​*Burn Off is a witty, heartfelt stand-alone rom com with adult language and steamy, open-door chemistry that will have you rooting for a happily-ever-after. Triggers at bottom of page.

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Chapter 1

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BECKETT CARTER

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The locker room smells like Jenkins’s cologne and sweaty socks.

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The cologne’s the bigger problem.

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Jenkins started wearing it last year—his wife bought it for him. Now he puts it on before every game, and the entire room has to live with it for sixty minutes while he sits at his stall and tapes his stick.

“Jenkins.” Brooks Kingston, two lockers down, flops his head back. “I gotta be honest with you, buddy.”

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“Dude. I’m in a zone.”

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“That shit you spray on could choke a donkey.”

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“Carter.” Jenkins looks at me. “Are you hearing this?”

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“I’m hearing it.” I pull my left skate on because the left one always goes first. I don’t know when that started, but I’m not about to find out what happens if I flip the order.

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“I’m getting attacked,” Jenkins says.

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I sigh. “Buddy. My nose hairs are fucking fried.”

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The room laughs. The room’s been laughing at Jenkins, in some version, for two years, and it never stops being funny. It’s because he commits: like right now. He’s leaning back, arms wide, his half-taped stick across his knees, and he’s doing the can-you-believe-these-guys face.

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I can’t help it; I love this dude.

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Eight years.

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Eight years across a dressing room from Traye Jenkins. We came up together—same college, same draft, now both with the Trout, although he started a year before I did. But we’re reunited, and it’s the best.

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We’ve been through it all. I watched him propose to Sarah by FaceTime from a hotel in Calgary because he couldn’t wait one more day. I’ve watched him cry, after his dad’s funeral, where he sat on the curb in his suit and said, “I don’t know what to do without him, Carter.”

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I sat next to him and didn’t say anything because there wasn’t anything to say. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do without his dad either.

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Here’s what most people don’t know about me: the last time I saw my father was my fifth-grade award ceremony, and he only showed up because I guess my teacher left a voicemail on the emergency contact line. And my mom—well, she did her best, but her best was working double shifts at the bottling plant and having a rotating cast of boyfriends who never learned my name. I got used to packing my own lunches, coming home to empty apartments in Portland, and microwaving stale popcorn for dinner.

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Then at nineteen, the Jenkinses took me in for a billet year.

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I didn’t even know what that meant at first. Jenkins’s mom, a tiny-but-mighty woman who wears cardigans in July and calls everyone “sugar,” makes three kinds of potatoes at Thanksgiving because “Papa Jenkins likes mashed, Traye needs roasted, and Justice can’t live without his hashbrowns.” The first one I spent there, she set a place for me at the table with a glass of sparkling cider and said, “We say grace. If you don’t, listening’s fine.”

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After the billet year, I went back every holiday until it was expected. The first December I wasn’t on the road, Mama Jenkins put up a red felt stocking with “BECKETT” in glitter, wedged between Traye’s and Justice’s.

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The Jenkinses showed me what a family could look like.

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So, yeah. Traye’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a brother, and he knows it; I know it.

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But in eight years, we’ve never said it out loud because that’s not what we do.

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“Carter.” Jenkins, again. “You ready?”

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“Born ready.” I jut my chin at him. “Finish getting taped up.”

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“Done.” He holds up his stick, which is sixty percent taped. “This is art.”

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Across the room, Sawyer McDavid makes a Captain sound: the sigh of a man who’s been managing this dynamic for a year. To his left, defenseman Jonah Holt puts on his shin guards in silence at his stall. Above Holt’s nameplate, taped to the back of the cubby, a photograph: his son Eli, ten years old, in a Trout jersey two sizes too big, holding a fishing pole on the dock at the Trout Reserve. Holt looks up at the photo before every period of every game.

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 “Boys,” McDavid says. “You got five minutes.”

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“Cap, Jenkins smells like Sephora again,” Kingston says.

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“I’m aware.”

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Kingston quirks a brow. “Are we, as a team, going to address this?”

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“I’m not going up against Sarah, Dude.”

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Jenkins barks a laugh, head-back, mouth-open. It’s the laugh of a man who finds the world genuinely funny, and is not embarrassed about it.

