All Chapters of Pucking Around with Fate: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

POV: KenseiThe snow was coming down soft and steady.Kensei stood with his back against the passenger door of his SUV and his arms folded across his chest and watched it fall. The parking lot lights caught the flakes on the way down, turning them briefly brilliant before they joined the general accumulation on the ground, and the effect was peaceful in the way that things sometimes were peaceful when everything around them was not.Shane was talking. Shane had been talking since approximately the moment they'd filed out of the building, and showed no signs of approaching a conclusion."I've tried talking to him, and I honestly cannot figure out what the friction is even about half the time. Khyle just keeps telling me he can't play with Gunner. Jäger won't cooperate. Jäger gets in the way. Jäger is too aggressive. Jäger...""Shane," Logan said."...Jäger can't shoot. Jäger's a mental case. He just kept going and going and I still have the headache and that was three days ago and..."

POV: GunnerHe was running on four hours of sleep and bad faith.Gunner stood with his back against the wall and his arms folded across his chest and held up his section of the crossroads hallway with the energy of a man who had fulfilled his contractual obligation to appear and was now waiting for time to pass. Around him the pregame ritual proceeded without requiring his participation. Balls in the air, voices overlapping, the particular looseness of men in the hour before they had to be something more demanding than themselves. He let it happen around him and contributed nothing to it.Logan and Sam were talking to him. He was aware of this in the same way he was aware of weather, as a background condition rather than something requiring direct engagement. Something about a party after the game. Hot tub. Open bar. Did Gunner want to come.No, he did not want to come.He wanted to go home. He wanted to put his shifts in and take his bruised shoulder and his sore knuckles and the acc

POV: KhyleThe woman had been watching Gunner the way certain people watched things they had already decided were theirs.Khyle clocked it from across the crossroads hallway with the peripheral awareness of someone who had spent the past several weeks developing an involuntary and deeply inconvenient radar for anything happening in Gunner's immediate vicinity. He wasn't watching. He was simply aware. There was a difference, and he was maintaining it with both hands.She was striking. That was the objective assessment, delivered by the part of his brain that processed visual information without editorial input. Dark hair, olive skin, the kind of posture that said she had never once walked into a room without knowing exactly what she was doing to it. She moved toward Gunner with the unhurried confidence of someone approaching something familiar, and Gunner's response was the one Khyle had heard through hotel walls on road trips more times than he wanted to count. That particular quality

POV: KhyleHe turned.The woman coming toward him was the one he'd watched from across the crossroads hallway twenty minutes ago, and she was considerably more immediate up close. The description his brain had processed from a distance, striking, confident, architectural in the way she moved, did not fully account for the experience of being the specific destination of all of that, with nothing between him and it except rapidly closing distance.She came to a stop close enough that the situation required a response.Khyle raised his eyes from the approximate chest level at which they had involuntarily landed and located her face, which was petite and pretty and wearing an expression that he recognized with the particular sinking clarity of a man who had seen that expression before and knew exactly what it meant.She wanted something. She had decided she was going to get it. She had not yet consulted him on either of these points.He was aware of Shane somewhere to his left, suspicious

POV: Dual, Khyle and GunnerKhyle was not running.He was moving at an elevated pace through the corridor with a specific destination in mind, and the fact that his feet were leaving the ground more than strictly necessary for efficient forward motion was a function of urgency rather than anything else. He was not running from Gunner Jäger. That was not something he was going to add to the list of things that had happened today.He turned the corner and broke into a full sprint.The hallways of Sokyoku Hill Arena were long and wide and largely empty at this hour, which meant he had room to open up his stride and actually move, and the movement helped in the way that physical exertion always helped, burning through the top layer of the feeling and letting the cooler air underneath reach the parts of him that had been running too hot since the crossroads.He ran until his legs started talking to him about the three-plus hour practice from the day before, and then he ran a little longer