Chapter 88 CHAPTER 88

Chapter 88 CHAPTER 88
Jax’s Pov

The River District arena on exhibition night was a completely different animal than the manicured, bow-tie atmosphere of the Northwood varsity rink.

There were no velvet-roped booster suites, no light organ playing classical fanfares between whistles, and no student section chanting rehearsed ivy-league taunts. The six-thousand-seat arena was built out of dark river stone and raw steel, crammed to the rafters with auto mechanics, steelworkers, dockhands, and off-shift railway crews in flannel shirts and grease-stained caps.

They didn't polite-clap. They howled.

When the horn sounded for pre-game warmups and we flooded out of the seafoam-green tunnel onto the ice, the noise hit us like a physical wall of sound, a raw, thunderous, blue-collar roar that vibrated straight through the rubber soles of our skates and rattled the glass panels in their steel frames.

The Chicago Wolves were in town for the pre-season opener, and they looked like a squad assembled out of an old-school enforcer reel. Their top line was anchored by a pair of twenty-nine-year-old minor league veterans who had combined for over four hundred career penalty minutes.

"Listen to that barn," Julian murmured beside me as we circled our defensive zone, his navy-blue Wolverines jersey flapping against his shoulder pads.

His dark hair was neatly trimmed now, the surgical tape long gone from his cheekbone, leaving behind a thin, clean line that showed pale against his skin. His blue eyes were razor-sharp, tracking the black rubber as Coach Vaughan dumped a bucket of pucks into the center circle.

"It’s a long way from the varsity quad, Jules," I growled softly, coasting past him and letting my stick blade click against his in a quick, familiar ritual.

"Good," Julian replied, his voice dropping into that low, lethal register he used whenever the ice turned cold. "I never liked the acoustics in Northwood anyway."

I took a deep breath of the rink air, filling my lungs with the smell of wet wool, cheap draft beer, hot popcorn, and cold diesel exhaust from the ice resurfacer. My engine was humming, that low, steady, Flint rumble in my chest that always meant my blood was up. We weren't here to prove anything to a trust fund board or a television crew. We were here to play hockey.

Coach Vaughan started us on the third line, pairing Julian at left wing and me at right, with a thirty-year-old veteran named Kowalski centering between us.

The first five minutes were a brutal, grinding physical war. The Wolves tried to test the "college kids" immediately, dumping the puck deep and sending two six-foot-two forecheckers crashing into our corners to rattle our cage. I took a heavy shoulder to the chest along the dasher boards that almost lifted my skates off the ice, but I absorbed the blow, drove my hip back into the defenseman's belly, and protected the puck with my broad frame.

Midway through the second period, with the score tied at zero and the ice chewed into a gray, slushy mess, the game shifted.

Kowalski won a defensive zone faceoff, tying up the Wolves center behind the red dot. The puck trickled free toward the left board.

Julian didn't wait to see if Kowalski would win the battle. He was already moving.

He anticipated the bounce half a second before anyone else on the sheet, stepping inside the Wolves winger's reach, taking the puck cleanly on his forehand, and accelerating out of our zone with that effortless, aristocratic skating stride that looked like liquid mercury on ice.

I didn't have to look at him. I didn't have to call for the pass.

We had skated three hundred hours together on the frozen ponds of Detroit, in the late-night darkness of empty rinks, and through the bloody trenches of the postseason. I knew the exact angle of his shoulders; I knew how he held his stick when he was preparing to cut inside; I knew the rhythm of his breathing before he even made his move.

I opened up my stride on the right wing, driving hard down the opposite boards into the Wolves zone, drawing their lead defenseman toward me to clear space.

Julian crossed the blue line at full speed. Instead of executing a standard, textbook drop-pass like we’d been taught in junior hockey, he used the raw, unscripted instinct we’d forged on the river ice.

He banked the puck hard off the side boards, a sharp, deliberate pass that hit the wooden dasher at a forty-five-degree angle, bouncing cleanly past two defender sticks and sliding straight into the high slot, right into the open ice I was sprinting into.

