by Amy Aislin
STICK SIDE SERIES
On the Ice
The Nature of the Game
Shots on Goal
LIGHTHOUSE BAY SERIES
Christmas Lane
LAKESHORE SERIES
The Heights
Other books:
Ballerina Dad
Picture Winter
As Big As the Sky
The Play of His Life
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Beta read by Jill Wexler at LesCourt Author Services
Edited by Brenda Chin
Copy editing by Boho Edits
Proofread by Between the Lines Editing
Cover art by Natasha Snow Designs
Interior design and formatting by Champagne Book Design
Table of Contents
Title Page
Titles by Amy Aislin
Copyright
Author's Note
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Other Books
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Although we first met the protagonists from Shots on Goal in the previous two books of the Stick Side series, Shots on Goal stands on its own. But if you enjoy Cody and Roman’s story, I hope you’ll check out On the Ice and The Nature of the Game. Thank you for reading! ~Amy
JANUARY 2003
Roman Kinsey didn’t usually make such drastically bad choices as the one that led to him kissing boys in the middle of the locker room. Granted, it had been one boy thirty minutes after hockey practice and everyone was gone for the day, but still. He could’ve picked a better location as evidenced by the interruption by none other than Coach Moore, who’d trailed Roman’s best friend, Kasper Kowalski, into the locker room while Roman was mid-lip-lock. His kissing companion, a figure skater Roman had been circling for months, had winked at him and disappeared out the door, leaving him with one slack-jawed best friend and an unimpressed coach.
“My office, Kinsey. Now.”
Kas had fled, mumbling unintelligibly, before Coach had finished his sentence. Some best friend he was. Roman’s feet might as well have been encased in cement, rooting him to the spot at the reproach on Coach’s face. Unsure what to expect, he pulled on a smoke-gray hoodie branded with the red, white, and black logo of his major junior team and followed Coach to his office, his heart sinking further into his chest with each step.
Being gay wasn’t grounds for being kicked off the team, was it?
“Look,” Coach said once they were seated in his office. “You’re young. Your hormones are going crazy. And the major juniors might not seem like a big deal—”
“It is, Coach!” It was what he’d worked for his entire seventeen years.
Coach held up a hand. “If you want to make it as a professional hockey player, you need to keep your head down and your sexuality to yourself. There’s a reason there are so few out professional athletes. So let’s keep this between us, and maybe next time you’ll choose a more private spot to kiss boys, huh?”
“Sure, Coach.” Anything. Anything to stay on this team.
Except by “just between us” Coach had evidently meant the two of them plus Roman’s host family, the Giffords, who’d told him he needed to leave as soon as he’d returned to their house in the Ottawa suburb of Orleans.
“We can’t have someone like you in this house,” Mrs. Gifford said, wringing her hands as she watched him pack. “Not with our impressionable young Toby.”
For the twenty agonizing minutes it took him to gather his stuff and load up his car, he kept pausing to look at her, hoping this was all some terrible joke. Surely she wasn’t kicking him out in the middle of January? What was he supposed to do now? He wasn’t going to beg a bed from Coach Moore, the traitor, and he couldn’t go home to North Bay . . . his team still had half a season left.
But when he’d called his parents for money for a motel room until he could find a new host family—an excuse ready on his tongue for why he couldn’t stay with the Giffords anymore—it was to find that Mrs. Gifford had gotten there first.
“You know how we feel about that lifestyle,” his dad said, and maybe there was a note of apology in his voice, or maybe Roman just hoped there was. He’d known he couldn’t be gay in his house, but he’d hoped to keep that to himself a little longer.
Goddamn Coach Moore. Goddamn fucking Mrs. Gifford.
Which was how he found himself sitting in Kas’s driveway down the street, all of his possessions in the backseat, numb with a combination of January freeze and sheer terror. His limbs felt too heavy, like he was drowning without a lifeline. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine the water closing over his head, weighty and thick.
All because of one kiss.
Everything had happened so fast, and he couldn’t tell up from down.
His hands were shaking as he exited the car, and he exhaled a puff of cold air that clouded in front of him. Saturday night meant Denny, Jeff, and Shawn were already here, likely spread out in Kas’s living room and already playing video games. Fuck, he needed his friends right now. He was desperate for someone to tell him everything would be okay, desperate for comfort, for human contact. Bypassing the snow angels he’d made on the snow-covered front lawn with Kas and his little sister just last week, he knocked on Kas’s front door, shuffling from foot to foot. God, he couldn’t wait to get inside, out of the cold, dark evening. Mrs. Kowalski would sit him at the kitchen table and feed him hot chocolate made from the chocolate squares he loved so much, and she’d order Kas to make up the spare room for Roman. Because of course Roman could stay. He could stay as long as he needed.
