Page 47 of Wild Card 13

I considered turning around.

Then Lucy looked up.

Everything inside me stopped. The hallway disappeared. The arena disappeared. The entire world restricted to those brown eyes finding me behind emerald frames.

And there it was again. That awful, impossible feeling I'd spent years convincing myself no longer existed. Like somebody had reached into my chest and wrapped a hand around my heart.

She knew me.

That was the part I couldn't get past.

Not the write-up.

Not the meeting.

It was the way she'd looked at me.

As if all those years had simply... vanished. As if we hadn't spent years tangled together in the most intimate corners of each other's lives.

Back when I was just Ty. Back when she was the one person who made me feel like that was enough.

Inside the room, Lucy held my gaze for another long second. The hallway suddenly felt too small. Too warm. Too crowded.

I should have left.

Instead I stayed exactly where I was.

Because after years of silence, after one disastrous meeting and one sleepless night, I wasn't walking away again.

Maybe it was the sleepless night. Maybe it was the fact thatevery time I'd finally drifted off, my brain had decided to torture me. Because apparently my subconscious was an asshole.

Every time my eyes closed, Lucy was waiting for me. Laughing. Smiling. Looking at me the way she used to.

Earlier, when I pushed through the locker room doors, I felt like I'd already played a full sixty minutes.

Music pulsed from somebody's speaker near the back of the room. Laughter echoed off concrete walls and rows of wooden stalls. Equipment managers moved through the space carrying armfuls of gear while the steady hiss of a skate sharpener drifted from somewhere deeper in the arena.

The air smelled like coffee, athletic tape, fresh laundry, sharpened steel, and a thousand other things that somehow only existed inside a hockey rink.

For most of my life, stepping into a locker room had settled something inside me. No matter what else was happening. The second I walked into a rink, the noise in my head usually got quieter.

Hockey had always made sense.

The routines.

The rituals.

The guys.

It was the closest thing I'd ever had to a reset button.

Not that morning. That morning I walked into the room carrying Lucy around in my head like a concussion.

Everything felt slightly off. Slightly blurry. Like I was moving through my normal routine while somebody else's life played on repeat behind my eyes.

I dropped my gym bag beside my stall and reached for my coffee. My patience was already hanging by a thread. Somehow, even before the guys started talking about her, I already knew I wasn't making it through the morning unscathed.

I'd barely made it to my stall before Zee's voice cut through the room. "Okay, but seriously. Nobody told me Hockey Ops was hiring supermodels now?"