Tomboy

“Stick up for you?” Stuckey asked, his upper lip curled into a sneer. “Yeah, I totally see how that would be a problem. Get your head out of your ass, Blackburn. She went after the people who’d taken a million cheap shots on you just like you nailed Hendrix after he checked Phillips from behind in the last game.”

His shoulders tensed. “It’s not the same.” It wasn’t. He was doing his job. Fallon was spilling secrets she wasn’t supposed to share.

“Whatever, dude.” Stuckey rolled his

eyes. “Now, where’s the beer.”

He crossed his arms and gave his teammates the stink eye. “All out.”

“Don’t worry,” Petrov said. “I’ll text Svoboda to pick some up on his way here with the Xbox. Hope you’re ready to get your ass kicked in Hockey All Stars. I call playing as Gretzky.”

An hour later, he walked out of his now fully furnished living room with half the Ice Knights roster eating pizza and drinking beer while talking shit about the video game hockey being played on his TV, now sitting on the stand Stuckey had put together. No one mentioned why he hadn’t had any furniture in the first place, or any more about what had happened with his parents or Fallon.

“I still don’t get it,” he said to Stuckey when they both were in the kitchen getting beers. “Why are you here? Is it just to get me playing better on the ice?”

“We’re a team.” Stuckey shrugged. “It’s what we do—on and off the ice.”

They both stood at the island, drinking their beers and watching the others in the living room where there were enough people and enough chaos to remind Zach of the Hartigans’ house, Fallon, and everything that had changed since she’d marched into his life. Even as pissed as he was, he wasn’t ready to lose her.

He twisted the top off his beer bottle. “She fucked up.”

“Maybe.” Stuckey nodded, not needing any explanation of who she was. “But didn’t she do it for the right reason? That might not excuse everything, but don’t you think it’s a reason to give her another chance?”

“She let everyone in the world see what a chump I was.” The words came out sounding the same as they had the million times he’d said them in his head, but something was off.

“Welcome to the real world.” Stuckey rolled his eyes. “We’re all chumps at one time or another. Only those asshole MRA types think having a set of balls makes someone always infallible. You need to wake up and see past the bullshit so you’ll realize that Fallon may not have been all right but she sure as hell wasn’t all wrong, either. Everybody’s fallible, man.”

And fuck him if that didn’t make some kind of sense, unraveling some of the anger that had wrapped around his middle like a python and squeezed him just about to death. She’d told him his reasons for wanting to keep it quiet were bullshit. He’d told her she was wrong. She’d taken matters into her own hands to defend him. It was an act so opposed to his normal worldview that he didn’t know what to do about it. Maybe it was past time he stopped with all the crap thinking about how a man should react, and instead did things the way his gut advised because they were the right things to do. Maybe it was time to be better. And when he did that, he wanted Fallon by his side.

“What are you, some kind of love doctor?” he asked the younger defenseman, who seemed to have his head on straight—well, mostly.

“That’s what all the ladies say before I love them and leave them, never to be tied down because that shit is so not for me.” He laughed. “Anyway, I’m just a guy on the trading block.”

He clapped his hand down on Stuckey’s shoulder. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“Yeah, well we need to win to make that happen.”

It was a simple solution, if not the easiest one, but what good things in life ever were. “So we win.”

Now, if it were only that simple when it came to figuring out what to do about Fallon.

…

Fallon couldn’t even watch the replay of the game. Sure, it was still on, but she’d tossed a blanket over the living room TV. They’d suffered five losses in a row since the news about Zach’s parents had hit, she’d come to his defense, and he’d gotten (rightfully, she could sorta admit) pissed at her for breaking his trust. She’d watched the most recent game as if the big screen was a radio while eating chocolate chip cookie dough straight from the plastic wrap (the CDC could kiss her ass with their warnings about eating uncooked food).

A buzzer blared on the TV. “And that’s another loss for the Ice Knights, who just can’t seem to get it together.”

Fallon flipped off the TV as she powered it down via remote then settled back on the couch, bringing her comforter tighter around her. It still smelled like him—warm and kinda woodsy with a strong whiff of I-will-fuck-your-brains-out-and-you-will-love it. She needed to wash it. She would. Tomorrow. Tonight was for cookie dough and loneliness. If she were ever to start an emo jazz band, Cookie Dough and Loneliness would definitely be the name of it.

Finn walked into the living room carrying his on-duty bag because he was covering the second half of a shift for one of the other guys. “You finally have an entire weekend off, and this is what you’re gonna do?”

She flipped him off. “You’re my brother, not the boss of me.”

“Thank you for that deep dive back to middle school.” He plucked the tube of cookie dough from her grasp. “If you eat this entire thing you’ll die.”

“If you don’t give it back,” she said, reaching while he held it way higher than her arm span, “I’ll smother you in your sleep.”

“Relax, Fallon. I’m smarter than to try to get in your way.” He tweaked her on the nose, handed back her cookie dough, and gave her a pitying look. “Do you need anything before I go?”