"The timing's all wrong." He looked at me. "They're reading our setup from the red line. If I jump early, it forces them to adjust."
"You're leaving me alone back there."
Jake grunted. "For two seconds. You can handle two seconds."
"It's not about what I can handle. It's about the system. Everyone else manages to follow it."
"Everyone else isn't trying to make plays happen. Sometimes you've got to trust that the guy beside you sees something you don't."
I held my ground. "Trust works both ways."
"Work it out!" Coach yelled from the bench.
The next rush started before I was ready. Jake held his position, but his body language screamed reluctance. When the play developed, he stayed exactly where the system said he should be—and watched a perfect scoring chance develop because he hadn't trusted his instincts.
"Shit," he muttered, loud enough for me to hear.
The puck found the back of the net. Coach's whistle stayed silent.
We lined up again. This time, Jake caught my eye before the play started. "I'm going early on this one. Trust me."
I wanted to tell him no. The opposing forward carried the puck across the red line, exactly where Jake had predicted he would be. Jake jumped the gap, but this time I was ready. When the pass came behind him, I was already moving, sliding across to cut off the angle while Jake recovered to take away the back door.
The play died against the boards. Clean. Efficient. Completely off-script.
"Better," Coach called out.
As we skated back to reset, Jake bumped my shoulder with his glove. "Nice read."
In the next drill, I lined up to execute a simple defensive play. Textbook positioning. The kind of quiet, effective work that never made highlight reels but won games in the margins.
I turned to follow a loose puck, already thinking about a breakout pass, when something exploded across my glove hand. The pain hit like a lightning bolt. Bone-deep. The kind of pain that traveled up your arm and lodged behind your teeth.
I dropped to one knee, my stick clattering to the ice. The glove felt wrong on my hand; it was too tight suddenly, like something was swelling beneath the leather.
"Fuck."
Through the haze of pain, I registered motion in my peripheral vision. Someone was yelling. No—someone was screaming.
"What the fuck was that? Are you kidding me right now?"
It was Jake's voice. Sharp. Angrier than I'd ever heard it.
I looked up to see him chest-to-chest with Murphy, the opposing forward who'd caught me with a slash. Murphy outweighed Jake by twenty pounds easy, but Jake was in his face, every muscle in his body coiled like a spring.
"Get the fuck off him," Jake snarled. He shoved against Murphy's chest.
Murphy tried to skate away, hands up in mock surrender. "Relax, pretty boy. It was a hockey play."
"Hockey play my ass." Jake skated up into his face. "You want to take runs at people? Try me."
"Riley, that's enough!" Coach's voice boomed from the bench.
Jake glared at Murphy like he wanted to tear him apart piece by piece, and the pure, protective fury made something tingle inside me.
I pulled off my glove with shaking fingers and immediately wished I hadn't. Blood ran across my palm where the blade had caught the gap between glove segments. Not deep enough for stitches, but enough to stain the ice beneath my hand.
"Shit," I muttered, pressing my bare palm against my practice jersey.
