Page 49

Epilogue

Ben Stirling

I’m in Las Vegas in a locker room that feels like a home away from home, getting ready to go into a rink I’ve played in many, many times. I’m here for a pre-season exhibition game and I can’t even begin to count the number of rules that have been broken to get me here. It started with Luddy bending the ear of every management type he had in his contacts list. McGuire got wind of the plan and ran with it, blasting a call for me to come back for one last game all over his social media platforms. In a matter of days, the momentum it had gained was unstoppable.

It’s been a whirlwind six weeks, but I’ve trained my guts out, and I’m ready.

I’m present.

We’ve run through the game plan for the day, and I’ve said a few words to the team, and now I’m taking it all in, the smells and the sounds, the bright overhead lights. The game jerseys hanging from hooks. The names on the backs. The numbers on the lockers above each player.

My name and number especially.

The bench is hard under my ass and the ground beneath my skates is solid. Bryce sits to my right, taping his stick in the meticulous way that, for me, will always be synonymous with him. T-Dog is across the room, face scrunched into a scowl. Sev’s in his personal space, giving him advice on how to best strap on his pads. As always, it’s poorly received. I get it. T-Dog is one of the best goalies in the league. The last thing he needs is advice on how to pad up.

“Get off me, asshole, and stop telling me what to do. You’re not the boss of me,” he says.

It’s the wrong thing to say as it leaves Sev incredulous, and an incredulous Sev is an unreasonable Sev.

“Of course I’m the boss of you. I’ve known you since you were nine, and I’ve got you out of more shit than anyone else ever has.” Sev preens, giving him a big, pleased-with-himself grin. “If that doesn’t make me the boss of you, what does?”

T-Dog, always quick to anger, is far from amused but manages not to fly off the handle. Just.

“Bullshit,” he mutters. “You’ve got me in more shit than anyone else ever has.”

I’ve often wondered about the dynamic between them. The tone of their bickering points to a remnant from childhood. As I understand it, they grew up together. T-Dog once mentioned that Sev is his older brother’s best friend. Apparently, Sev and the brother are thick as thieves to this day. Makes sense, I guess, because when these two aren’t almost coming to blows, Sev treats T-Dog like a kid who needs help tying his laces.

I’m the first one ready, as always. I get to my feet, and one by one, players start making their way to me. I’m jostled by fist bumps and chest hugs and the light crash of helmets tapped against mine.

The mood is charged. Adrenaline pumping. Banter and chirps fly over my head, but inside, I’m going still. I’m drawing into myself. Into my mind. Into my body. I have one glove on and the other in my hand. My helmet is on.

There’s a low rumble shaking the foundation of the arena. A soft hiss of the ice saying my name.

“You ready for this?” Bryce asks as he holds the locker room door open for me. There’s a faint flicker in his eyes. Concern or excitement? Concern and excitement, maybe. It’s the only tell he gives me, the only inkling that this walk to the rink will be any different from any of the hundreds that came before it.

It gives me a second to prepare.

It’s a second I need badly because as I cross the threshold, I’m met by a sea of faces. Faces I know. Faces that mean something to me. Faces of teammates from years past. Years and years past. Many belong to people I’m still in touch with, and some I’ve lost contact with. Every face I see is significant though. All of them played a part in my story.

The faces, the people who’ve come to see me off, line both sides of the corridor, the turn that leads to the tunnel, and the tunnel as well. Each player I pass has a stick in their hand, and as I move through the throng, I notice the stick they’re holding bears the colors of the team we played for together. Most sticks are full-sized, but some range all the way down to the size Luca currently plays with.

As soon as I move past them, players begin drumming their sticks on the floor in a steady, heady rhythm.

My heart hears it and quickly begins using it as a metronome.

I spot team owners and managers in the fray and stop briefly to greet them. There are past coaches and even team medics here too. I laugh as I embrace a rehabilitation coordinator I haven’t seen since my college days. She’s built like Tinkerbell, but she used to make me squeal like a little bird on her table.

I stop and acknowledge as many people as I can, but I don’t stay long. I can’t. The ice is calling to me. Not just the ice but the crowd too.

Stir-ling

Stir-ling.

It started as a gentle bay, a soft, seductive call.

Now, it’s a roar.

A thunderous chant.

