“Not if you don’t feed him liquor like a thirsty raccoon,” I said.
Briggs stared at me for a beat. “You know, you use raccoons in examples a concerning amount.”
“They’re useful comparisons for someone so simple-minded.”
Easton stepped into the aisle beside me. “Party starts at nine. Aura said she’d stop by after dinner.”
“Stop by,” Rider repeated, amused. “That’s what girls say when they want the legal right to leave immediately.”
“She won’t,” Easton said.
I looked at him. “You don’t know that.”
“No,” he said, and this time his grin came back slow. “But she’s bringing our girl Bliss, and Bliss loves a hangout.”
The room around us kept moving, but I felt that sentence in a way I didn’t allow onto my face.
Briggs caught enough of it to make a pleased sound. “There it is.”
“There’s nothing,” I said.
“Sure.”
Rider’s mouth curved faintly. “He didn’t say there was something.”
“He didn’t have to,” Briggs said. “Mercer gets all serial-killer calm when Bennett comes up.”
I gave him a flat look. “Find a better phrase.”
“Emotionally constipated but with cheekbones?”
“Worse.”
“Romantically haunted?”
Easton nodded thoughtfully. “Closer.”
I walked past them toward the door. “All of you are useless.”
“Yet you keep feeding us so we won’t leave,” Briggs called after me.
That was the unfortunate truth.
I kept them because they were loud where I was quiet, loose where I was controlled, and loyal in ways none of us ever said directly because saying things directly ruined them. Easton knew how to have my back without demanding explanations. Briggs could turn pressure into a joke before it crushed the room. Rider saw too much and spoke just enough. Ryan kept everyone honest by looking permanently unimpressed. They were idiots, but they were my idiots, and there were very few things in my life I could say belonged to me without money, expectation, or bloodline getting there first.
What I brought to the table was loyalty. Extreme loyalty. I was willing, able, and ready to fuck shit up if anyone fucked with mine. Hockey House belonged to us. The Fury belonged to us.
And tonight, if Easton Wade’s two-year exercise in emotional self-destruction worked, Bliss Bennett would walk through our front door courtesy of his lovesick ass being head over heels for Aura.
The thought should not have made the rest of the day rearrange itself in my head but, it did anyway.
By the time I stepped out of the arena building, the rain had softened into a fine mist that clung to the pavement and turned Athlete Row glossy beneath the gray afternoon light. Across campus, students moved in clusters under hoodies and umbrellas, dragging suitcases, laughing too loud, already acting like the semester hadn’t begun until they found somewhere to make a mistake. KFU looked alive again, messy and wet and over-caffeinated, with Fury banners hanging from light poles and pink-and-yellow decals bright against the concrete.
I headed toward Hockey House with Easton and Briggs arguing behind me about whether navy counted as a seductive color.
I should have been thinking about preseason systems. I should have been thinking about Coach Little’s warning, therankings, the scouts, the pressure building around my last college season before the draft swallowed whatever remained of my private life.
Instead, I thought about Bliss Bennett in my house, laughing with my friends, pretending not to notice me noticing her.