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I think, not for the first time, that this is the best room I’ve ever been in.

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Jenkins stands and stretches. He cracks his neck the way he always does—left, right, roll the shoulders, two little hops on the balls of his feet. Then he walks over to my stall and stands in front of me with his stick on his shoulder and his helmet under his arm. “Big game tonight.”

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“Yeah.”

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“Snowhawks have been chirping us all week.”

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“I know.”

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“Eighteen’s been saying things on Instagram.”

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“I know.”

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“You see what he said about your mom?”

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I shrug. “I saw.”

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“You good?” He’s not smiling. This is the other Jenkins, the one nobody outside this room sees, the one who checks on you in a tunnel before a game, who notices when you’re tight in the shoulders, who asks the question quietly enough that you can answer it honestly.

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“I’m good,” I say.

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“Okay. Don’t get cute out there tonight. Get the puck, move the puck, don’t be a hero.”

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“I never try to be a hero.”

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“You’re always trying to be a hero, Carter.”

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“Name one time.”

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“Vancouver. Last March.”

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“That was a hockey play.”

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“That was you trying to be a hero.”

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“We won.”

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“We won despite you, Rookie.”

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“Not a rookie anymore.” I reach up and grab the front of his jersey and pull him down so I can talk into the side of his helmet. “Eighteen’s out for blood.”

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“I know.”

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“I mean it.”

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“I know. I’ll be smart.” He grins and pulls back. He claps me on the shoulder pad, hard, twice—the same two claps as always. “Let’s fucking go, boys.”

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The room yells it back.

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We’re on our feet, and McDavid nods to each guy as they go past. Kingston wacks his stick against the door frame, Jonah mutters something to himself, and Jenkins’s at the front of the line because Jenkins is always at the front of the line. I’m the last one out because I’m always the last one out.

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And then the tunnel, the noise, and the ice.

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* * *

 

The puck is in the corner, and Jenkins is going after it.

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I see it, not as a picture but as a shape, the pattern of where everyone is and where everyone is about to be. Jenkins on the puck. Number eighteen of the Portland Snowhawks coming in hot from his blind side. Me twenty feet away with a winger between us and no clean lane.

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I yell his name like I have five hundred times. “Jenks, heads up!” and Jenkins does the thing he always does, the half-glance over his shoulder.

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That’s the part I’ll think about later. He turned because I told him to.

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Number eighteen doesn’t slow.

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The hit is—

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The hit is wrong. Jenkins’s shoulder’s open, his head’s dropped, and number eighteen comes through him, and there’s a sound I’m going to replay in my head for the rest of my life.

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And Jenkins—he doesn’t fall.

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Another part that’s wrong. Players fall. Players go down, they slide, they scramble, they get up cursing. He doesn’t fall, he drops. There is a difference, and I’ve never in my life had to know it until right now.

He drops like a thing, not a person. His helmet hits the ice, then his head hits inside the helmet, and his body goes one way and his legs go another. Then he’s on the ice, not moving.

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The whistle goes.

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I don’t remember skating. I’m just there. I’m on my knees on the ice next to him, and I’m saying, “Jenks, Jenks, hey, hey buddy, hey, come on,” and his eyes are open, but they’re not looking at anything. They’re aimed at the lights but not looking at them. There’s blood coming from inside his helmet. A dark line coming from his ear, and I—

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“Don’t move him,” somebody says. A linesman. “Carter. Don’t move him. Don’t—”

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“I’m not. I’m not. Jenks. Jenks, buddy!”

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“Carter, back up.”

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“I’m not moving him.”

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“Back up.”

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I can’t even understand what they’re saying. I put my glove on the ice next to his head, not on him, next to him, and I lean down so my face is in his sightline in case he can see, in case somewhere behind those eyes Traye Jenkins is in there, and looking for me.

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And I whisper, “Hey. Hey. I’m right here. You’re okay. You’re okay, buddy, you’re okay.”

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He’s not okay.

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His mouth’s open, and there’s a string of spit at the corner of it. One of his hands is twitching, and I look at the hand, then I look at his face, and I understand that I’m looking at a person who’s not currently inside his body.

