Gametime: A Moo U Hockey Romance, Jami Davenport [best reads txt] 📗

our teammates continued to cast wary glances in our direction.

My twin stole one of my wings, but I didn’t put up a protest. Normally, he didn’t like that flavor, but he was fucking with me. I shrugged and sipped my beer, pretending everything was fine when it wasn’t. No one was fooled. The tension between us was thicker than the slop they called gravy in the dining hall.

“Where’ve you been? You didn’t sleep at home last night.”

“Slept at the hockey house,” I muttered.

We ignored each other for several minutes. Patrick ordered a beer and some wings, striking up a conversation with Tate sitting across from us. We’d diverted a disaster. Or so I hoped.

“Why’d Coach move you to the second line, Pax?” one of the freshmen asked. The second the words were out of his mouth, he realized his mistake.

I stared straight ahead, not looking at my twin. The table went silent again as all eyes turned to me and our team captain—my brother.

Michael, our alternate captain, rushed to fill the silence. “Pax is having a good scoring year. More scoring opportunities for both Pax and Trick if they’re on different lines.”

“He’s showboating. Hogging the puck. Moving him was punishment,” Patrick muttered.

“What the fuck did you say?” My blood boiled, and my head was so filled with rage I couldn’t see straight.

“You heard me.” He lifted his chin in defiance and looked me straight in the eyes.

“Guys, we’re teammates, and you’re brothers. Let’s get along,” Tate admonished us.

Patrick’s glower told me all I needed to know. He wasn’t through with me yet. He stood and moved to the end of the table. An hour and many beers later, things seemed to have blown over.

But I was wrong.

I got up to leave, and Patrick followed me out the door. I waited until we were away from the windows and prying eyes. I whipped around, ready to take this wherever it needed to go.

“You wanna settle this right here?” I asked.

Patrick shook his head and said in a deadly quiet voice, “Meet me at the rink tonight at midnight. On the ice. Wear your skates. This is between you and me. I don’t want anyone else there. We’ll settle our differences then.”

From the look on his face, he was angling for a fight. I was ready for him. If he wanted a fight, he’d get one, because I was fucking sick and tired of his entitled behavior.

38

Kicking Ass

Paxton

Several hours later, I strapped on my skates and stepped onto the ice. Patrick was already skating lazy circles in the center of the rink. I skated up to him.

“You’re an ass,” he said simply, keeping attention on the perfect circles he was skating.

“Better than being a prick,” I shot back. All my plans to handle this diplomatically and mend fences flew out the window as emotions overcame any logic.

Patrick ground his skates to a stop and faced me. “You asked to be moved, didn’t you? So you could showboat.”

Anger and resentment I didn’t know I had bubbled to the surface. “You’re an entitled prick who thinks every member of our team should do your bidding. We don’t play hockey to glorify you or make your game look better.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you,” I said back, knowing on some level we sounded like children rather than twenty-one-year-old men. I had to get away from him and calm down before we ended up brawling on the ice.

This wasn’t going as planned. I dug in and sped off, skating a couple feet from the boards. Patrick caught up with me and matched me stride for stride. I skated faster. So did he. I turned on the speed. So did he.

Faster and faster we went, rounding the corners at a dangerous pace and somehow keeping our blades under us. We hit the straightaways with breakneck speed, neither conceding to the other. We’d raced before but nothing like this. We were on a mission to prove who was better. I’d die before I backed down. I was as talented and driven as Patrick, and he’d damn well learn to live with that fact. I’d allowed him to be number one too many times, content to exist in his shadow, not wanting the adulation and star status he enjoyed. Tonight, I wanted the acknowledgment from him that I wasn’t second-best.

I’d skate with him until my heart burst, my legs gave out, or I passed out. But I would not stop.

We flew around the rink at a dizzying pace, and I lost track of how many laps we’d made. My heart pounded, and my lungs screamed for air. Sweat ran down my forehead and burned my eyes. I didn’t give a shit. I ignored my body and pushed harder.

Chunks of ice flew against the boards as we rounded another corner. I heard Patrick’s labored breathing over my own and chanced a look at him. We were mirror images of each other down to my being left-handed and him being right-handed. His face was red, his eyes bugged out, sweat soaked every inch of him. I had to look the same.

I lost a little ground by chancing that glance and dug in, finding some last well of strength to pull even with him again.

We were going to die in this fucking arena trying to prove which one of us was better when we were identical in physical stature, fitness level, and ability. Regardless, I wouldn’t relegate myself to second-best. I’d done that too many times, fulfilling my role as the secondary character in the play of our life. Not this time.

We rounded another corner, not letting up. My lungs screamed for oxygen. My eyes blurred either from sweat or because I was about to pass out. My heart jackhammered against my rib cage.

As we started to come out of the corner, we both faltered from exhaustion and drifted in each other’s path. My skates hooked up with his. We went down in a tangle of limbs and skate blades, sliding across