Page 20 of Breakaway Hearts

It’s fine.

But it really isn’t.

Chapter Seven

Madison

Someone’s salty

“She shoots, she scores! Woo….” I make fake crowd noises as I skate around the net, while my best friend rolls his warm brown eyes at me.

“Lucky shot.” Jason shrugs. From anyone else, I’d see it as him trying to make himself feel better that I beat him, but I know I played dirty. Still, that part won’t make it into the story when I say I scored on a guy who blocked everything the best players from multiple D1 teams sent his way while he was still in high school. Wynchester was the only one of his tryouts I sat in on, since we toured the school together, but after a quick warmup, the coach just had his first line shoot on Jason until one of them scored. It took forever.

Jay said it wasn’t fair, because he’d seen them play, and they knew nothing about him, but my friend is just that good. Was. Or still is, but these days he lets more in to help lesser athletes feel better about ourselves.

He comes out of the net to help me round up the pucks, shooting a few at the net as he goes. They all slide in, but it’s easy with no goalie.

“Remember when you would just lie across the net with your stick in front of you and stop everything?” I ask, working on my stick handling, even though Jason’s the only one I ever play with, so there’s no one to steal it from me.

“Operative word being that I stopped everything.”

“Someone’s salty.” I roll my eyes instead of pointing out that as one of the first on our team to manage to lift the puck off the ice, I used to score on him quite a bit back then. Perks of having your dad as assistant coach.

Jason gets back into position and I shoot pucks at him, one after another, alternating corners or between his legs. I’ve watched him play for years, so I see his body itching to move this way or that, but he doesn’t, letting me score every few shots so I’ll enjoy myself. Which is sweet, but misguided.

“Don’t go easy on me, Nugget, or I’ll think you’re rusty.” I use the nickname his mom still calls him by.

“I am,” he points out.

“We need to come more often if you’re this bad,” I warn, relishing the way he bristles.

“Fine,” he reluctantly agrees. “I stop them all, you do the dishes for a week.”

“I get one in, without you cheating, you deep clean the bathroom.”

“You really don’t want me to go easy on you.”

I don’t, but miracles also happen. And odds are we’ll both do the dishes and the cleaning because neither of us is good at letting the other suffer without trying to help.

I line the pucks up and wait for Jason to nod before I make my way across, smiling more with each puck he stops.

“There he is!” I say once I make it to the end and not a single one went in.

“Hot chocolates are on me,” he offers, but he’s smiling.

“I’ll accept your pity bribe.”

He heads for the locker room, but I have no interest in dark arena hallways, so I take my skates off on the bench, then wait for him by the doors, aimlessly scrolling Instagram.

There’s a notification that Jason’s mom posted for the first time in a while, so I go to like it and see a picture of a maybe nine-year-old Jason wearing hockey gear. It’s in a frame that says, ‘When I grow up, I want to be…’ and Jay wrote, in glitter pen, ‘in the NHL’.

I knew, because I was there when he wrote it. I know that was his dream. In high school, he discovered gamers have an edge in surgery, so he dove into that as well, but I’ve had a nagging feeling he lied when he said being a doctor was his dream now, not just a backup. Because isn’t the NHL always the dream? It’s just a question of whether you’re good enough.

And I’m pretty sure Jason is.

Chapter Eight

Owen