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The rink, the lights, the eighteen thousand people, the entire building goes quiet.

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Not actual quiet. The crowd’s making the sound they make when something’s happened, and they don’t know what yet, that low collective hum. But my hearing isn’t right. It tunnels, and the only two sounds are of Jenkins’s breathing, which sounds like it’s something his body’s doing without him, and the sound of my own voice still saying, “You’re okay, you’re okay,” and there’s nothing else.

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The trainers arrive.

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I don’t move. Somebody—McDavid, I think, says, “Carter, let them work,” and he puts a hand on my shoulder. I shake it off, and he puts a hand on my shoulder again, harder. McDavid says it again, “Carter, let them work, buddy, let them in,” and I move. I shuffle backward on my knees on the ice, and I let them in.

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They’re fast, they’re quiet, and that’s the part that scares me most because trainers in a hockey game are loud. They joke with you while they tape you up, and right now, they aren’t making any sound. One of them has a hand on the side of Jenkins’s neck. One of them does something with Jenkins’s mouth. One of them has a radio, the voice saying something about a stretcher. Then there’s another word, a medical word, and I don’t catch it. Later I’ll be grateful and furious that I didn’t catch it.

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I look up.

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The Snowhawks bench is across the ice. Number eighteen is on it, and he’s not looking at us. He’s looking at his stick, turning it in his hands like he doesn’t know what it is.

I want to kill him.

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I want to kill him so much it goes through me like a hot wave from my skates to my scalp, and then it goes out of me again, and what’s left is so much worse. It’s me on my knees, on the ice, six feet from the closest thing I’ve ever had to a brother, watching three strangers in tracksuits try to keep him on this earth.

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The stretcher comes out.

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The crowd makes a worse sound. I hear someone—a woman, somewhere up behind our bench—start to cry, one voice out of twenty thousand, and I know it’s Sarah. I should go to her. I think that’s my job, but I can’t move or think. And Mama Jenkins. Is she watching this?

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They load him.

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They’re so careful with his neck. Two of them on the board, one of them holding his head completely still in two gloved hands. They strap him. They don’t take the helmet off. I learn later this is correct. But right now, I want to scream at them to take the helmet off so he can breathe, so he can hear me, so he can—

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They lift.

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McDavid’s hand is still on the back of my neck, and it’s the only reason I’m still upright.

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“Easy, Cart. Easy.”

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“McDavid, he—”

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“Just breathe.”

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They wheel him toward the tunnel. All players have taken their helmets off. Somebody, somewhere, has started a slow clap, the kind hockey crowds do when a guy is being taken off, the “we see you, we love you, get up” clap, and I can’t with the clap. I can’t because the clap is for a guy who is going to get up.

 

Jenkins’s hand hangs off the side of the stretcher. The glove hand. The strap that holds his glove on has come loose, and his bare wrist shows—a thin umber strip of skin—and his hand just hangs there. I’ve seen that wrist a thousand times. Across a thousand dressing rooms. Lifting a beer. Holding his nephew.

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I won’t see that wrist again if he doesn’t make it.

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I think it before I can stop myself. Then the rest comes in one terrible avalanche of a thought:

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What do I do if he doesn’t make it?

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What do I do without him on the bench next to me? What do I do without him on the plane in the seat across the aisle, the one where he sleeps with his mouth open? What do I do without him at the table on road trips, ordering the chicken sandwich? What do I do without his laugh in the dressing room, the only laugh that’s ever made me feel funny? What do I do without the text he sends me every game day morning, the same text for eight years, let’s fucking go boys, with the same three emojis in the same order? What do I do the first morning I wake up and that text isn’t there?

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Please. Please. Not him. Please not him.

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I’ve never prayed in my life.

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I’m praying.

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The whistle goes again. Play is not resuming, and they’re clearing the ice. McDavid’s at my elbow. He’s helping me up. I’m being walked toward our tunnel. My skates are doing what skates do on rubber matting at the tunnel mouth, making that wrong sound, and I’m thinking about Sarah. Where did she go?

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I don’t know. Right now, I don’t know much.

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I only know that whatever I am, whoever I’ve been, the version of Evan Carter who skated onto this ice tonight is not the one skating off it.