Roxy POV
The dull, sickening sound of my shoulder slamming hard against the solid plexiglass wall left me breathless.
For a terrifying second, the world went entirely gray, the bright overhead stadium lights blurring into long streaks of blinding white.
The roaring silence of the empty arena filled my ears, suffocating me.
“Get up, Tutor,” Jaxon’s voice cut through the fog in my head.
It was smooth, unbothered, and entirely too close.
“We’re just getting started. Don’t tell me that’s all you’ve got.”
I forced my lungs to expand, sucking in a sharp, painful gulp of the sub-zero air.
It felt like breathing in crushed glass.
My left shoulder throbbed violently, a deep, hot ache already blooming beneath the thin fabric of my cotton hoodie.
I pushed my palms against the freezing ice, my hands shaking so badly I could barely wrap my numbed fingers back around the rough, taped handle of the wooden hockey stick.
For the next ten minutes, the midnight rink became a theater of fast-paced humiliation.
I tried every single thing I could think of.
I tried to fake a drive to the left, shifting my weight clumsily in my sneakers before breaking right.
I tried to slow my pace down entirely, hoping to bait him into stepping forward so I could slide the puck through his legs.
I even tried to use the wooden boards behind the net to bounce the rubber puck around his huge frame.
But Jaxon read me perfectly every single time.
He didn’t even drop into his professional goalie stance anymore.
He just skated effortless, mocking circles around me, his stormy grey eyes tracking my awkward movements with a look of lazy amusement.
He was playing with his prey.
Every time I managed to get the puck within striking distance of the goal, he would glide forward with a effortless ease.
With a casual, playful flick of his gloved wrist, his stick would poke the puck away, sending it sliding all the way to the opposite end of the rink.
“Too slow, Brooks,” he murmured, his steel blades spraying a fine mist of freezing ice over my scuffed sneakers as he cruised past me for the fifth time. This chapter was taken from NovelPing without permission.
“Your feet are heavy. You’re dragging your whole past behind you.”
The unsaid mention of Ashenvale twisted a sharp knife in my gut.
He didn’t know the name of my hometown, but he knew exactly what I was—a charity case from a place where people didn’t have the luxury of playing games for a living.
Images of home flashed through my mind, fueling my anger.
I thought of the endless gray winters, the rotting wooden piers of the harbor, and the sound of my father coughing through his draining double shifts at the shipping docks just to send me here.
They had sacrificed everything so I could escape that fog.
I was not going to let some spoiled rich boy crush my family’s future because my shoes couldn’t grip the ice.
Desperation, thick and suffocating, rose from my stomach into my chest.
My heart hammered loud enough to echo inside my own skull.
My body was slick with hot sweat despite the freezing temperature of the arena, my hair sticking to my damp forehead in messy strands.
“I am not quitting,” I gasped out, my voice raw and cracking as I chased the black rubber disc into the corner once more, my thighs burning from the agonizing strain of staying upright.
Over by the player benches, Nate Miller still watched the entire spectacle, his large arms crossed tightly over his broad chest.
His calm, quiet eyes followed my clumsy movements across the ice, but his face remained a closed book.
He didn’t offer a single word of encouragement, and he didn’t join in on Jaxon’s mocking commentary.
He just stood there like a stone statue, a silent witness to my destruction.
I dragged the puck back out to the high slot, my vision swimming slightly.
My breath came in harsh, burning wheezes that turned into thick white clouds in front of my face.
I knew I had exactly one shot left in my tank before my legs gave out from the intense physical toll.
I had to make it count.
I had to find a gap.
I locked my eyes onto the tiny, inches-wide space between Jaxon’s left skate and the iron goalpost.
With a final, aggressive burst of energy, I made a direct, reckless drive toward the net.
I lowered my head, gripping the wooden stick with a white-knuckled intensity that made my fingers ache, and threw all my remaining body weight and anger into the forward motion. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
I didn’t care about form anymore.
I didn’t care about balance or safety.
I just needed to force that puck past him to save my life.
Two feet away from the red crease, my right sneaker lost all balance.
The cheap rubber sole slipped on a smooth patch of wet, shaved ice.
My forward charge didn’t stop, but my feet vanished from beneath me.
Instead of swinging the hockey stick, my entire body launched forward through the air like a stone from a slingshot.
I flew across the blue paint, airborne for a little while, before I crashed brutally into the hard wooden boards directly behind the net.
The impact rattled my teeth so hard I bit the inside of my cheek, tasting copper.
My right hip took the brunt of the hit, a sharp, blinding spike of agony tearing through my lower body and stealing the consciousness from my mind for a brief second.
I collapsed onto the hard, freezing ice, sliding onto my back.
I lay there gasping like a fish out of water, my chest heaving uselessly as I tried to force oxygen back into my empty lungs.
Tears of frustration, exhaustion, and pain pricked the corners of my eyes, but I swallowed them down, refusing to give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry.
A deep, throbbing bruise was already forming on my hip, making my entire right leg feel like dead thing.
The sharp scrape of steel blades slowly approached my head, cutting through the quiet air of the arena.
Jaxon skated over, his six-foot-three frame towering directly above my broken form.
He blocked out the bright overhead stadium lights, casting a shadow over my face, trapping me in his darkness.
He wasn’t smirking anymore.
The playful, arrogant look was gone.
Slowly, he leaned down over the barrier of his own knees, lowering the blade of his hockey stick until the cold, sharp steel was hovering mere inches from my cheek, close enough for me to feel the freezing air radiating off the metal.
His stormy grey eyes were dark, heated, and intensely focused as he stared down into my face.
The lazy amusement had vanished, replaced by a dangerous tension that made the space between us feel incredibly small.
“Time’s up, Tutor,” Jaxon whispered, his gravelly voice vibrating through the ice and straight into my spine.
“You lost. Get off my ice, pack your bags, and go back to whatever gray hole you crawled out of.”