When I reach the mouth of the tunnel, my eyes sting as I take in the two men waiting for me. Dave Landry, the last man who ever coached me, the man who stood with me at Liz’s hospital bedside and at her graveside, stands with Allistair Goodwin, my first coach, the man who taught me how to hold a stick. I embrace Landry briefly and thank him for everything he’s done to get me here today, purposefully keeping it short as I know I’ll see him during and after the game, and turn my attention to Coach Alli, as we used to call him.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen him, decades in fact, and the years show on his face. There are lines around his eyes and mouth that weren’t there before, and yeah, I’ll bet a few of those lines were earned by yelling at kids to do better and try harder. But most of them, the vast majority, were earned by caring, not only if games were lost or won, but caring that every kid who came through his team left better than they were when they joined it.

“D’you remember what I always used to tell you?” he asks.

I nod, and when it becomes clear he expects me to tell him, I say, “You said if I worked really hard, I could end up being the best player you ever coached, Coach.”

He gives me a wry smile, and his eyes grow misty. “You must have worked really fucking hard, kiddo.” Emotion rises suddenly and almost gets the better of me, but as always, Coach Alli has me. He grabs hold of me, pulls me into a hug, and whispers, “You’ve got this, Ben. You hear me. You’ve got this. Go out there and give ’em hell.”

It’s not just his words that have meaning to me. It’s the way he says them. It takes me back in time to the very beginning, to the early days, to the wobbly legs, to the wins and losses, to the orange slices our moms brought to our games. It stirs all that up, lets it settle, and spits me back out again.

When he releases me, I give a sharp nod to show I heard him and step back a couple of paces before turning to face the ice.

My blade covers are off and I’m aware of the delicate weight, the perfect balance, of the stick in my hand. My team stands behind me in silence. The phantoms of hands clapping my shoulders and back still echo through me. I feel it all, all their touches, all their well-wishes, but most of all, I feel the tight circle of Luca’s arms around my neck as he wished me good luck earlier and the warm stamp of Jeremiah’s lips against mine.

The ice stretches out before me, a powdery sheet of pure white. I take a long, deep breath and let myself feel it. The crowd, the lights, the nerves, the excitement.

Then I put my right skate to the ice and push off…and glide.

An icy blast hits my face as red and blue lines swim before me. To my left and right, nets hang quiet and motionless from the goalposts.

Not for long, I hope.

It’s a brutal clash. A shock to the system. An assault to my senses. It’s faster and harder and better than all the games I’ve played in my dreams put together.

Luddy wasn’t kidding. McGuire and Decker are fire together. I’m having the time of my life, laughing and panting when I’m not grunting, but I’m almost certainly going to cough up a lung after the last buzzer sounds.

It’s a close game. Too close for comfort. McGuire scored a cracker in the first period, and Bryce knocked a nice forearm in the first few minutes of the second.

We’re tied with one goal each as we go into the third period. The last period. The last period of the game. And the last twenty minutes of professional hockey I’ll ever play.

There’s a hush in the crowd when I skate onto the ice, and I know there are cameras panning close-ups on my face. For reasons unknown to me, my ritual has always been a crowd-pleaser. To me, it’s significant. A superstition. A way to set my intentions in stone.

Beside me, Bryce chuckles quietly, but his eyes are damp. He became part of my process in his rookie year, and it worked so well that season we both figured, why change it?

“One for the road, Captain,” he says as he hands me my water bottle.

The crowd is so quiet you could hear a pin drop.

I raise the bottle and tilt my head back, squeezing a stream of water into my mouth. I let it pool for a second before swallowing. It’s cool but not icy and slides down my throat easily. I right my head when I’m done and let my gaze travel around the arena to find them—Jeremiah and Luca, Amy, Ellen, Jeff, and the boys—I give them a quick smile before tilting my face slightly forward and closing my eyes.

As always, it’s a shock, even though I’m expecting it. A quick spritz that rattles my brain and brings things into focus.

A woman in the crowd screams.

Several men whoop and fall silent again.

I bring my hand up to my face and swipe it down, slowly and deliberately, from my forehead to my chin.

Usually, when I do this there’s nothing going through my mind but hockey. Usually, when I’m here, I hardly remember that anything other than pucks and skates and sticks exists. Everything else feels far away.

Today, it’s the opposite.

I look down at my hand, glistening with water, and consider the goal. I don’t need to. I know where it is. History has taught me. The shape, size, and location of the posts have been permanently burned into my brain. Into my bones.

This time, the last time, I break tradition. I turn my back on the goal and face the crowd. In a blur of faces, two stand out like a beacon: Jeremiah and Luca.

My family.

My future.

I raise my hand in their direction, clenching my fist decisively before smiling and flicking my fingers hard, sending a thousand tiny droplets in their direction.

