CHAPTER ONE
JONAH
“Would you slap a teammate—”
“Yes.” The profound silence followed by an annoyed sigh told me I hadn’t been patient enough, so I shut my mouth and cleared my throat to let my little brother know he should go on.
“Would you slap a teammate,” Caleb said again, slower this time, “for twenty-five thousand dollars?”
“Dude. I wouldpaytwenty-five thousand dollars to slap a teammate,” Micah interrupted.
I kicked to the side, grinning when I made contact with some part of his body. Probably his shin, if his grunt was anything to go by. As goalies, we were beat up there the most. Especially as totally blind goalies.
The pads helped, but not much.
Sitting back, I folded my arms over my chest and listened for the sounds of our mom in the kitchen. She was humming one of those creepy-as-fuck old showtunes, which told me she was in a good mood. But good-mood mom was never the best mom.
That was when she was most scary. When she was having one of her episodes that meant chaos for the rest of the family. Bile rose into the back of my throat, and my anxiety ramped up.
“Jonah,” Caleb said.
Right. Shit. I forgot Caleb had been distracting us with hypotheticals. “For twenty-five grand, yes. There are a few I’d slap for free.” More than a few, but I was trying to be kind to my team. Unfortunately, the current owner was a gigantic fucking twat-waffle who insisted on drafting players who wanted to make asshole their entire personality.
An unfortunate side effect of being para hockey was that a lot of guys felt like they had something to prove. Like they had to be bigger pieces of shit than NHL players, as though that would legitimize them or something. There were two players on my team currently on six game suspensions for tossing out homophobic slurs during our last game against the Fury.
Chad—because of fucking course it was Chad—and Kevin. BecausefuckKevin. Goddamn rookies and their goddamn mouths. We’d pulled Mitch off the bench and some guy named Osric from the farm, but I was starting to contemplate poking out one of Ford’s eyes so he might qualify to come play with us.
I had no idea how well he’d skate with his prosthetic, but it was starting to feel worth the attempt. And I mean, it was just one little eye.
I had none, and I was just fine.
Killian might murder me if I further disabled his boyfriend, but whatever. He’d get over it.
“You’re being weird and quiet,” Micah said after a long stretch of silence.
Usually when I got quiet, the conversation moved along without me, but we were all tense today.
Mom had called us all in for some kind of big announcement, and the last time she’d done that, Micah and I had been in high school, and she sat us down to tell us she’d written a book about the “horrific struggles of being a mom to blind sons.”
She hadn’t transcribed the book into braille, but she narrated it herself, so I couldn’t even hate-read it unless I wanted to hear her whining at us over a recording about how difficult we’d made her life.
There wasn’t a chance in hell I was subjecting myself willingly to eight hours of her simpering Disability Mom voice.
Living with it was bad enough.
Life with her had been both really easy and really fucking hard. She’d made our genetic condition her entire fucking personality, which meant everywhere we went, she was either picking a fight with perceived ableism, or she was talking loudly to anyone with the ability to hear about how brave her sons were.
And by her sons, she meant herself. That spoke to her weird, complicated, Greek-tragedy-style mental health disorder that didn’t have a name yet but should.
But because she’d made her personality having blind kids, our house was also probably the most accessible house that any kid like us could have ever wanted. Sometimes I wanted to thank her for it, but mostly, the three of us just hated her.
Because deargod, what it cost us was more than the therapy we’d all started going to the moment we left home.
At least Micah and I had hockey, so we could pick fights and shed some of the frustration whenever she really pissed us off. Caleb had metalsmithing, and while he pretended half the noises he was making was twisting hot iron into artsy shapes to sell at his art shows, I knew he was probably just beating the fuck out of scraps to lift some of the weight off his chest.
Luckily, we were all adults now with our own lives and own homes, so whatever she had to say, at least we could politely tell her to fuck off. None of her problems were our problems, and the three of us had gotten together to decide that before we set foot in the house.
“Alright, boys,” she singsonged. Her feet gently tapped on the wood floors as she made her way back into the living room. “Tea is on the table.”
