the locker room and sat down on a bench. I put my head between my knees, and I tried to just breathe while he kept a reassuring hand on my shoulder. Familiar. Comforting. This was how he and Kuznetsov always helped me down. It meant everything would be okay. I just needed to concentrate on him and follow his lead, same way I did every time.
Except it wasn’t working. I couldn’t pull myself together. My heart kept beating harder. All the oxygen in the room stayed just beyond my reach. I tried to speak, but ran out of breath before I’d made a sound.
“Kelly. Kelly, come on. Look at me.”
I made myself sit up, and Maddox gripped my shoulders firmly. “Look right at me, and just breathe, man.” He inhaled deeply through his nose, then exhaled through his mouth. “Come on. Just breathe. Breathe like this.” He did it again, and I focused on how he was breathing. “Don’t worry about anything else.”
I concentrated hard on him. On his breathing. On my breathing. On not passing out.
With his help, I’d usually start coming down steadily. But I wasn’t. This was bad. This was real. It was always real, but it was…like real this time.
“C’mon,” he said, the faintest hint of worry in his voice. “Kelly, just breathe. You’re good.”
No. No, I was not good. What the fuck was happening? I tried to focus on breathing. I tried not to let myself think about what had sent me into the spiral in the first place. Just breathing. Breathing in. Breathing out. Breathing in. Breathing out.
“Kelly?”
Damn it, I still couldn’t breathe. The room was spinning.
Fuck. I can’t breathe.
“Kelly? Hey. Look at me.”
I blinked a few times, but my eyes wouldn’t focus. Tried again.
“Kelly? Dude, come on. Look at me.”
Where the fuck was I? What was going on?
“Hey! I need a hand in here!”
“That’s it.” The voice sounded far away. “Just breathe nice and slow.”
What the fuck was over my face? And why was everything cold? The air rushing at my nose and mouth. Whatever I was lying on. Everything was cold, damn it.
“Jason?” I had no idea who that was. “Jason, can you hear me?”
I opened my eyes, but winced away from the bright light in front of them. Cautiously this time, I opened them again.
Above me were three faces. One I immediately recognized as Coach. The second took a few beats, but finally connected as Doc Williams, the team doctor. The third was someone I’d never seen before, but the uniform gave him away.
I closed my eyes again and sighed against the oxygen rushing in through the mask over my face. The paramedics. They’d called the goddamned paramedics.
“His heart rate and blood pressure have leveled out,” a woman said.
She and Doc Williams exchanged a few words. There was some medical jargon in there, but my head was still swimming, so I didn’t catch much of it. The gist seemed to be that I wasn’t having a heart attack and that I was stable. That was good to know.
“I still think we should take him in and monitor him,” the other EMT said. “Just to be absolutely sure.”
My first instinct was to rip off the mask and tell them no way because I had a game tonight. I needed to be getting focused and gearing up.
But I knew the drill. Someone had called 911 or grabbed the on-site EMTs, and there was no way in hell Coach was letting me out on the ice tonight. He and Doc would probably bench me for at least the next couple of games. League policy. Club policy. Liability.
And truth be told, even if they asked my opinion on the subject, I wasn’t going out on the ice tonight. I was exhausted. Every muscle in my body ached. My chest hurt. My head didn’t hurt, so whatever had happened, I hadn’t fallen. My brain was trashed, but not from a concussion. Yay?
I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I wasn’t playing hockey tonight.
“Let’s see if you can sit up.” The male paramedic held my arm and put a hand under my shoulder. With his help and Doc’s, I eased upright. I was still kind of dizzy, and the motion of sitting up took more work than it should have, but the worst was over. I’d sure be wrung out for the rest of the night, though.
With some more help, I got up and sat on a bench. Christ, I was still sweating. I definitely