The Year We Fell Down: A Hockey Romance (The Ivy Years Book 1)

—Corey—

September quickly became October, and life was good. I stayed on top of my course-work, and I learned to navigate the campus with increasing ease. Dana was in the throes of the singing group rush process. Her audition song was Hey There, Delilah, and with all her practicing, I had started to hear that song in my sleep.

I didn’t have much of my own social life yet, but that was probably going to take some time. Hands down, my favorite Friday and Saturday nights so far had been spent playing RealStix with Hartley. As hockey season got going, Hartley’s friends were increasingly unavailable. They were either at practice, or headed to parties in corners of the campus Hartley didn’t wish to climb to. On those nights, he would flop onto the couch next to me for a few games of hockey. Sometimes we put on a movie afterward.

“You know, you depend too much on your team captain,” Hartley said one night, when I was losing.

I wasn’t about to tell him, but the reason I was losing that night had very little to do with my center, and everything to do with the fact that Hartley was not wearing a shirt. I’d spent the last half hour trying not to drool over Hartley’s six-pack.

He cracked open a bottle of beer and offered it to me, but I waved it away. “Digby is good, but there are other players on the ice.”

“But Digby is dreamy,” I said, setting down my controller. And it was true — even the digitized version of the Puffins’ captain made my heart go pitter-patter. He was almost the hottest hockey player I could name. The hottest one was sitting beside me on the sofa.

Hartley snorted into his beer. “Seriously?” He laughed, which meant I got to see more of his smile. “Callahan, I thought you were a real fan. I didn’t realize you were a puck bunny.”

That made me gasp. “And I didn’t realize you were an asshole.”

He held up two hands defensively, one of them still clutching his beer. “Whoa, just a little joke.”

I bit my lip, trying to dial back my irritation. Puck bunny was a derogatory term for women who liked hockey players much more than they liked hockey. Nobody had ever called me that before. The happiest moments of my life had been spent on the rink.

Hartley eased his broken leg onto the table and cocked his head, like a golden retriever. “I hit a nerve? I’m sorry.”

Reaching across the sofa, I took the beer out of his hand and stole a swig. “I guess I should start painting my face and yelling at the refs. Since I’m such a big fan.”

I stretched the bottle back in his direction, but he didn’t take it back. He just looked at me so intently that I wondered if he could hear my thoughts. “Callahan,” he said slowly. “Are you a hockey player?”

For a minute, we just blinked at each other. I’d always been a player — since I was five years old. And now, at best, I was just a fan. And that really stung.

Swallowing hard, I answered the question. “I was a player. Before, you know… Before I gave it up.” I felt a prickle behind my eyes. But I was not going to cry in front of Hartley. I took a deep breath in through my nose.

He licked his lips. “You told me your father was a high-school coach.”

“He was my high-school coach.”

“No shit?” Hartley cracked open a new beer without ever breaking eye contact. “What position do you play?”

Did I play. Past tense.

“Center, of course.” I knew what he was really asking. “Captain. All state. Recruited by colleges.” It was so hard to tell him this — to show him exactly what I’d lost. Most people didn’t want to hear it. They would change the subject, and ask if I’d considered taking up knitting, or chess.

But Hartley only reached over, clinking his beer bottle against the one that I still held. “You know, I knew I liked you, Callahan,” he said. At that, my battle against tears became even tougher. But I took a long pull off the beer in my hand and fought them off. There was another moment of silence before Hartley broke it. “So…I guess this means I should teach you how to flip the screen perspective, so you can always see where your defensemen are. Slide over here.”

Happy to have that conversation over with, I scooted closer to him on the sofa. Hartley wrapped his arm around me in order to hold the controller in front of my body where I could see it. “If you push these two buttons at the same time,” he said, depressing them with his thumbs, and looking up at the screen, “it toggles between the player’s view and the coach’s.” I was tucked snugly against him, where I could feel his breath on my ear when he spoke.

“Right,” I breathed. The heat of his bare chest at my back was incredibly distracting. “That’s…useful,” I stammered.

As he showed me a couple more maneuvers, I inhaled the clean scent of his soap, and admired the sculpted forearms reaching around to encircle mine. There should be poetry written about those arms. Hartley explained something about body-checking, but I didn’t quite catch it. Every time he said “body” all I could think about was his.

“Okay?” he finished, as I struggled to take in oxygen. “Now when I beat you, you won’t be able to claim ignorance.” Giving my short ponytail a gentle yank, he withdrew his embrace.

With flushed cheeks, I scooted quickly back to my own end of the couch. “Come on, then,” I said, mustering up a few brain cells. “I’m ready to mow you down.”

“We’ll just see about that,” he chuckled.

The next Friday night, I bumped into Hartley as we were both coming in the front door of McHerrin. “RealStix later?” I asked. Please?

He shook his head. “The hockey team doesn’t start their play season for another week, so Bridger’s having a party. You should come — there are only six stairs. I made him count them for me. Can you do six stairs?”

I considered the question. “I can do them, as long as I don’t mind looking like a drunk giraffe on stilts. Only less graceful.”

