All Chapters of Pucking Around with Fate: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

POV: KhyleThe penalty box had a particular quality of isolation.Not physical isolation. The box was right there at ice level, surrounded by glass and the ambient noise of the game and the crowd and the specific auditory experience of being in an arena at full capacity with something happening on the ice that everyone present had opinions about. But there was a quality to sitting in it that was its own thing, the specific experience of being removed from the game while the game continued without you, watching the thing you were supposed to be doing happen in real time with your hands figuratively tied.Khyle sat in it and watched Gunner.He was out there in the way he'd been out there all second period, which was with the contained destructive focus of someone who had made a decision about how they were going to conduct themselves and was not deviating from it regardless of what the game asked of them. He was hitting clean. He was positioning well. He was doing, by any available metr

POV: GunnerSomeone wanted him to get onto a stretcher.This was not going to happen.Gunner was aware of the hands on his shoulders and the voice telling him to stop moving and the general insistence of the people around him that he was in a condition that required intervention, and he was aware of all of this the way he was aware of most things right now, which was partially and from a significant distance. His brain was running several processes simultaneously and none of them were running at full capacity and the one that was supposed to manage his response to instructions from medical personnel was currently offline.The one managing refusal was operational.He brushed the hands away and used his forearms to push himself up.He made it to all fours.His arms had opinions about this that manifested as a sustained vibration that moved from his elbows through his shoulders and communicated something about structural integrity that he chose not to interpret directly. The ice was inte

POV: KhyleHe woke up to the sun in his face.Not gently. Not the gradual brightening of a room coming to life around a sleeping person. The full, direct, unambiguous commitment of mid-morning light that had been working its way across his bed for hours and had finally arrived at his face with the cheerful indifference of something that had no idea it was unwelcome.Khyle had forgotten to close the blinds.He had also forgotten to set his alarm, which he discovered when he reached for the clock and lifted it and looked at the numbers and made a sound that he was glad nobody was present to document. He let the clock drop back to the table and lay there for a moment while his faculties returned, and with them the events of the previous evening, which did not arrive gently either.They were exactly where he had left them before his body had finally overridden his mind and dragged him into a sleep that was fitful and insufficient and had done approximately forty percent of the work sleep

POV: KhyleHis brain was still trying to deal with the new information when a short, dry cough broke the silence.He started at the sound, heart picking up its rhythm. After all that, he'd nearly forgotten why he was in this room in the first place. Khyle quietly crossed the room and stepped up to the bed to get a better view of the reclining hockey player, the smooth landscape of the plain white sheets broken into rolling hills by the bulk of his body. Gunner was nearly as pale as the sheets that covered the bed.Had he really been asleep, Khyle wondered? Had he heard any of that conversation? He leaned over the bed to catch a better view of his teammate's eyes. No. Clearly he hadn't. He was only now beginning to stir. Gunner's eyes were fluttering open. And he seemed a little confused. He was definitely just waking up.The younger man's expression softened slightly. Gunner almost looked gentle in a moment like this, half asleep, hair tousled and fanned out against the pillow. And th

POV: Khyle"You can't be serious."Exactly two days later the social experiment of a lifetime had begun, and already Khyle was regretting it.After doing a very obvious double take, the younger man looked pointedly at the bluenet's chosen attire, irritation quickly replacing the calm facade that he had worked so very damn hard to construct before their meet up.Since the moment Khyle had woken up this morning, the bluenet had been on his mind. And Khyle was filled with an anxious mix of revulsion and excitement. The revulsion he got. The excitement though, he had to think about that. He wanted to chalk it up to good old fashioned anxiety, the same feeling he got before a game, because he knew the outcome was important. Though they weren't under the game time glare of several thousand pairs of eyes, they were still in effect being watched. Their respective careers were riding on this.It was logical. Khyle had every reason to feel nervous. But eventually, he managed to come up with an