Page 5 of Arctic Titans of Northwood U: Volume 1

A sense of unease uncoiled in my stomach. Showing some freshman where the gym was wouldn’t earn me a great deal of respect. Besides, I wasn’t so sure I deserved anyone’s respect. Least of all for showing them the campus map.

Coach’s gaze was intense, eyes narrowing in expectation.

“Yes, Sir,” I said, realizing it had been a while since it was my turn to speak. “I can do that.”

“Of course you can, Brooks.” Coach gave a firm nod that served both as encouragement and dismissal, so I headed out of his office and made my way toward the team house. It was on the other side of our campus for the very obvious reason of the rink needing a fairly large space in the east-most area.

The entire campus sprawled over a massive plot of land. It was almost a world of its own. On my way back from the rink, I had to pass administration buildings and the great library. Beyond them, entering the heart of campus, lay the bustling student center with coffee shops, work and study spaces, and restaurants. Each way you went, there were faculty buildings for different departments. Once the semester actually started, this whole area would be swelling with students grabbing coffee while running late to their first lectures. It was only beyond these that several kinds of accommodations were placed. Dormitories with single beds and shared rooms; fraternity and sorority houses where the wildest of parties took place; and team houses for hockey, football, and baseball teams. In practice, it was a disorganized mess of people running around; but it also somehow worked like clockwork. Like a beating heart, the campus milled with students and staff scurrying up and down the paved paths, cutting across green lawns, and, on hot days like today, flocking to the shade of old oaks, ashes, maples, and elms. Some outer paths were often dotted with early risers who love a good run instead of coffee. I knew because I was one of them.

I turned right after passing through the much more subdued student center — only a fraction of students populated campus in these weeks before the semester kicked off, and it was mostly us on sports scholarships who needed the early drills and getting back into shape — then made my way to our team house. With ten occupied bedrooms and two guys per room, ours was the biggest of the team houses on campus. It was an old colonial revival house with red-and-brown brick walls, a large wooden front porch, gray-tiled roof, and white window shutters hanging from white frames. The lawn was large and, thankfully, not left to us to tend, so it sported blooming roses in full health. A feat none of us would have been capable of.

My muscles still hurt as I approached the front door and filed in. The rest of the team was already shuffling around. Beckett was in the fridge, mixing one of his calorie bombs. No doubt he would be at the gym for the better part of the afternoon. With the body he had, I didn’t need to look at his schedule to know how much of it was blocked for exercise.

Being the only openly gay guy on the team, I made it my priority to never look at other guys in this house. Especially not the ones as straight as Beckett Partridge, who happened to have somewhat lower levels of respect for my captaincy. Besides, I was supposed to be keeping their spirits up, and not making them uncomfortable in the locker room or their campus home. Nobody could ever say I’d done anything like it. Not even Caden, who I knew was exploring his sexuality because he’d pretty much told me so.

I kept my personal affairs well and truly outside the team house.

Partridge ignored me benignly as I made my way through the open plan ground floor, then climbed up the stairs to the room I shared with Caden. It was a sparsely decorated place with two beds, two desks, two chairs, and two wardrobes. A bean bag in one corner and a private bathroom door in the other were the only luxuries we needed or wanted. “All good?” Caden asked, turning from the desk to look at me. “What did the coach want?”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose and tossed my duffel down at the foot of the bed, then exhaled. “Just…babysitting duty.”

Caden snorted. “It could be worse.” He was reading my mood and I was pretty sure he knew what exactly bothered me.

“Yeah. Of course.” I sprawled on my bed, staring at the plain white ceiling. “I’ll just take them around the house, show them what’s what. Show them a bit of campus, where the gym is, where the swimming pool is. That’s how great men are forged,” I finished sarcastically.

“Dude,” Caden said pointedly. “You’re the captain for a reason. This isn’t a punishment.”

I gritted my teeth. Perhaps I needed to hear it spoken in order to realize that was precisely how I’d felt. Or, worse still, how I thought I should feel. In the minutes following our defeat, there had been a groan of disappointment, but nobody had said a negative word to me. It was like I’d dropped a nickel, not a championship.

Perhaps I needed someone to lash out and blame me to my face. Instead, they were shrugging it off, and the weight of their concealed disappointment was more than I could bear. Every single relationship I had with teammates in this house strained a little. Except with Caden, to be fair, but I wondered if that was because he felt a sense of responsibility, too. Not that he should have. That last miss was all on me, but Caden was my right hand man and he was honorable as fuck. Sacrificial, even.

“If only it was,” I muttered, more to myself than to Caden.

He scoffed, then cleared his throat. “I’ll give you this one,” he said in the end. “You get to feel sorry for your ass tonight, Cap, but that’s it. We need you.”

My ears perked and I couldn’t help but share a ghost of a smile. I still had a whole year ahead of me and tonight showed that the Titans still had some grit left in them. Spit the blood out and get back up.

I tucked my hands under my head, fingers twining, and felt a deepening sense of relief. Maybe there was a way to do this, after all. Sure, our team had its south and its north poles; sure, we didn’t always get along. Beckett and Caden would be the first to tell you, playing as a team was not always intuitive. Often, it took extra effort just to play alongside someone. But we shared the same goals and nearly all the same values.

We had a fighting chance.

As I exhaled with a little more pressure lifting off my chest, I felt Caden’s gaze on me.

Just as I looked at him, he bit his lip. “Er…actually, the first of the new teammates is already here.”

“Oh. Okay.” I sat up, not sure how to feel about this. Was I the last one to find out? The guy could have come around to see us doing drills if he was around. But it didn’t matter. “I guess I should go and make a good first impression.” A half-smile touched my lips.

The intrusive voices were quick to remind me that I had no actual business acting like a guide or a mentor to anyone. I had always been everyone’s second fiddle. An afterthought. The son of a doctor; the brother of a doctor. And this feeling was never far from my heart.

But I clenched my fists and hopped out of the bed, then marched out of my room. The first floor hallway was quiet, so I headed downstairs. The ground floor was not exactly our place of congregating. We also had a basement that sported vintage arcades, table soccer, lengthy sectionals, a surround sound system, and a well-stocked fridge that may have pushed the lines of what was allowed. Most of us weren’t that hardcore in party-going, but we were all known to kick back with a cold one.

As I reached the ground floor, I found Sawyer Price scowling over his phone. Our legendary goalie and the guy you didn’t mess with, Sawyer lifted his dark gaze from his phone and greeted me with a grunt.

“Have you seen the new guy?” I asked, not wasting my breath on asking if something was up. Nothing was up with him; he just had that resting bitch face. The fastest way to anger him was to pester him with questions on whether he was angry already.

Sawyer thumbed in the direction of the basement. “Getting cozy already.”

Ah, a cocky freshman, I decided. I couldn’t exactly blame the new guy for feeling like he was at the top of the world. He had scored an athletic scholarship at Northwood U and was on a highly respected hockey team. A thing like that went to your head. But it did inform my approach.