Bab 148: Chapter 148: Playing with Heart

TYLER

One month later.

It's playoff season. Las Vegas has hockey fever, the energy around our bid for the Cup intensifying with each win. They should rename it Crush Vegas, for the abundance of posters and billboards and news reports about us.

The marketing team has reintroduced the larger-than-life banners around the outside of the arena, each of us immortalized, three stories tall like hockey-playing kaiju. I should love it, should be basking in the glory of being a superstar among superstars, but really, I'm just a heartbroken kid.

I miss my girl. I miss her so much it aches and it's not about the sex. I miss her friendship most of all. I miss talking to the one woman who ever told me she loved me. I have the single text she sent me about an hour after her father marched her out the door. It's clipped like she was interrupted. My best guess? Dad killed her phone before he put her on the plane back to Saint Petersburg.