His No Good Boys His Pucking Rival

What do you do when the man who almost destroyed your career shows up wearing your jersey?

Foster

I kept the puck.

Two years, three drawers, and one captaincy I nearly lost, and I still kept the stupid puck from the night Knox Bellamy skated onto national television and made me look like a man who'd already peaked. I told myself it was a reminder. A warning. The kind of thing you hold onto so you never get comfortable enough to let it happen again.

I told myself a lot of things about Knox Bellamy.

Then the trade went through, his name showed up on a locker two stalls from mine, and every story I'd been telling myself for two years stopped holding its shape. Because the man standing in my locker room isn't the idea I'd been carrying. He's funnier than that. Steadier than that. And the way he reads the ice, the way he finds me in the slot before I'm even there, the way he looks at me in the dark like I'm something worth staying for.

I've been the controlled one my entire career. The captain who never says the wrong thing, never risks the wrong move, never lets anyone see the version of him that doesn't have an answer.

Knox is the first person who's ever made that feel like a loss instead of a strength.

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Knox

I didn't come to Saint Paul to fall for my captain.

I came because the trade was done and the paperwork was signed and I've learned the hard way that when a team decides to keep you, you show up and you prove they were right. You don't ask questions. You don't make it complicated. You put your name on the locker and you skate like your career depends on it, because it always does.

What I didn't expect was Foster Lange.

Not the press conference version, the one who gives the cameras exactly nothing and makes it look effortless. The other one. The man who drives through a blizzard to make sure I don't starve, who keeps a two year old secret in his nightstand, who looks at me sometimes like I'm the answer to a question he's been afraid to ask out loud.

I've been traded twice. I know what it feels like when a place is about to let you go. I know it in my bones, in my gut, in the half second before the call comes when everything goes quiet.

Foster going quiet is different. Foster going quiet costs me something I didn't know I'd given him.

And I'm terrified I already know which one of us is going to be left standing at the wrong end of a decision he makes to protect everything except the thing that actually matters.

Two men. One winter. A city that builds beautiful things out of ice and burns them down every February.

Some rivalries don't end on the scoreboard.
>His Pucking Rival is a high angst, slow burn MM hockey romance featuring rivals to lovers, forced proximity, and two men who have to lose the right things before they can find each other. HEA guaranteed.