My teeth grind together as my hands grip my stick so tightly I’m afraid I might snap it in half before the game even starts.
“Seems as though things have changed, though. At least what I gathered. You looked protective. You like her, Hornsby?”
I keep my mouth shut and stare at the ice, willing the refs to hurry the fuck up so I can do some damage . . . undetected.
“Don’t want to talk about it? I get it,” he says, his voice dark . . . sinister. “Hard to talk about Penny Lawes without wanting to talk about all of her attributes.”
Don’t do something stupid. Keep it together. He’s poking you for a reason, to get you to react, to get you to hurt the team and make this win an easy one for him.
“Fucking great tits, right?”
And . . .
I explode.
You can’t talk about my goddamn Penny like that and get away with it.
I turn on him so fast that he’s not expecting it. I drop my stick, and I clock him right in the helmet before shucking my gloves and helmet and barreling into him, bringing him down to the ground where I straddle his body.
But he’s quick and well-trained, and he rolls me over and blasts me in the face with a punch before I roll him over and swing, clocking him in the nose. That’s as far as we go before we’re pulled away from each other by our teammates.
“What the fuck?” Posey says, holding me by the arms while Pacey stands between Gasper and me. His eyes pierce me.
“He’s saying shit about your sister,” I say, spitting out blood before I’m taken to the bench where I know I’ll be serving a ten-minute misconduct penalty.
“The game hasn’t even started, you fuckhead,” Taters says, coming up to me as well. “You’re giving us a disadvantage.”
“He was saying shit about Penny.”
“To get under your skin.” Taters tosses my helmet at me, which I catch. “Jesus fuck. We did not need that right now.”
“I’m not going to let him—”
All hell breaks out on the ice again, but this time, it’s Pacey who’s in the mix of it all, pulling Gasper’s jersey over his head while throwing uppercuts. I hop off the bench, scale the boards, and then skate out to the ice along with our teammates as we get into a five-minute brawl with the Polar Freeze.
Needless to say . . . we lose the game.
But the fans were entertained.
Pacey: What the fuck did he say?
I’m sitting in my car, outside of Penny’s apartment, not excited to go inside out of fear of what she’s going to say to me. After the loss, we received a blistering speech from our coach, who threw a few hockey sticks at a table in the middle of the locker room, knocking over some food. He apologized to the staff, helped them clean it up, and then we quietly all went our own ways. We were never able to recover after losing Pacey and me for ten minutes, and the loss did not come at the best time since we are racing to the finish line to make it to the playoffs.
I’m to blame for the loss.
I still have no idea what came over me. Like Penny said, we’re not dating, I have no claim over her, yet today I acted like a jealous boyfriend, a title I’ve never worn in my entire life.
Staring down at my phone, I text Pacey back.
Eli: You don’t want to know.
The only bright side of this entire night is that Pacey actually looked at me after the fight. In the locker room, he gave me an appreciative nod. And right now, he’s texting me. It might not be what I want to discuss, but it’s an open door that I’ll take.
Pacey: If I didn’t want to know, I wouldn’t have asked.
Fair enough.
Eli: He was goading me about Penny, and then right before I clocked him, he talked about her tits.
Pacey: I’m going to fucking murder him.
Eli: Easy, killer. Wait until after the season. I shouldn’t have reacted tonight. He cost us the win.
Pacey: No one talks about Penny like that and gets away with it. You did the right thing. Thank you.
And just like that, as I stare down at the text from Pacey, the weight that I’ve been carrying around for the past few weeks over my broken relationship with one of my best friends slides off my shoulders. In the heat of the moment, I wasn’t thinking about the consequences of sleeping with his sister, and even after, I didn’t think much of it because neither of us was going to say anything. But it’s been painful not having him to talk to since he found out. Not hanging out with him. Basically living in a Pacey-induced exile. I can only hope that things will change now. Or at least start to change.