Page 14 of Dangle

Sticks dropped.

Gloves flew in the air.

Helmets hit the ice.

Players jumped in the air, skated the perimeter, waved to fans, dogpiled their teammates.

Meanwhile, I sat in the sin bin.

My eyes slid shut to block it all out.

The roar of the crowd was so loud my ears rang. The glass behind me bounced and vibrated from the force of the fans beating on it.

Wish I could close my ears the same way I could my eyes.

Because the celebration in the barn? InThe U’sbarn? Inmy team’sbarn? It wasn’t for my fucking team.

Now, it was all…fuck. It was over.

The season.

Our chance at the title.

My shot at the show.

My junior year.

Well, not so much the last one, but all the others? Yeah. Those were probably all true.

Since Coach Storm and Aiden left a few weeks ago after Storm warned me, the season plummeted into a dark, shitty abyss. Not that I blame them, because I didn’t. They weren’t to blame.

There is only one person to blame.

Me.

And my fucking father and grandfather had made sure I knew it. Every game—win or lose—ended the same way, with a multitude of text messages from each of them detailing all the ways I disappointed them, all the ways I fucked up, all the things I could’ve and should’ve done differently, and all the ways they had done all the things better than me.

At the start of the season, I’d hoped that even if the Wardens left me on the bench for the start of the season, they would pull me from the team as they ramped up for the playoffs.

But it didn’t happen.

That hope grew when they lost one of their centers to rib fractures a couple of weeks ago.

It still didn’t happen.

They called up an AHL player instead. The guy had great stats. I watched several of his games, trying to see what he had that I didn’t.

Those videos hammered home the dread I felt. There was no hope of New York signing me now. That wasn’t fucking happening.

The guy they called up, Dylan Kahun, had zero major penalties, and the minor penalties were utter accidents.

So, no, New York calling me up this year wasn’t happening. Which means my NHL prospects just got tanked. Because mystupid ass had allowed my fucking daddy issues—who was I kidding, I had daddy issues, mommy issues, and granddaddy issues—to affect me so much that I threw away a lucrative professional career.

“Did he fall asleep?”

Opening my eyes, my linemates and some of the team huddled around the door to the penalty box.

“Nah, just trying to figure out how the fuck this game went to shit.”