It took a horribly long time for the door to swing open, so long that he started to suspect no one was home. But Mr. Kowalski’s car was in the driveway, so he waited, blowing air into his hands. And when it finally did open, the sight of his best friend’s perfectly symmetrical face made his shoulders sag and his eyes burn. Finally, a friendly face. He blinked the tears away.
“Roman?” Kas closed the door halfway.
“Hey.” Roman looked over Kas’s shoulder and saw nothing but the hallway wall. There were v
oices and laughter—sounded like Denny was telling one of his bad jokes. “Can I come in for a bit?” For a few months?
“You can’t be here right now.”
“I . . What?”
“Is that the fairy?” Denny yelled from inside the house. “Tell him I’ll give him twenty bucks to suck my dick!”
No teasing in the words, only a hard finality that reminded Roman of a brick wall. Along with the raucous laughter that followed, they slapped Roman in the face so hard, he took an instinctive step back.
Searching Kas’s face, all he saw was contempt. “You told them?” His voice squeaked on the last word, and he swallowed back bile. If his heart had sunk before his talk with coach, it was nothing compared to how it was shriveling at Kas’s feet.
“Like I said, you can’t be here right now.”
Roman was left staring at a closed door a second later. At this piece of wood and metal that cut him off from Kas and their teammates. The door was dark blue, the paint chipping off around the handle. The normality of it kept him rooted to the spot, waiting. Waiting for it to open again. Waiting for Kas to come get him, or Mrs. Kowalski, trailing lavender-scented perfume in her wake, or one of Kas’s little sisters, clutching a new drawing, or even one of the older ones, who’d remind him again not to put his feet on the coffee table.
The street was quiet. Lonely and starless. Wind shivered through the trees, crept down the back of Roman’s coat like bony fingers. The house across the street still had their Christmas lights up; the winking red and white did nothing to imbue him with joy.
Five minutes later, he was forced to concede that Kas and Denny and the others had dropped him just as surely as his parents and the Giffords had.
Ten minutes after that, cracked wide open, feeling like he was sitting on dynamite that was about to explode him into a million insubstantial pieces, he parked in the lot of a twenty-four-hour grocery store where he had less chance of getting towed, cranked the heat, lowered his seat back, and curled into a shivering, protective ball of sorrow.
JANUARY 2011
It’ll be fun, they said.
Don’t worry, they said.
It’ll be easy, they said.
If his new team’s engagement coordinators thought this was easy, they’d never been the center of attention of fifteen unimpressed three- to six-year-olds.
“You have to do the voices.”
Roman Kinsey paused mid-sentence and glanced up from the children’s book in his lap. “What?”
“The voices.” One of the little kiddos in attendance for Tiny Tot Storytime at the library leaned forward and tapped his book.
As a professional hockey player, he was used to playing in arenas that held thousands, but being the sole focus of a bunch of ankle-biters? He hadn’t been this nervous since he’d played his first NHL game four years ago. Why did they have to look at him like they could see into his soul?
“Okay,” he said, glancing back down at the book. On the page was a rocket ship with a cartoon face that was smiling down at a smaller rocket ship. He cleared his throat and dropped his voice an octave. “‘Where do you want to fly to today, son? asked Papa Ship.’”
The kids giggled.
“That’s the wrong voice,” the same kid said.
Roman clicked his tongue ring against his teeth. “What does a talking spaceship sound like?”
There was what sounded like an aborted snort-laugh behind him. He ignored it.
“Like a robot,” said the kid.
“A . . .” Yeah, all right, that made sense. He repeated the sentence, using a robotic Greetings, Earthlings kind of voice. The kids giggled again, and Little Miss Ringleader didn’t object, so he kept going.
His first storytime wasn’t awful. It helped that he didn’t have to actually interact, just sit here and read from a twenty-page children’s book that had all of three sentences per page. Except Tiny Tot Storytime was slotted to last thirty minutes, and the only reason the rocket-ship book took him ten minutes to get through was because he read really slowly. Midway through the second book, his voice went hoarse. He hadn’t talked so much in one go in a very long time.
A week ago, he never would’ve guessed he’d be leading Tiny Tot Storytime in a small-town community library.
But then, a week ago, he hadn’t known he was going to be traded.
Happy fucking New Year to him.
The shitty thing was that since the Trailblazers were such a new team—they’d played their first game last September—in such a small city—only 40,000 people and the NHL thought Burlington, Vermont, was a good place for a team?—he couldn’t carry on as he had in Tampa, showing up for practices and games and the required minimum amount of charity and community functions while avoiding the press and ducking out of team bonding events. Here, he had to demonstrate community spirit. Visibility in the community, apparently, helped sell tickets.
