“Two minutes. Then I’m dragging you over there.”
“You can try.”
I grabbed my stick and headed for my stall, my pulse already picking up. Game days were what I lived for—that brief window of time when everything else fell away and the only thing that mattered was the puck and the ice and the clock counting down.
But even as I started gearing up, bouncing on my toes, part of my brain stayed back with Marco.
That was the thing about us. We were separate people, different in almost every way, but somehow we’d gotten tangled up in each other’s lives until I couldn’t imagine going through a game day without him. Without taping my stick at his stall and adjusting his pads, running plays together, knowing that when I looked over my shoulder on the ice, he’d be there.
No one got me like Marco got me.
My father had never understood the way I played. Too instinctive, too emotional, too in-the-moment. He’d wanted me to be more cerebral, more calculated, more like the player he’d never quite managed to be himself.
Three years we’d been doing this. Three years of buildingsomething that felt less like friendship and more like… I didn’t even know what to call it. Partnership. Brotherhood. The kind of connection where you didn’t have to explain yourself because the other person already understood.
It hadn’t started with anything dramatic.
First road trip. Late night to Vancouver. I couldn't sleep—never could on planes—so I fidgeted and shifted and tried to make conversation with the guy sitting next to me. Marco. Quiet, guarded, polite, but clearly not interested in talking to a stranger at thirty thousand feet. He had a book open on his lap and kept glancing back down at it, a gentle dismissal I probably should have taken.
I didn’t.
Instead, I dug a deck of cards out of my bag and set it on the armrest between us. “Poker?”
He stared at the cards for a long moment. Then he closed his book, took the deck from me, and started to deal.
We didn’t talk much that first game. We didn’t need to. The cards filled the silence—shuffling, betting, the quiet tension of hands being played. I won the first hand. Then the second. Then the third.
Marco played the way he played hockey—smart, analytical, patient. He watched me carefully, trying to read my tells, calculating odds. But poker required instinct as much as calculation, and I’d been playing since I was a kid. I could bluff when I needed to, could read the subtle shifts in his expression that told me when he was unsure.
By the time we landed, I’d won every significant hand. His chip pile had dwindled to almost nothing.
“Well.” He stared at the cards like they’d personally betrayed him. “That was humbling.”
I laughed. “You just need more practice reading people.”
“Apparently.” But there was a spark in his eyes.
The next flight, Marco pulled his own deck out of hispocket first. Held it up with the smallest hint of a smile I’d ever seen on his face. “My deal,” he said.
And just like that, we had a thing. Our thing. No grand conversation, no dramatic moment of connection. Just a deck of cards and two stubborn guys who kept showing up for each other, flight after flight, until one day I looked up and realized Marco Morelli had become the most important person in my life.
I’d had friends before. Teammates I grabbed dinner with, guys I’d go out drinking with after wins. But this thing with Marco was different. Deeper. The kind of friendship where you didn’t have to perform, didn’t have to be “on,” could just exist in comfortable silence and know it was enough.
“Savard.” Boucher’s voice cut across the locker room. “You see the rumors online?”
I looked up. He was leaning against his stall, arms crossed, that smirk on his face that I’d learned to hate.
I hesitated to take the bait, but finally asked, “What rumors?”
“About you being traded.” He said it loud enough that half the locker room could hear. “Social media’s got you going to Boston.The Athletic Reportsays Toronto’s interested too.”
My stomach dropped. “What?”
“You didn’t know?” His smirk widened. “Bob Macaulay posted about it this morning. Colorado’s taking calls on you. Performance concerns, apparently.”
The air left my lungs. Bob Macaulay. That wasn’t speculation—that was as close to confirmed as hockey news got.
“I’d check your phone if I were you,” Boucher continued. “Might want to know which city you’re moving to.”