He grinned. “That’s me on a good day. I’m going over at eight, and I’ll knock on your door. Bring Dana, and anyone else you feel like.” He went into his room.

“Do you want to go to Bridger’s party tonight?” I asked Dana when she finally came home.

“I would, but I can’t,” she said. “There are two rush parties. Will you help me choose an outfit?”

“Sure,” I said, feeling even better about my decision not to rush a singing group. If you had to sing well and dress well, I was not a good candidate.

We chose a slinky purple sweater for Dana, over jet-black jeans. She looked pretty, but it didn’t look like she was trying too hard. “But what are you wearing?” she asked me.

I only shrugged, glancing down at my Harkness T-shirt. “It’s a kegger in Bridger’s room. Who would dress up for that?”

Dana rolled her eyes at me. “Come on, Corey. The jeans are okay, but you need a cuter top.” She strode into my room and began opening dresser drawers. “How does this one fit you?”

“Well, it’s pink.”

“I can see that. Put it on.”

Humoring her, I threw my Harkness tee on the bed and grabbed the top that Dana held out.

—Hartley—

When I opened the door to the girls’ common room, I could hear voices from behind Corey’s half-open bedroom door.

“There. Can I go now?” Corey asked.

“That’s so much cuter,” Dana gushed. “It hugs you in just the right places. Now, wait. Put on these hoops.”

“Fine,” Corey sighed, “because it’s quicker than arguing with you.”

“And I’m not letting you out of the house without lipstick.”

“God, why?”

That’s when I laughed, and Corey’s door opened all the way. “Gotta go,” she called to Dana.

“Wait!” her roommate cried, fumbling on Corey’s dresser top. “Don’t you own any mascara?”

“Good luck at the rush parties,” Corey called as she crutched toward me in a hurry. “Run,” she mouthed, and I opened the door.

Corey managed the six stairs into Bridger’s room with little difficulty, which was great since I wouldn’t have been any help. But that night, the party itself was the real work. It was exactly what I should have anticipated. Warm beer in plastic cups? Check. Music too loud to talk over? Check. Girls tossing their hair at all of my teammates? Check and check.

Bridger’s room was thick with Harkness Hockey jackets and sweatshirts. The puck bunnies fanned out around them, fawning. I followed Corey’s stare to find a rather drunk young woman grinding up against Bridger. When I caught Corey’s eye, she raised an eyebrow. All I could do was shrug. You might think that there wouldn’t be any puck bunnies at an ambitious school like Harkness. But you’d be wrong. At every home game, there was at least one homemade poster reading: “Future Hockey Wives.” They weren’t even subtle about it.

When Corey and I had battled all the way into the party, Bridger gave us each a warm smile and a warm beer. It was then that I discovered the logistical difficulty of drinking a beer while supporting oneself on crutches. Corey, who was obviously smarter than I was, had wedged herself onto the arm of Bridger’s beat up old sofa. Leaning her crutches up against the wall behind her, she had her hands free.

From her perch, Corey surveyed the room that Bridger and I would have shared if not for my broken leg. Beaumont House was a hundred years old, and the university hadn’t renovated it in a few decades. So the dark wood moldings were scratched, the walls yellowing. But it was still one of the coolest places I’d ever been. The arched windows were hung with real leaded glass, divided into tiny shimmering rectangles. An oaken window seat stretched beneath.

Students perched on its edge, cups in hand, the same way they’d been sitting since the 1920s. I’d always thought that was cool, but tonight it just seemed depressingly stagnant.

Bridger even had one of those felt banners hanging above his not-functional-since-the-1960s fireplace, reading Esse Quam Videri. The university motto was: To Be, Rather Than to Seem. It was a nice sentiment, but the vibe in Bridger’s room that night was more along the lines of: To See, To Be Seen, and To Drink a Lot.

The first beer went down quick. “You need another?” I asked Callahan.

“Not really,” she said with a smile.

And good thing, because I probably couldn’t carry one back to her without spilling it. With my cup in my teeth, I made my way through the crowd to the keg without crushing anyone’s toes with my crutches. Bridger took the cup out of my mouth and refilled it.

“What happened to that octopus I saw hanging on you earlier?” I asked him.

He tipped my cup to avoid too much foam. “Christ. I had to peel her off me. That’s Hank’s little sister.”

“Seriously? I thought she was younger.”

“That’s the problem. She’s sixteen, and just visiting for the weekend. Now she’s reattached herself. To Fairfax, of all people.”

I scanned the scrum of bodies. Sure enough, on the window-seat I spotted a half-lidded girl wrapped around our teammate. And Fairfax looked pretty deep into his cups himself. “Fuck. Where is Hank, anyway?”

“I really don’t know. Haven’t seen him for a while. Probably someone offered him a smoke.” Bridger handed me my cup, and we both watched a drunken Fairfax shove his tongue in the girl’s mouth. “That’s just some kind of wrong,” Bridger muttered. “Do you have your phone?”

“Sure. Hold this.” I gave Bridger my cup, and shot off a quick text to Hank. “911. Put the bong down and come get your sister.”

