Page 26 of Puck Wild (Storm Warning #1)

Someone had already ordered me a beer—Molson Canadian, perfectly adequate for washing away the taste of defeat. I sipped, and some of the tension left my shoulders. The pain in my ribs was still there, but it was more manageable when surrounded by my teammates' cheerful profanity.

Juno appeared at my elbow. "How's the brooding going? Scale of one to Edgar Allan Poe."

"I don't brood."

"Everyone broods. It's whether you're good at it that matters." She drank a pale blue mixed drink through a straw. "Though I must say, sitting alone in your apartment organizing spice racks isn't classy brooding. It's only advanced sadness."

I stared at her. Across the table, Pickle was deep in conversation with Murphy about something that involved a lot of hand gestures and intermittent laughter. He caught my eye and winked, and I realized they'd set me up.

"This whole thing was Pickle's idea, wasn't it? Getting me here."

"Kid's worried about you." Juno's voice was matter-of-fact. "We all are. You've been playing like you're carrying the world's weight on your shoulders."

"Someone has to."

"Says who?" She leaned closer, lowering her voice. "Look, I know things are different without Jake. We all know it, but trying to be two players at once is just gonna burn you out faster."

There it was—Jake's name, spoken aloud at last.

"He's not coming back," I said quietly.

"Probably not." Juno's honesty was brutal and necessary. "What are you gonna do about it?"

Before I could answer, the opening notes of "Don't Stop Believin'" blasted from a karaoke setup in the corner.

"Oh no," I muttered. "Might be time for me to leave."

"Oh yes," Juno grinned. "This is about to get very interesting."

Pickle stepped up to the microphone and started belting out the tune. His voice cracked on the high notes, but he powered through.

The entire bar sang along on the chorus. It was ridiculous. It was loud. It was the freewheeling mayhem I usually avoided.

And yet, for the first time in nearly a week, I wasn't persistently angry and hurt over missing someone who'd probably already forgotten Thunder Bay existed.

I was still home.

Three beers in, the world's rough edges began to soften.

Not drunk—I wasn't drunk. I was strategically relaxed, a completely different thing. The pain in my ribs was manageable as long as I didn't move too quickly or laugh too hard.

Unfortunately, Pickle's karaoke performance made the "don't laugh too hard" part increasingly difficult.

He'd moved on from Journey to "Eye of the Tiger," complete with air guitar. Murphy provided backup vocals, sounding like a moose in distress. Somehow, it all worked.

"Your turn, Spreadsheet!" Hog's voice boomed across the table. "Time to show these amateurs how it's done!"

"Absolutely not. I don't sing in public."

Juno tried to be helpful. "Everyone sings in public after enough beer. It's a scientifically proven fact."

"That's bad science."

"The best kind. Besides, Pickle already signed you up."

The beers weakened my resistance. "What song?"

Kowalczyk grinned and pulled out his phone, scrolling through a carefully curated playlist of musical disasters. "We had a few options. 'Islands in the Stream' was the front-runner, but then Juno suggested something with more emotional range."

"Please tell me it's not 'My Heart Will Go On.'"

"Better." Juno's smile was pure evil. "'Total Eclipse of the Heart.'"

I stared at her. "You want me to sing Bonnie Tyler? In public? With witnesses?"

"I want you to stop thinking for five goddamn minutes and do something ridiculous." Her voice softened, and she spoke directly into my ear. "When's the last time you let yourself be bad at something?"

The question hit hard. I was good at being good at things. That was my entire identity.

Being bad at something on purpose would be like wearing my underwear on the outside.

The alcohol prevented the rational part of my brain from staging an intervention. "Fine, but if I die of embarrassment, I'm haunting all of you."

The cheer from our table was loud enough to rattle the neon beer signs. Pickle finished his performance with a dramatic bow and immediately started chanting my name. It caught on with disturbing enthusiasm.

I made my way to the karaoke setup on slightly unsteady legs. The microphone was heavier than expected, warm from Pickle's grip, and slightly sticky.

The opening piano notes of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" filled the bar, and suddenly I was standing in front of forty-something people who expected me to sing.

I'd made a terrible mistake.

The first verse came and went in a blur of muscle memory and panic. I'd heard the song enough times to know the words, even if I'd never paid attention to what they actually meant—something about bright eyes turning around and falling apart.

Not entirely inappropriate.

Everyone around me sang along, badly but energetically. Hog's bass voice carried the melody while Murphy provided questionable harmony. Even Juno swayed along, raising her drink in salute.

The chorus hit, and I sang instead of only mumbling along. My voice wasn't great—too rough around the edges—but it was mine.

"Turn around, bright eyes..."

The words caught in my throat.

The next moment happened without warning, like stepping onto black ice. One second, I was singing along with a room full of drunk hockey players, and the next, I was drowning in the sudden, overwhelming realization of what the song was about.

Loss. Longing. The space left behind when someone important disappears from your life.

"Every now and then I fall apart..."

My voice cracked on the word "apart," and suddenly the microphone weighed a thousand pounds. The bar noise faded to static, and all I heard was my own breathing, too fast and too shallow.

Jake would've been with us, in the front row, probably recording the whole thing on his phone so he could embarrass me with it later. He would've been singing along, voice breaking on the high notes, grinning like this was the best thing that ever happened to him.

He wasn't here. He was in Rockford, probably taping his stick in some AHL locker room and pretending he didn't miss Thunder Bay's particular brand of organized disorder.

"And I need you now tonight..."

The words came out as barely a whisper. Forty-something pairs of eyes waited for me to pull it together, finish the song, and be the reliable guy who never let anyone down.

I couldn't do it.

