All Chapters of The Hockey Star and His Roommate; She Has A Secret : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

AURELI’ve been holding the same red plastic cup for an hour just so people stop handing me new ones."Hey man, great game," some guy I’ve never met before says, clapping me hard on the shoulder. "You were absolute fire out there.""Thanks," I flash my practiced, easy smile. The room erupts into another chant of the North Bay Ice Bears, and I let the noise wash over me, nodding politely."You're doing that thing again," Finn says, dropping onto the arm of the couch beside me."What thing?" I turn to my best friend and housemate."The thing where you smile at everybody but your eyes go completely dead. It's honestly disturbing." Finn takes a sip of his drink, nodding toward the beer pong table. "You know you've said 'great game' to like nine different people in the last twenty minutes?""Somebody has to keep track of how weird you're being."I don't argue with him. I take a sip of my drink just to have something to do with my face. If I drop the smile, people will ask questions, and I c

WRENLEYBy six in the morning, my entire life is sitting on a freezing concrete curb in three black trash bags.I packed them by the light of my phone screen so I wouldn't have to turn on a lamp I no longer pay for. The first bag is clothes. The second is my swim gear, which is the only thing I own worth more than the bag itself. The third is everything else—some books, a phone charger, and a dead potted plant I kept meaning to water and apparently couldn't bring myself to leave behind.I am sitting on the icy sidewalk next to the dead plant, and I am losing the war inside my own body.The Pacific coast morning air is hovering somewhere around forty degrees, but the chill sinking into my bones has nothing to do with the weather. It’s the Fade. Without the proximity of a pack, and without the bond I rejected, my body cannot regulate its own temperature. My teeth are chattering so violently my jaw aches.Shift, the dying wolf in my chest begs, her voice a ragged, desperate whine. Give me

AURELCon Law is the one class I can't afford to fail, which is exactly why I haven't understood a word in forty minutes.Professor Adler is up front saying something about commerce and clauses and a case from seventeen-eighty-something, while I'm staring at the same paragraph in my textbook I've been staring at since the bell, the words sliding off my brain like water off a windshield. Wrenley would absolutely know what it means. She's someone that could explain it in two sentences and make me feel stupid for not getting it, which is somehow the only way it ever sticks.But she isn't here. She's probably across campus pretending she didn't just verbally dismantle my girlfriend in front of twenty four people yesterday.And speaking of my girlfriend.Elise is in the seat beside me with her head on my chest, the way she likes to sit when there's an audience, her hand resting over my heart, sometimes circling it like she's claiming territory. Which she is. Half the lecture hall watched

AURELThe next day, during practice Hartley has missed the same pass four times in a row, and the fifth time he does it I know he's doing it on purpose.We've got the season opener against Brookfield in nine days. Nine days. And our second-line winger is fanning on tape-to-tape passes a peewee could land, grinning a little every time the puck slides past his stick, looking over at me to make sure I saw."Hartley." I skate over, trying not to lose my cool, because I'm captain and that's the job. "What's going on, man. That's the fourth one.""Fifth," Finn calls from the crease, helpful as always."Maybe throw a better pass," Hartley says, and skates off like that's that.I managed to let it go. But when we run it again, he fans it again, lazy, deliberate, and this time he laughs."Hey!" I rush towards him "You want to sit? Because you're skating like you want to sit.""I'm skating fine." He coasts back toward me, and there's something already loaded behind his face, something he's been

AURELFor as long as I can remember, the one thing my dad obsessed over was attention. He was a complete sucker for attention. It doesn't matter if the whole world was sinking as long as he is the center of attention, he was good.So I was already prepared to be used as a circus monkey when he called me to his office.His office is on the top floor of a building with his name on it, while he keeps the chairs across from his desk lower than his own, so that everyone who sits down has to look up at him. Yes, that was my father. Tech mogul and trillionaire. I remember wishing for him to become poor again because this wealth is one of the reasons my parents split. He had gone to look for greener pastures leaving my mum and a little me to fend for ourselves. Months later, news of his success got to us and with joy in our hearts, we went to reunite with him. I remember how happy my mum looked. Only that the happiness didn't last very long because we walked right to his new family.He had