Chapter Five

At home, with a glass of wine next to her, Darcy settled into doing research for her real passion, becoming a commentator. After she retired from competition, she’d taken the first job she found in television. Wake Up, USA wasn’t going to give her a chance to do hockey commentary but it got her in the door at the network that owned the rights to broadcast the women’s team.

When she was a kid, she would watch the games with the sound on low and practice what she would say. In college, when she’d have video sessions with the coaches, she had to keep herself from commenting about each player as they rolled through footage of games, their opponents, and watched endless loops of their power play and penalty kill units. Occasionally, when the coaches stepped out of the room, or let her finish the session, she’d amuse her teammates with her commentary.

“Oh look, there’s Hinch floating out by the red line. That’s unsurprising to me, Bob, since she’s never back-checked a day in her life.” That time Hinch had thrown a towel at her head but it was worth all the laughs from her teammates.

The Olympics segments Raquel offered her, no matter how goofy she looked doing them, were the next step in getting to that commentator role. If she could get her ass to the Games, get in front of the camera, she could prove that she belonged on-screen and not stuck behind a desk.

She took a sip of her wine and opened her laptop. Her ex, Sabrina, used to be so pissed at her for coming home and immediately jumping into more work. Whatever, she was going to be on-screen, halfway to her dream. All that time working instead of going out with Sabrina was about to pay off. She could almost taste it.

Darcy scanned the rosters for all the women’s teams. Her eyes skimmed the U.S. team, unable to believe that Natalie’s name wasn’t on the list.

Darcy blew out a long breath. Any time she saw Natalie’s name, her brain served up a montage of every memory of the two of them together. In college, in the Olympics, on the ice. Every single second flew by as she considered just how much it sucked to end your career by getting cut. There were other memories, too—the feel of Natalie’s hand in hers, the way her skin smelled behind her ear—but she shoved them aside. Those only made her heart ache.

After watching her dad have his career end with a trade to a shitty team and a stint on the fourth line, Darcy was never going to play until she got cut. She had way too much pride for that, but Natalie never met a challenge—whether it was beer pong, a set of stadiums, or a race on the ice—that she wasn’t willing to try and fail at.

When she started to lose out to younger, faster players, Darcy made a plan for retirement. She decided when she was done rather than risk getting told by a bunch of coaches that it was time to hang up her skates. Her plan meant deciding to retire after the last Olympics, win or lose.

Darcy took a sip of wine and grabbed her phone. She opened her group chat filled with former teammates.

Anyone talked to Natalie?

It took less than a minute for several sets of dots to appear.

The first message to pop up was a link. When Darcy clicked on it, she found herself on Natalie’s Instagram page where she’d posted a picture of her still-packed hockey bag with a caption that read “time to hang this up. Not sure how to do it. Can anyone help?”

Yiiiiikes! came the first message from the group.

You looking to rub it in her face, LaCroix?

Or looking for a booty call?

Darcy winced. No! Just worried...

Sammy, shut up. It’s not like Darcy can call Nat to check in.

Darcy closed her eyes. She shouldn’t have asked. Now everyone thought she was an asshole, again. God, what was it about Natalie that made her so stupid?

While the chat bubbled in the background, she scrolled through Natalie’s feed to happier times. Darcy’s favorite was one where Natalie met a Labrador named Pancake who licked Natalie’s face so much that she fell over backward laughing. She missed that laugh.

Enough.

It was too easy to get sucked into a Natalie Carpenter?shaped rabbit hole.

Back in the group chat, she asked her friends if any of them knew the players on the Olympic squads. The TV audience loved to know as much as they could about the stars, but even more than that they loved to know about any player with an interesting backstory. If the players had overcome some kind of hardship, a sick parent, not enough money, the audiences would eat it up.

Her former teammates were retired from competition; some had kids and boring jobs. Whenever they got together, they laughed about the surprised looks they got when people found out that they were Olympians. One of her teammates told her about volunteering to go to her kid’s school to talk about the Olympics and the teacher didn’t realize she was going to show up with a couple of medals. If they were men’s players, everyone would know who they were, but women could fly under the radar, even if they would have preferred a little more fame. And a lot more money.

Instead, Darcy and her teammates found regular jobs. Some went to graduate school, a few even became doctors. More than a few became coaches, but the rest found regular jobs like everyone else. They just got to put it off a decade or so after graduating from college.

After an hour of compiling interesting information from her friends and the internet, Darcy’s eyeballs felt dry as potato chips. She finished her wine in one gulp. Tomorrow she’d see Natalie for the first time in years. The thought unleashed a kaleidoscope of butterflies in her stomach. She tried to dismiss them as nervousness about her new job. But like every other time she thought of Natalie, her brain fed her a montage of their time together, including the time after the national championship game when everything had felt so good before it went horribly, horribly wrong.