The Captain’s Comeback

by Maren Quinn

Heat 2 / 5Novella · 10 chapters24,971 words1h 49m read~2h 46m listen

The dry-erase board in the video-review booth above Northwood Civic Arena’s penalty-box corridor tells the truth whether Captain Dex Callahan wants it to or not. And on a Sunday morning in late February, the truth is written in red: his name, circled, with an annotation that cuts straight to the one weakness he has spent three years hiding from everyone, including himself.

Tatum Voss has been watching Dex through a lens all season — cataloguing, color-coding, annotating — and Dex has been ignoring every single request. Until a PR mandate ties six mandatory film sessions to his contract extension and leaves them both with nowhere to go but a very small booth and a very honest reel of footage.

What starts as a power struggle over who controls the story of a three-game scoring drought becomes something neither of them planned for: the slow, bruising realization that contempt and recognition are closer than they look, and that the person who sees you most clearly is the one you have been fighting hardest to dismiss.

Hockey RomanceGrumpy SunshineEnemies To Lovers