It was an impossible, telepathic read.

I stepped into the puck without breaking stride, loading every ounce of my broad chest, my Flint grit, and my two hundred pounds of muscle into a crushing wrist shot.

WHACK!

The black rubber exploded off my stick blade like a cannonball, streaking past the Wolves goalie's glove and slamming violently into the top-right iron corner of the net.

PING-CLANG!

The red light behind the glass flashed bright, and the horn sounded, a deafening, ear-splitting howl that shook the roof rafters.

Before I could even turn around on my skates, a heavy blue jersey slammed flat into my chest.

Julian threw his arms around my neck, his helmet knocking against mine with a sharp clack, his dark blue eyes blazing with a fierce, uncaged joy that lit up his entire face.

"Great finish, Jaxom!" he shouted over the deafening roar of the six thousand fans screaming in the stands.

I wrapped my broad arms around his waist, lifting his skates six inches off the sheet, my face buried in his shoulder as the adrenaline roared through my veins.

"All you, Jules!" I bellowed back into the cold air. "All you!"

When we skated back toward the team bench, the veteran players weren't sitting down.

Vance, Kowalski, Stasiak, and the rest of the squad were standing up on the wooden floorboards, slamming their wooden sticks against the acrylic glass in a deafening, rhythmic cadence.

THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP!

Vance reached out his heavy, gloved hand, catching me by the shoulder pad and yanking me onto the bench with a rough, affectionate shove, while Stasiak gave Julian a solid, heavy slap across his upper back that nearly knocked the wind out of him.

"That's how you work the slot, kid!" Stasiak growled, a huge, toothless grin breaking across his bearded face. "Hell of a read off the boards!"

I sat down on the wooden bench beside Julian, both of us panting heavy, hot air into the cold arena.

I looked over at him. The sweat was dripping down his neck, his dark hair plastered to his forehead beneath his dark blue helmet. Right on his left cheekbone, where the surgical glue used to be, the pale silver line of his scar caught the bright yellow overhead lights.

It wasn't a disfigurement. It was a badge of honor. It was the mark of a man who had stood on center ice, taken the worst the world had to throw at him, and walked away entirely free.

Julian looked over at me, catching my gaze, and offered a soft, quiet smile that belonged only to us, a tranquil, unshakeable promise that cut straight through the noise of the screaming crowd.

The final horn sounded an hour later, sealing a hard-fought 3–2 victory for the Midwest Wolverines.

The crowd went wild, standing on their feet and pounding on the glass as we skated around the ice, lifting our sticks to salute the six thousand fans who had filled the barn to support us.

After Coach Vaughan gave his short, gruff post-game speech in the locker room, telling us to enjoy the night before two-a-day practices resumed on Monday, we slowly unbuckled our pads and headed down the narrow, dimly lit concrete tunnel toward the shower room.

The corridor was quiet, hidden from the press boxes and the public exit doors.

The low, humming sound of the ice resurfacer echoed from the main arena, and the air smelled of wet leather, hot water, and clean floor wash.

I fell into step beside Julian, our heavy rubber flip-flops making a soft slap-slap-slap against the wet floorboards.

Julian was wrapped in a dark blue towel, his dark hair dripping water over his shoulders, his face flushed and relaxed from the win. He looked down at his bare feet, a quiet, peaceful expression on his face that I had never seen back in the gilded halls of Northwood.

I looked around the dark tunnel. No cameras. No reporters. No father watching from an executive box.

I reached out my right hand, my bare, calloused hand with the small pink scars over the knuckles, and caught his fingers in the shadow of the cinder-block wall.

Julian didn't pull back. His long fingers intertwined with mine instantly, squeezing tight, his warm palm pressing firm against mine for five quiet, unhurried seconds in the dark.

We didn't say a word. We didn't need to.

The engine was running. The sheet was ours. And no matter where the road led next, we were standing on our own two feet, together, right where we belonged.

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