It’s a tough period. A hard clash. Much as it pains me to admit, technically, they’re better. Luddy, McGuire, and Decker are a force that’s almost impossible to stop. A freight train with a fuck ton of weight behind it. They’re playing offense—they’ve had nine shots at goal to our three—and we’ve been forced to defend for most of the period.

Fortunately, T-Dog is playing out of his socks. Sev too, but he’s tired. He must be because he just yelled, “Defend the goalie,” instead of "Defend the goal."

It’s a struggle, a constant fight. My arms and legs are heavy, but my heart is light.

The puck lands on the hook of my stick and I hear Amy’s words to me before the game.

“Have fun, Ben. Go out there and have the best time, win or lose, enjoy every second.”

When she said it, Luca’s little head turned sharply, eyes narrowing at Amy as though she had something unpleasant stuck in her teeth.

“Daddy, no,” he whispered urgently as he hugged my neck. “We play to win.”

There are twenty seconds left on the timer. I have two opposing players coming at me, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let them stop me because Luca was right: Stirlings play to win.

Then, now, always.

I tap the puck left then right, lowering my stance slightly, bracing for impact from Luddy. I receive the force with my left shoulder and turn into it hard. It throws him off-balance and puts him flat on his ass. Ordinarily, I’d smirk, but I don’t have time for that today. My skates slice through the ice, hissing as I hit top speed. Thoms is careening straight at me. I veer left sharply at the last second and lose him.

It’s just me now. Me and the goalie. The posts and the net. It’s a hard shot. An impossible shot. The angle is tight. Too tight. Ordinarily, it’s not a shot I would take. I’d look back and find someone, anyone, wearing my colors, and I’d pass the puck to them.

Not this time. This time, I don’t. This time, I see the puck. And the goal. I see an acute angle between me and the far right corner of the net. The goalie is in place, right where he needs to be to stop it. There’s no margin for error. None at all.

I transfer the weight from my back foot to the front and swing my stick back, pausing for a split second before snapping my wrists and shooting the puck like an arrow from a tightly strung bow.

It’s an impossible shot.

On any other day, it would be an impossible shot, but today, nothing’s impossible. The puck bounces once, twice, and follows the precise line I drew for it.

The goalie lunges.

He’s too late.

The net flies back behind him as the puck finds its way home.

It’s one of those goals that’s met with stunned silence. With frozen smiles and eyes in wide circles.

The buzzer sounds before the applause reaches me.

In a matter of seconds, I’m stampeded. My team is everywhere, arms and hands and chests crashing into me before lifting me off my feet. I feel like I’m flying. I am flying. Endorphins are singing. Adrenaline surging. My heart is beating so hard and fast that I can hardly hear the crowd over the din. I can see them though. Thousands of hands clapping. Fists raised in the air. Mouths open wide.

I take it all in, spinning and unsteady, as the momentousness of the occasion finally hits me.

I did it.

I fucking did it.

I rewrote part of my story. Not the whole story, but I rewrote one of the chapters. A significant chapter. I kept most things the same because they matter, but I changed the ending.

I spot my family in the crowd and the lump in my throat is suddenly too much to swallow. Jeremiah is dressed head to toe in Blackeyes merchandise, and I really do mean head to toe. So is Luca. They’re both bouncing up and down and screaming with joy. Amy is next to Luca. Her face is bright red and tears are streaming down it. Her fists are pumping, and she’s cheering. Not a little, a lot. She’s cheering in a way that’s borderline crazy. Honestly, I’m not even sure you’d call what she’s doing cheering. It’s more like bellowing. More like roaring a victory cry most people have forgotten.

As soon as I see her, I know what it is, what she’s doing, what’s happening.

Amy’s not just cheering. She’s not just my sister-in-law, rooting for me. She’s standing in for her sister.

Tears start to fall. They’re mine, but I don’t feel them. I feel no pain at all, only joy and love, and yeah, a rib-cracking, chest-swelling sense of triumph as well.

When my teammates set me down, Luddy makes his way over to me. When he’s a foot away, he loosens a glove and drops it to the ice. There was a time, a long time, when seeing Luddy like this would’ve made me tense. It would’ve made my blood boil. Not anymore.

Now, I loosen my own glove and drop it as well.

“Stirling,” he says like it’s a full sentence.

“Luddy,” I reply the same way.

He offers me his hand, and I take it. As our palms meet, he gives me an up-nod and the start of a smile.

“Good game.”

“Holy shit, what a day,” says Jeremiah again.

