Ace is standing next to me, shoulders shaking with laughter, and when our eyes meet, he grins, dimples appearing on his cheeks.
Well, fuck me.
Please?
CHAPTER 6
ACE
WE LOST.
Four to two, and honestly? It felt worse than the score suggests. We played like we'd never seen a hockey stick before. Like someone replaced our team with a bunch of dudes who learned the rules five minutes ago from a Wikipedia article.
The locker room is a funeral.
Groover's got his head in his hands. Wall's staring at the ceiling like he's searching for answers from a higher power. Petrov's muttering in Russian—could be prayers, could be curses, could be both. Becker's aggressively untying his skates.
I yank off my helmet and immediately regret it because the smell in here is unholy. Sweat, disappointment, and what I'm pretty sure is Jinx's protein shake that exploded last week and never got fully cleaned up.
"That was fucking embarrassing," Snooze announces to no one in particular.
"Thanks, Captain Obvious," Hammer shoots back. "Really needed that insight."
"I'm just saying—"
"Well, stop saying."
Washington's sitting in the corner, still in full gear, looking like a statue. He takes losses hard. Always has. It's like each goal against us is a personal insult to his entire bloodline.
I'm peeling off my shoulder pads when the locker room door flies open so hard it bounces off the wall.
Coach Martin storms in.
And he lookspissed.
Like, not regular pissed. Nuclear pissed. The kind of pissed that makes you wonder if you're about to get benched for the rest of your natural life.
The team goes silent.
Coach never gets angry after a loss. Disappointed? Sure. Frustrated? Maybe. But angry? That's reserved for when we do something monumentally stupid, like the time Becker tried to fight three guys at once, or when Jinx forgot we had a game and showed up an hour late smelling like a distillery.
We played like shit tonight, yeah, but notthatkind of shit.
Coach paces back and forth, jaw clenched so tight I'm worried about his dental work.
Nobody moves. We've all collectively decided that breathing too loud might set him off.
Finally, Groover—brave, stupid Groover—clears his throat. "Coach? What happened?"
Coach stops pacing and turns to face us.
"Management," he says through his teeth, and the single word sounds like he's chewing glass, "are a bunch of spineless assholes."
Okay, what the fuck?
Coach doesn't swear. Like, ever. He says things like "darn" and "shoot" and once, memorably, "oh fiddlesticks" when Petrov accidentally broke his clipboard.
The room's energy shifts from funeral to, "did we just enter an alternate dimension?"
