GARRETT
Head up, eyes up. Don’t carry it.
Garrett’s thighs burn from crouching. His lungs burn. Sweat runs under his chest protector in rivulets, and he lets it happen. Ignores it. He can’t track anything but the puck, anyway. Or the idea of it. Where it might go. Where it wants to go. His body’s locked into his flow state, that static hyper-awareness he only finds in the net, when everything else drops away.
The Whalers are up 3-2 against the Storm, and it’s been brutal since the opening whistle. There’s a hum of old rivalry in the air, louder than the music, louder than the announcements. Every hit gets a roar. Every missed call earns a chorus of angry boos. The whole place vibrates under his skates.
He’s holding steady. Playing fine.
But the second-period goal is still crawling under his skin. A wrister from the high slot that bounced off a stick and went glove side, half an inch higher than he expected. He got a piece of it. Not enough. He’s replayed it eight times in his head already, and each time his glove hand moves a little faster, a little higher, like regret could rewrite history.
It can’t. So he shrugs it off. That’s the rule.
Head up, eyes up. Don’t carry it.
By the third period, center ice is a battlefield. The Storm start chirping more, hacking more. Number 11 barrels straight through the crease after a whistle. Doesn’t slow. Doesn’t stop. Slams Garrett back into the crossbar, popping the net off its moorings like a loose tooth.
The guy’s got a shit-eating grin plastered across his face like he’s proud of it.
Garrett sees red. Shoves off the post and drives his blocker into the guy’s chest, hard enough to make him stumble. No one crashes his crease and walks away like it’s a joke.
“What the fuck was that?” he snarls. “You lost, pigeon?”
Tilly’s there in a flash. Jesse too. Shoving the guy back, putting bodies between them before Garrett completely loses his shit. The Storm forward shrugs them off and tries to get close again, throwing elbows like he wants a fight.
“Your tendy’s leaking, bro,” the idiot chirps at them, still struggling to get in Garrett’s face to rattle him. “Grab a bucket.”
Garrett doesn’t blink. “Buddy, my balls dangle more than you,” he says flatly.
Jesse barks a laugh. Tilly shoves both gloves into the guy’s chest and sends him staggering backward.
The linesman skates over and stoops down to set the net back on its pegs. Garrett stays crouched in the crease, mask propped up, sucking in a long breath through his nose.
Head up, eyes up. Don’t carry it.
Then—uninvited, unhelpful—an idle thought flickers into his consciousness.
He wonders whether she saw the hit.
The crash. The shove. The chirps that followed.
Garrett wonders if she laughed. Or flinched. Or rolled her eyes and called him dramatic under her breath.
He shouldn’t care.
But his stomach tightens anyway, like it wants an answer.
He saw her earlier. A shot of the kids from the hospital flashed on the jumbotron, and there she was. Blurry through the camera but unmistakable, tucked between two kids in wheelchairs. Her long hair was tied back. She was laughing—full-body, head-tilted—and something about it punched him low in the gut. She looked lit from the inside, cheeks flushed, eyes shining.
What made her laugh so hard?
And just like that, his edge dulls.
His grip slips. Not literally—his hands are locked in tight—but mentally, he feels it. The tiny drift of attention. The shift. The static in his skull that wasn’t there five seconds ago.
Goddamn it.
His jaw flexes hard behind the cage of his mask.