Which was how he found himself reading to a bunch of kids. As a mid-season addition to the National Hockey League’s recently formed Vermont Trailblazers, he didn’t exactly have a lot of options to express this supposed community spirit. The engagement coordinators’ list of available Trailblazer-affiliated volunteer opportunities had been slim, with storytime the least unpleasant of the three options. Except the library in Burlington he was supposed to volunteer at had shut down temporarily for renovations, so they’d sent him instead to this tiny one in the minuscule college town of Glen Hill, about an hour southeast of Burlington.
Operation: Community Spirit—check.
“There’s no I in team,” Coach Donovan had said yesterday morning upon their introductory meeting, as if Roman hadn’t heard the exact same cliché from every coach he’d ever had.
“Um . . .” Roman had frowned at the poster tacked to the wall behind Coach’s desk in his office at the arena, an uninspiring thing depicting a hockey puck on ice with the words There’s no I in team written in block letters underneath. “Understood, Coach.”
“We work together, as a unit, toward the same goal. We respect each other, and we play by the rules. Team spirit.” Coach banged a fist over the pile of papers on his desk. “I want to win, Kinsey, but I also want my men to treat each other like brothers. Family. Those guys out there—” He pointed one finger at his office doorway and, presumably, the men in the locker room down the hall getting ready for morning skate. “—are some of the best you’ll meet. They’re the best friends you’ll ever have.”
It took Roman a moment, but he’d figured it out eventually: Coach wanted him to make friends. Him. Make friends. His hands had clenched on the chair arms.
That . . . would be much more complicated than the community spirit thing, owing to the fact that Roman had purposefully avoided friendships for years. When more than one “friend” turned their backs on him for being gay, it made a man quit the friend train. Friends would betray him if he let them.
He didn’t let them.
Operation: Team Spirit—pessimistically willing to try for the good of the team.
Finally finished reading the third book to his storytime attendees, he flipped it closed to a smattering of applause, which was unexpected, and then requests for autographs and selfies, which . . .
Was also unexpected. He was a good hockey player, but he stayed out of the spotlight as much as possible, preferring privacy and relative anonymity, and thus wasn’t one of the better-known players. Although, with the excited chatter from some of the parents—
“With your stats, son, the Trailblazers will have a better chance at coming in somewhere other than dead last in the conference.”
“It’s great to have you here, Mr. Kinsey. We’re still so excited that the NHL chose Vermont as the home of the Trailblazers.”
“Tell your coach that he needs to put you on the same line as Ritz. With your speeds, you’d be well-matched.”
“So far the Trailblazers have a below-average shots on goal. That’s something your team might want to work on, son.”
&
nbsp; —he had a feeling he wouldn’t be able to fly under the radar like he had in Tampa.
“Mr. Kinsey.” The library director, Eileen, a short lady with a puff of curly white hair that resembled cake icing, approached him once the crowd finally dispersed and parents took their children home for dinner. “I’m sorry about that. I didn’t know there was so much interest in hockey here.”
She must not watch much TV then. The Trailblazers were, in fact, dead last in the conference, but that hadn’t dimmed the public’s excitement. Vermonters were surprisingly loyal to their new team. Why that excitement and loyalty hadn’t translated to ticket sales yet was something Roman—having only arrived yesterday—had yet to investigate.
He shook her outstretched hand. “It’s no problem.”
She beamed at him. “We’ll see you next Tuesday, then?”
Right, this was a weekly thing until the end of the season—if he could swing it. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and opened the calendar app. “Let me check my schedule—”
“No need.” She waved a hand like she was swatting a fly. “Samantha already emailed me your itinerary.”
Samantha was one of his club’s engagement coordinators. “That’s . . . incredibly thorough.”
“So we’ll see you next Tuesday,” Eileen said. “But I believe the week after you’re unavailable.”
She knew his schedule better than he did. “Do I need to find a substitute or something?”
“Oh no, dear. Cody fills in when no one else is available.” She waved her hand again, this time toward a guy maybe two or three years younger than Roman’s own twenty-five and only a couple of inches shorter than Roman’s six feet. Cody, presumably. He leaned against a hip-high shelf of children’s books a few feet to Roman’s left, wearing a pair of dark jeans and a teal-colored polo shirt. He had a lean, narrow face, front teeth that were slightly too big, a nose a touch too large for his face, and a wide forehead; paired with his dirty blond hair, chin scruff that was a shade darker than his hair, and pale blue eyes covered by glasses that took up half his face, it made for a package that was unexpectedly attractive. His lips curled up further and he gave a little wave, and Roman knew instantly—this was his snort-laugher. Definitely.
