COMPLETED. A university student. A professional hockey player. They've proved they can be friends. Can they be more?
Although they're both in their early twenties and living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, their lives couldn't be more different. Cami...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Holy shit. It's so fucking cold.
I almost regretted cranking the heat in my Jeep on my ride home after practice. Yeah, it kept me warm for that fifteen minutes, but it just meant that the frigid air that slapped me in the face when I opened my car door shocked my system all over again.
I shoved my hands deep into the pockets of my black sweatpants—still in too much denial to purchase, let alone wear—gloves, and sprinted to the entrance of my apartment complex.
And it wasn't even winter yet. That was the scary thing. What was "winter" back in Pasadena probably didn't even come close to Winnipeg's early days of October. One of the first things I did when I got here was delete Pasadena's weather app. Not knowing that it was precisely thirty degrees Celsius made me miss home a little less.
Funny how I still considered it home even though I can't remember the last time I spent two consecutive months there. When people think of NHL players and where they come from, there's a lot of Canada and Russia. For the longest time, those were probably the biggest ones. But now there's a lot of Americans from you know, American cities that actually get cold, like Boston and Detroit and Lake Placid. Pasadena had to be the least hockey-centric city in the entire country, and no one could have predicted that it would cultivate any talent on skates, let alone a future first-overall draft pick. That was something I was reminded of over and over again. And again. Every single pre- and post-draft interview mentioned my non-traditional background. It was a part of me and I didn't mind the questions, even if I sounded like a broken record answering them.
California was in my blood, and I didn't know if there was a saying that you can take the boy out of California but you can't take the California out of the boy, but there should be. Because I never got used to the cold. Not even when I went to Ann Arbor, Michigan when I was fifteen for the United States National Development Program. Leaving the warmth wasn't my choice but there were literally no other opportunities for a player of my caliber at home. I wasn't being cocky. That was just the truth.
The tension in my hunched shoulders loosened as I stepped inside the apartment complex and was bombarded with a gush of heat. Unfortunately, that tension was replaced by the burn in my calves from practice. With the season about to start, the priority was conditioning and getting our feet under us. Those drills still kick your ass even when you've spent the summer training. I was surrounded by NHL players, though, and that certainly provided a push to give it my all. I wanted to impress. What I did before, what got me here, didn't count in my eyes. The second I knew I deserved to be there was the second my performance fell.
I took the steps two at a time up to the third floor. Taking the elevator was just a way to cheat myself out of a workout.
The door to my apartment wasn't locked, but that fact was a comfort more than a scare. I could hear the familiar sounds of the video game, Landslide, coming from the living room.
"Lawson?" I called out, tossing my unnecessary keys on the small table in the entrance and kicking off my Adidas.
"In here!" he replied, distracted by the army-themed graphics on the screen.