“It was unreal, right?”

“It was amazing, Ben. I was so proud of you out there. Luca was too. Every time you got the puck, he yelled, ‘That’s my dad!’ It was so cute it made me cry.” He smiles at me and slows things, shifting the mood to something a little more serious. “Was it everything you wanted it to be?”

“Yeah, everything and more.” We’re in our hotel room. Luca is sound asleep in the room next door, and Jeremiah is lying on top of me, naked, propping himself up on my chest. He does that thing where he looks into me and ekes out tiny spaces in my soul I didn’t know I needed someone to share with me. As always, it makes me feel like there’s nothing I can’t or shouldn’t say to him. “It was… It was a privilege. An honor.”

I inhale deeply as I consider everything that happened today. “A lot of the time, most of the time really, we don’t know when big things in our lives, things we love, are about to end. We don’t get to decide or prepare. Usually, all we get to do is to survive. To react. To find a way to live with our new reality. Today, I got to know ahead of time that something beautiful was ending. I got to experience it on my own terms, and it feels really good.” I let out a soft sigh. “I didn’t expect it to be like this. I thought I’d be gutted, but I’m not. It was an ending I was ready for. An ending that felt like a beginning.”

“So you’re not tempted by what that Vipers man said?”

Mike Santos, the Vipers head coach, cornered me at dinner after the game and offered me a spot on his practice team. It’s a pretty sweet deal. The money’s decent. I’d get a ton of ice time, and he said I’d be exempt from travel, which is the most important thing to me, as being home with Luca is nonnegotiable.

A few months ago, I would have jumped at it. It would’ve been close to a dream job for me. A way to keep playing without costing me time away from Luca, but not anymore. Things have changed. I’ve changed.

“Nah, I told him the same thing I told everyone else—I have a job.”

“Oh my God,” Jeremiah squeals. “Does that mean you’re taking it?”

“Yep, I’m taking it.”

“Am I seriously in bed with the coach of the under-twelve Mighty Arctic Seals right now? The Arctic Seals?”

I cackle because the name is a mouthful and slightly out of keeping with the skill level it implies.

My team is a motley crew, one that comes in an assortment of shapes and sizes. There are a few common threads: gangly legs and big feet, croaky voices prone to the odd crack, and the fact that all of them, down to the last one, style their hair like a llama.

The pay is terrible and the position comes with a ton of responsibility, but I don’t care because how many people get to go to work and do something they love? Something that matters. Something that makes a difference. Something that has the potential to change lives. How many people get to go to work and make magic happen?

Jeremiah’s eyes glint in a way that really shouldn’t be possible for a man who’s been recently sated. “I guess I’m going to have to start calling you Coach now.”

“Don’t even think about it.”

He drops his chin and bats his lashes. “Yes, Coach! No, Coach! On it, Coach!” He gives me a filthy smile that makes something inside me clench as he cranks up the temperature in the room. “Please, Coach,” he says with meaning and a heaped dose of faux innocence. “Please. I’ll do anything to play on your team. Anything you want. Anything at all.” To my dismay but not surprise, my body reacts with vigor. His brows shoot up and his lips quirk to one side. “Um, excuse me, Ben Stirling, but did your dick just twitch ’cause I’m pretty sure that’s what happened?”

I buck him off me, laughing and cupping my junk in both hands to hide the evidence because, yes, my dick just twitched from being called Coach by my incorrigible, adorable, flirty-as-fuck boyfriend.

And it’s rapidly hardening too.

Jeremiah kneels beside me and looks down at my groin with longing. It’s the kind of longing that leaves me powerless to deny him, so I move my hands and take in his lovely face as he watches me grow. Sweetness melts and gives way to sex. His eyes flare and he absently drags an incisor over his bottom lip. He turns his body thirty degrees and raises a shoulder, giving me a wink so wildly exaggerated it requires his jaw to drop in order to properly punctuate it.

As if that’s not enough, he raises two fingers to his temple and serves me with an infinitely saucy, infinitely ridiculous salute.

I feel a rush of arousal. Of amusement. Of fondness and friendship. Lust and love. And love. And love. So much love I can’t keep it in.

“Jeremiah,” I say, sitting up and taking his face in my hands, “did I ever tell you I’m a fan?”

Curiosity creases a sweet, flushed cheek. “A fan of what, Coach?”

“A fan of you, darlin’. I’m a big fan. A huge fan.” I lean in and kiss him. Lightly, then deeper, pulling away only so I can see his expression when I say it. “I’m your biggest fan, baby.”