I set the microphone back in its stand and walked away, pushing through the crowd toward the back hallway by the bathrooms. Behind me, I heard Pickle's voice pick up the melody, covering for my sudden exit.

It was just a song, a stupid karaoke performance in a dive bar full of people who'd probably forget about it by tomorrow.

So why did it feel like I was falling apart?

I stayed there for maybe ten minutes, listening to the muffled sounds of the bar through the thin walls. The karaoke continued, and so did the laughter.

When I finally returned to the table, nobody said anything about my disappearing act. Pickle just slid another beer in my direction and started telling a story about his sister's attempt to teach her cat to play fetch.

I caught Juno watching me, and I knew she'd seen precisely what had happened up there.

I'd cracked. In public. In front of witnesses.

And somehow, the world hadn't ended.

The apartment was too quiet when I got home.

Not regular quiet. It was aggressive quiet, pressing against my eardrums and making me aware of every slight sound. The hum of the refrigerator. The click of the thermostat. My own breathing.

The alcohol intoxication was starting to fade, and the kitchen called to me, as it always did when my brain was too loud.

Baking was control. Baking was chemistry and precision, and following rules that worked—flour, sugar, butter, eggs—ingredients that behaved predictably when combined in the correct proportions.

Chocolate chip cookies. Classic. Foolproof. I could make them in my sleep.

I creamed butter and sugar until the mixture was light and fluffy.

The ritual was soothing. Measuring, mixing, and following steps that led to a predictable outcome.

For twenty minutes, I could pretend that everything else was as simple.

That life came with clear instructions and guaranteed results.

The first batch went into the oven, and I set the twelve-minute timer. Perfect cookies required precise timing. I'd learned that the hard way, through countless batches that were either underdone and gooey or overdone and brittle.

While they baked, I started cleaning up. Bowls in the dishwasher, measuring cups rinsed and dried, counter wiped down until it gleamed under the overhead lights. Order restored, chaos contained.

The timer chimed.

I opened the oven door and immediately knew something was wrong. The cookies were too brown around the edges, darker than they should have been. Not burned, but close. Too close.

I pulled out the tray and set it on the cooling rack, staring at the imperfect circles of golden-brown dough. They smelled right—butter, vanilla, and melted chocolate—but they looked wrong.

I'd been making them for years. I knew the recipe by heart and could execute it flawlessly even when I was tired or distracted or nursing bruised ribs and a wounded ego.

I never messed up the timing.

The second batch went in, and I adjusted the temperature, checking the timer twice, making sure everything was right. Twelve minutes. No more, no less.

I sat at the kitchen island and stared at the first batch, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. The oven temperature was correct. The timer had worked properly. The ingredients were fresh and measured accurately.

The only variable was me.

Eleven minutes into the second batch, I opened the oven door. The cookies were already browning, edges setting faster than they should have.

I turned off the oven and pulled them out, watching twelve more imperfect cookies cool on the rack.

It took me another ten minutes to determine what I'd done wrong.

I'd set the oven temperature to 375 instead of 350. Twenty-five degrees too hot, enough to rush the baking process and leave the cookies overdone despite perfect timing.

I'd been baking cookies every week since Jake moved in and never messed up the temperature. It was automatic, as natural as breathing.

Tonight, my muscle memory had failed me. Tonight, even the one thing I could always count on had betrayed me.

I stared at the two dozen imperfect cookies cooling on my counter, and something inside me finally broke.

The sound that came out of my throat wasn't quite a sob or a scream. It was something rawer than that.

I grabbed the nearest cookie sheet—still warm from the oven—and threw it into the sink. It hit the bottom with a metallic crash that echoed through the apartment.

Somehow, that felt good. Destructive and wrong—what I needed.

I swept the ruined cookies off the cooling rack, watching them crumble against the sink's edge.

When the counter was clear and the sink was full of debris, I slumped back against the cabinets and slid down until I sat on the kitchen floor.

My ribs ached from the sudden movement, but I didn't care. Everything ached—my body, chest, even the space behind my eyes.

I'd held it together for almost a week, pretending that Jake's absence didn't matter, and I could fill the hole he'd left through sheer force of will and perfectly executed defensive zone coverage.

I was lying to myself about what he'd meant to me.

I stared at the refrigerator door across from me, where Jake's ridiculous notes still clung to the white surface. "Emergency Cookies – Not For Cereal Boy." "Milk Expiry Date: When It Smells Weird." "Leftover Pizza: Property of The Better Roommate."

He'd been here. I didn't know it would feel so empty without him.

Jake had disrupted everything by existing in my space, making me want things I'd convinced myself I didn't need. He looked at my labeled containers and color-coded systems and didn't see neurosis.

He'd seen me.

And now he was gone, and I was sitting on my kitchen floor surrounded by cookie crumbs and the wreckage of my composure, finally admitting what I'd been too scared to say out loud.

I missed him. Desperately, completely, and it made my hands shake.

I missed him so much it felt like drowning.

I pulled out my phone and scrolled to Jake's contact, thumb hovering over the call button.

What could I say? That I was sitting on my kitchen floor having a breakdown over burned cookies? That I'd cracked during karaoke and couldn't stop thinking about his bright eyes and falling apart?

That I'd been stupid enough to fall for my wild roommate and too scared to tell him before he left?

I set the phone aside without calling.

The truth was too big for a midnight phone call.

Sitting in my ruined kitchen, surrounded by the evidence of my unraveling, I understood what Juno had been trying to tell me.

I wasn't building walls anymore. I was building a home.

And my home was empty without Jake Riley in it.

I knew what I had to do.

I just had to find the courage to do it.