It took a few minutes to get the kids’ focus back on camp. Drew took over the skating drills and had the kids weaving through cones while he skated backward, calling out encouragement. He could trash talk on the ice when it was a game, but he’d always been good encouraging kids. Now that he was a dad, that instinct had only gotten stronger. He was the kind of guy who showed up and stayed.
Unlike some fathers I could name.
I shoved that thought down and focused on Foster, who’d set up a passing station and was patiently correcting grips and stances. Foster was always steady and unflappable. He had a calming yet commanding presence that had made him an easy choice for captain of our team. The kid he was working with, Theo, was thriving under his attention, and his passes finally connected for the first time all summer.
“That’s it, bud. Nice job!” Foster said, clapping him on the back. “Soft hands. Let the stick do the work.”
“You sure you should be teaching passing?” Drew called from across the rink. “Pretty sure you went five games without an assist last season.”
“Pretty sure I had more points than you, Monty.”
“Defensemen don’t need points. We need presence.”
“Is that what you call it when you trip over the blue line?”
The kids were eating it up, their heads turning back and forth between the two of them. I leaned against the boards, watching my best friends interact with these kids like they’d been here all summer.
Fuck, I’d missed these guys. I’d hardly spent any time with Drew this summer. He’d been busy splitting his time between work and Harper and Rory, but I’d also avoided him out of guilt. No one knew me better than he did, and I couldn’t stomach lying to his face about what I was doing behind his back.
Gordy skated up beside me. “You look like shit.”
“Thanks, man. Really feeling the love.”
“I’m serious.” His gray eyes studied me with that unnerving stillness he had. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
“What are you, my mother?”
“If I need to be.” He glanced toward the ice where Drew was teaching Elias how to do a proper hockey stop without spraying bystanders—a lesson Elias was gleefully ignoring. “Something’s off with you.”
“Nothing’s off.”
Gordy stared at me for a little longer, but didn’t push further. He never did. He mastered the skill of making anobservation, laying it on the table, and leaving it there for you to deal with on your own time.
“Come on,” I said, pushing off the boards. “Let’s give these kids a show.”
The last half hour of camp was the most fun I’d had in seven days.
Not that I was counting.
Because I absolutely wasn’t.
I just knew that it had been exactly a week since I’d last seen Ava. I was the one who wanted the distance, whoneededit so I could stop feeling…everything. I wasn’t the guy who could feel anything for a woman. Not like that.
That’s what I kept telling myself.
But even that mantra was doing little to ease the hollow feeling in my chest the longer I went without her.
Drew had the kids running a scrimmage, and the level of play was predictably chaotic. Mack tripped over his own stick. A girl named Sophia scored on a breakaway that was more luck than skill, but the entire rink erupted like she’d just won the Stanley Cup. Drew hoisted her onto his shoulders and skated a victory lap while she shrieked with delight.
Joelle was playing defense, and doing it well. She was killer at reading the play, positioning herself between the puck carrier and the net, and cutting off passing lanes. At one point she poke-checked the puck off Elias’s stick so cleanly that Foster actually laughed.
“That kid’s got instincts,” he said when she skated past.
“I told her the same thing.” I watched her rejoin the play, still quiet, still keeping her head down, but she was fully locked in. “She’s a total natural. She just needs to trust those instincts.”
