Five seconds.
The Toronto players swarmed the ice, not even waiting for the buzzer.
Fuck.
Then the buzzer sounded with finality, echoing through the arena.
Game over.
I came to a stop, surrounded by Toronto players and fans going wild, cheering and screaming and celebrating. In a few minutes, the team would be lifting the Stanley Cup over their heads while we watched from the sidelines.
We’d been so fucking close. Two games away from the cup.
It was devastating.
The locker room was deathly silent.
I slumped on the bench with my heart pounding and my hands shaking, still in full gear, staring at the floor between my skates. Some of my teammates were already out of their gear, stripped down and sitting with their heads in their hands. Others were still frozen in stunned silence like I was, attempting to process the fact that it was all over.
Coach Keller cleared his throat. “Listen up. I know this hurts. I know you’re disappointed. I know you probably feel like you leteach other down. Like you let the fans down. But I want you to remember that out of all the teams in the NHL,youmade it to the Stanley Cup finals. That’s something to be proud of.”
Proud. It was impossible to feel proud when we’d come so far and then fallen at the last hurdle.
“Take some time to process everything. No one is to blame for tonight’s loss.” He took his time to glance around the locker room at each of us. “This team, this season—I’m proud of you all. You’ve given a hundred percent. Every single one of you. I couldn’t ask for a better team.”
When he disappeared, I buried my head in my hands, willing myself to hold it together until I was alone, when I could fall apart without anyone to see.
“You okay, Clements?”
I looked up to find Petrov standing beside my bench, studying me with his brows pulled together.
I shrugged.
He lowered himself down next to me, sighing heavily. “Fuck. What a night. Doesn’t feel real yet.”
“Yeah.”
Glancing at his watch, he sucked in a breath. “You gonna shower anytime soon? You don’t want to miss the flight.”
I shook my head. “I’m making my own way home.” The last thing I wanted to do was to be trapped in a metal tube with my teammates, trying to force conversation even though my stomach was in knots and we were all trying to pretend that we weren’t devastated by our loss.
“Alright.” Petrov clapped me on the shoulder before rising to his feet. “We’ll see you at the team lunch. It’s mandatory.” He emphasised the word “mandatory.” Giving me a resigned look when I grimaced, he sighed. “Just don’t isolate yourself, okay? We’re all in this together.”
If that were true, why did I feel more alone than ever?
When the locker room emptied out, I reached for my phone. Unlike those of my teammates, it had remained mostly silent. There were a few messages of condolence from some of the parents of the kids I coached, and below them, one other message.
Jude:
I’m so fucking sorry. I wish more than anything that I could be there with you right now. Please meet me later if you can. I don’t care how late it is. I just want to see you
I stared at the message for a long time, my vision blurring as the tears I’d been suppressing filled my eyes.Jude. He’d been in the stands tonight, watching everything fall apart, worrying about me as well as his brother. Because he cared. Because this thing between us had become something real. Something that mattered.
Something that was going to end in less than two weeks when he got on a plane to go back to England.
The thought hit me like a fucking freight train. Yeah, I was aware that our time was coming to an end, but I’d managed to push reality away for the most part. But now, sitting in an empty locker room with my season over, knowing that all I had ahead of me was a lonely fucking summer, I couldn’t avoid it anymore.
Jude was leaving. He had the contract of a lifetime and a new team excited to meet him, a world away from here. One of the tears in my eyes spilled over, and I angrily wiped it away. Fuck. What did I even have to offer him in return? Stolen, secretive moments with a man who everyone knew as aggressive, abrasive, and guarded, with a career that had failed once and then fallen short of its biggest goal. A life in a city where Jude was just a tourist, seven thousand kilometres from his home.
