“Ahhh, that’s so sweet,” Jayce teases with a grin.
Carson throws a towel at him.
“I’m out too,” Owen says. “Millie and Stacey are going to be here any moment and I promised Millie we’d go for pizza and ice cream because she did so well at her skating competition this weekend.”
“Fair,” Wilder nods, then looks to Jensen. “Cap’?”
Jensen just grins and shakes his head. “I’ve got wife plans.”
I feel a small pang in my chest - I wish I had that. Someone to go home to. Someone to spoil, who’s excited to see me when I come home at the end of the day.
“You’re all so domesticated,” Wilder says with a dramatic sigh.
“You bet your hairy ass we are,” Carson chuckles.
That makes me burst out laughing and Wilder scowls. We finish getting cleaned up and start to filter out of the locker room, one-by-one. When I make my way out, Owen falls into step beside me.
“Good work today, man,” he says as we step out into the hallway.
“Thanks, bro. You too.”
“Daddy!”
We both stop and look to see a little girl with her red hair arranged in pigtails and her blue eyes wide running toward us.
Grinning, Owen drops to a knee and opens his arms, and Millie charges into them.
“Hey, sweetie,” he says, dropping a kiss on the top of her head. “How was school?”
“Good!” Millie exclaims. “We had a lady come to class and she had a snake!”
Owen arches a brow. “Oh, that sounds… exciting.”
Millie turns her gaze up to me and gives me a big, toothy grin. “Hi, Zander!”
“Hey, Mills!” I reply. “Heard you had a skating contest this weekend and you did really good. Your Dad was telling us about it.”
Millie looks thrilled by this and clings to Owen’s neck as he stands up, holding her tight in his arms. A little ways down the hall, Stacey is standing with Millie’sBlueybackpack, smiling as she watches us. She has a slight belly bump, though she’s only four months along. I give her a wave and she waves back.
“All right, we gotta get going,” Owen tells me. “See you, man.”
“Yeah, see you.”
Owen carries Millie as he makes his way to Stacey. When he reaches her, he gives her a kiss and she slips her hand through his arm. I watch them walk away, a perfectly happy family and I feel that pang in my chest again.
Clenching the handle of my duffle tighter, I shake my head and let out a deep breath before continuing on by myself toward the building’s exit.
Ping. Ping. Ping.
“Dude, what is that?” Jayce asks, looking at me with a frown. He blows a lock of his blonde hair out of his face.
Sighing, I pull my phone out of my pocket and wave it at him.
“Sorry, it’s this app I signed up for,” I mutter.
We’re sitting in Wilder’s apartment, huge flat screen TV in front of us and his Playstation 5 up and running. We’re playing a video game Skyler developed based on our team - which was the original reason she came out to Denver - and it’s sick as hell. After she quit her previous job and got her new job in Denver at the place my cousin works, her new company was able to convince the clients to switch the hockey game development to them. She gifted everyone on the team an early copy ahead of the release.
The controller vibrates subtly in my hands as I skate down the ice. I flick the right stick to deke past a defender, then fire a wrister top shelf and watch the net ripple, then pause—replay time. I find myself spinning the camera around just to see how real the action is on the ice. The goalie’s movements, for instance, are fluid and there’s even ice spray at his skates, like he tried to dig in. Details. Damn.