Bridge and I drank a beer together while watching the door. But Hank didn’t appear. I looked back toward the happy couple. “Dayum. Did she just grab his junk?”

Bridger winced. “We’ll have to stage an intervention. If that was my little sister…” he let the sentence die. “That girl is drunk off her ass.”

It had to be done. “Coming through,” I called, and Bridge and I wove our way towards the window seat. They were still hot and heavy by the time we got over there.

I tapped the girl on the shoulder. “Excuse me, Hank is looking for you.” Their lips made an audible popping sound when they came apart. “Whah?” the girl slurred.

“Your brother,” Bridger said, pulling her off Fairfax. “Right now.”

“Holy shit, Darcy!”

Hank had appeared, towering over us. The dude was almost seven feet tall. He put one giant hand on his sister’s shoulder, and held up his phone with the other. “Thanks, Hartley. I owe you.”

I shrugged it off, but not before Fairfax noticed. After Hank dragged his sister away, he fixed me with a wobbly stare. “So you’re cock-blocking me now?”

Seriously? “No, man. I’m helping you out. You’ve got to throw the little ones back. It’s the law.”

“You are such a bastard, Hartley. Always such a bastard.”

I clenched my fists on instinct.

“Oh, fuck no,” Bridger spat, putting a hand on my chest. “You are not punching Fairfax at my party. No matter how big a douchecanoe he is tonight.”

But my blood was boiling already. That fucking word. Why do people have to use that fucking word?

“Dude, no,” Bridger pled, both his hands on me now. “Let this one go. If you hurt him, he tells Coach…nothing good comes from that. And the guy is plowed, Hartley. He won’t even remember this in the morning.”

As if to prove the point, Fairfax began to sag onto the window seat.

I shook Bridger off me, but I didn’t lunge at Fairfax.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” Bridger added, handing me the crutch I’d dropped.

Right. So this had been fun.

I turned away without another word, heading back towards Corey, and her perch on the sofa arm. The sofa proper was taken up by with two couples engaged in varying stages of foreplay. But the wall beside Corey was empty, and so I maneuvered myself into position to lean upon it. With just a third of a beer left, I could dangle the cup from two fingers and still hang onto my crutches.

“Everything okay?” she asked mildly.

“The leg is killing me tonight,” I mumbled, staring into the last of my beer.

She tugged her bag off her shoulders. Digging into the bottom, her hand emerged with a tiny bottle of Advil. God bless her, she tapped two of these into my palm.

“You are such a babe,” I said, tossing them back into my mouth.

“Uh huh,” she said with an eye roll.

I gave her a wink, and the puck bunny standing in front of us gave Corey a dirty look. She was a fluffy-haired cheerleader type wearing some kind of tight, shiny shirt.

“Stacia really left you high and dry, didn’t she?” the shiny-shirted girl asked me.

“How do you figure?” I shifted my weight to put more of it against the wall. I was fairly miserable, and it was only ten o’clock.

“She’s wandering Paris, and you’re stuck here in sunny Harkness Connecticut. How’s that fair? A whole semester without any action?” She tossed her hair, and the invitation was unmistakable.

I winked, shaking my phone in one hand. “See, that’s what Skype is for.” The girl and her friend dissolved in a fit of giggles, while Corey rolled her eyes again. “The only tricky part is getting the whole thing in the picture.” I held the camera at arm’s length and waist height, as if zooming out on my crotch, and they howled again. I drained my beer, wondering why I came to these things.

A guy we called Kreature pushed through the girls to talk to me, and I was happy for the interruption.

“Hey man. How’s it going?” I asked. “Have you met Callahan’s little sister?”

“Nice to meet you,” Kreature shook Corey’s hand. “Practice was just brutal today, Hartley. Lunging sprints on the track, followed by murder drills on the ice. No scrimmage. It was exhausting and boring at the same time.”

“Giddyup,” I said, crushing my empty cup.

“Trust me, man. It was a day when missing practice meant missing nothing.”

“No kidding?” I said. But privately, I thought, bullshit. I’d have done anything to be at practice today, instead of laid up with a giant cast on my leg. I cut my glance over to Corey’s for half a second, and found her with a knowing smile.

Yeah. She was the only one in the room who understood.

After Kreature went away, Corey put her bag over her shoulders again, and found her crutches. “I’m going to take off,” she said.

“I’ll walk you out,” I volunteered immediately.

She headed for the doorway, and I managed to follow without clubbing anyone with my cast.

“You don’t have to walk me out,” she said as we reached the landing outside Bridger’s door. “Why do the stairs two extra times?”

The pain in my ankle made me grimace. “I’m not, Callahan. I’m just using you as an excuse to sneak away.” With great care, I crutched down the first stair. “Come on, you can say it. That was a totally pointless evening.”

“Was it? Honestly, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Nobody puked on me, and I didn’t do a face plant on the stairs.” Callahan hopped down one stair, and then another. Compared to me, she was practically a gazelle.

“I guess it’s all about expectations,” I muttered, tackling the second stair.

“Everything is,” she agreed quietly.