Awk-Weird (Ice Knights, #2)(49)

The ref let go, Petrov won the face-off, and the half a second it took for Zarcheck’s tiny brain to process the your-mom insult was all Cole needed to get a lead on the ice so he’d be in place for Petrov’s pass. The move was one of the last that Zarcheck expected, in no small part because it wasn’t one that Cole usually made. There was that benefit to Coach Peppers’s new play system, even if it did feel like he was trying to eat peas while holding his fork in his left hand.

A deke here, a pass there, and Christensen shot the biscuit home right through the five hole. It was fucking beautiful when the goal light flashed. The crowd went nuts and all the players on the ice skated over to Christensen for a celly.

And for the first time since Coach had tossed that playbook into his lap, Cole thought he just might be able to make this work. His gaze landed on Tess, who was doing a high-five shimmy dance with Fallon in the front row.

She’d been avoiding him since the ultrasound and his failed attempt at seducing her by making bread. Way to go, Phillips. You are the king of the have-no-game doughboys. But here she was at his game. She wasn’t in his jersey. She wasn’t even wearing any Ice Knights gear. Still, she was here. He could get used to that change.

Cole was skating back to the neutral zone so they could hand it to the Rage one more time when his snarly little shadow reappeared at his elbow.

“That was your one time,” Zarcheck bitched. “Next time you’re kissing glass.”

“Interesting nickname for your own mother.” Was he being an asshole? Yes. Was it working to make the other winger go a little bananas and lose a step? Also yes.

“Fuck you, Phillips.”

Cole shrugged. “I’m already taken.”

They faced off to the right of the puck drop. The ref let go of the rubber and it was on. Petrov continued to do his thing, scrapping until he got control of the puck and sending it flying down the ice to Christensen. The left winger did his dance, making it look like he’d been working the new play system since birth. Then he smacked the puck and sent it hurtling toward Cole.

A whisper of “oh fuck” breathed across the back of his neck, but he ignored it. This was hockey—almost every moment of a forty-second shift was an oh fuck situation. He didn’t line up the puck and pass to Christensen according to the new system. Instead, that muscle memory of the old plays filled him, and he took his shot.

The puck was still blasting through toward the goal when his oh fuck turned into an OH FUCK and Lowell Moltan, a Rage defenseman, hit him hard with his shoulder, plowing into him hard enough to send him airborne. In a weird bit of life slowing down in the heat of the moment, Cole watched the puck ricochet off the pipes before he landed flat on his back. His sight dimmed for a second when his helmet hit the ice and every sound except for his own harsh breathing disappeared for a few heartbeats before everything roared back to normal. There was a second of quick assessment, and then fury propelled him up off his ass.

It was fucking bedlam.

Fans pounded on the glass. Players from both teams were getting chippy as they danced around each other. The team trainer was doing his awkward hurry skate to Cole. Blackburn had dropped his mitts and was having a go with Moltan that, judging by the arctic-cold, fuck-you snarl on the Ice Knights’ captain’s face, was not going to end well for the Rage defenseman.

“That was a late hit and you know it,” Christensen told the ref.

An already bruising Moltan, thanks to Blackburn’s fists, got a five-minute major, and Cole got yanked off the ice for concussion protocol testing followed by an ass chewing from Peppers for not following the new system. He didn’t get back on the ice until the third period, and by then, he was dying to touch the puck.

It took everything he had to ignore the moves that had been ingrained in him for as long as he’d played hockey and follow the new system. Change was a motherfucking bitch. But then he got the puck and let loose with a wrister that went top-shelf. The crowd erupted loud enough to almost drown out the goal-scored siren and he—because he was very much an asshole—did a slow skate by Zarcheck, who looked like he’d just eaten an entire handful of vomit-flavored jelly beans.

He didn’t mean for his attention to move from Zarcheck’s ugly mug to Tess, but it did, almost as if he couldn’t help but glance over there and visually check in. While all the other fans were celebrating, she stood behind the glass with her hand splayed over her belly and a worried expression on her face.

…

He didn’t get hit after he took a shot on goal.

Not that time, at least.

Still, Tess’s heart stayed in her throat as she stayed alert, watching for one of the Rage players to come tearing down the ice toward Cole.

This was hockey. Players got hit or checked or body-slammed or whatever the hell they called it. But she wasn’t watching a player get smashed into—she was watching Cole, and she hadn’t taken a proper breath since he’d gone down in the second period.

Fallon squeezed Tess’s arm. “You okay?”

Nope. Not even a little bit.

“Athletes suffer from three hundred thousand concussions a year,” Tess said, the words coming out stilted.

“Cole’s fine. The trainer checked him out. They wouldn’t let him back with a concussion.”

Fallon was an ER nurse. She knew her shit. If she trusted the team trainer’s two-second checkup—okay, it had lasted way longer and been more thorough than that, but that’s what her head knew, not what the panic zooming through her acknowledged—then everything was fine. Fine. Everything was fine. Who in the hell ever said that when things really were fine?