Pucking Sweet

Lukas, known as “Novy” to his teammates, is one of the narrators and protagonists of Pucking Sweet. He is a defensive lineman for the Jacksonville Rays and a longtime professional hockey player who has played with Colton in the past.

Lukas’s narrative arc focuses primarily on his struggle to allow emotional intimacy. Though he considers Colton his closest friend from the early pages of the novel, he keeps this friendship distant. When Lukas tells Colton that he has listed him as his emergency contact, for example, Colton considers this the first moment of “true friendship” between them, even though they have known one another for 10 years. Over the course of the novel, Lukas reveals that his emotional reticence comes from being abandoned by his mother and subsequently raised by an emotionally and physically abusive grandfather. As a result, he spent the latter years of his adolescence unhoused; he sees hockey both as the thing that saved him from greater trouble and as the only thing at which he has ever felt accomplished. He has many short-term sexual relationships, which he excuses as being simpler, but over time, he comes to realize that he believes that because he thinks he is not worthy of any longer-term form of love or intimacy. Lukas particularly fears that he is poorly equipped for fatherhood, as he has had exclusively bad experiences with parental figures.

Lukas’s intense attraction to Poppy causes him to question whether these emotional walls are serving him. He struggles, particularly in the middle third of the novel, with his desire to be closer to Poppy and Colton and his fear that doing so will lead to inevitable pain for all of them. However, he eventually realizes that the majority of the emotional pain he suffers comes from his efforts to keep his partners at an emotional distance. Gradually, with Colton’s help, Lukas embraces the idea that the fear of emotional intimacy may be causing greater pain than the risk of letting someone close to him. Though he continues to struggle with his self-worth, he begins to see his partners’ love not as an aberration but as an indication that he is worthy of love.

At the end of the novel, Lukas is the captain of the Rays, which suggests that he has developed the interpersonal skills needed to lead the team and that he has bonded with his other teammates in the intervening years between the main timeline of the novel and the Epilogue. He has also embraced fatherhood, enjoys playing with his children, and is stable and happy in his relationships with Poppy and Colton.

Colton is one of the narrators and protagonists of Pucking Sweet. He is a defensive lineman for the Jacksonville Rays. Colton is one of only a few Black hockey players in the league, something that he considers periodically in the novel when evaluating the way he is perceived by the media. More central to his self-image is his childhood experience with heart failure, which led him to have numerous surgeries. He sees his ability to become a professional hockey player despite the health concerns as a defining characteristic, so when his heart begins to suffer from the exertion of a professional sports career, it challenges Colton’s identity. His growing relationship with Lukas and Poppy helps mitigate the feeling that losing hockey will mean losing the most important thing in his life; he increasingly feels that his family is more important to him than his hockey career.

Colton is the most confident of the three protagonists when it comes to their relationship; he has had a long romantic interest in Poppy, so when he decides to pursue her, he intends to build a relationship that lasts. He is also the one to most clearly pursue a romantic relationship with Lukas after the two have decided to date Poppy simultaneously. Colton is intensely loyal, a quality he recognizes and values in himself. Lukas sometimes needs to caution Colton against growing too intense in his affection too quickly—as this overwhelms Poppy early in their relationship—but this loyalty and commitment is overall framed as a positive quality. Despite this conviction, Colton requires the most convincing to have a relationship between the three of them. He initially struggles with jealousy and possessiveness, wanting to keep Poppy from having any interaction with Lukas. Eventually, however, he overcomes this jealousy enough to enjoy the relationship with both partners and even finds short-term jealousy an erotic force that he explores while observing sex between Poppy and Lukas.

At the novel’s climax, Colton suffers dysrhythmia that necessitates getting a pacemaker, something that abruptly ends his professional hockey career. He considers the trade of his career worth the opportunity to have many more years with his partners and their children. At the end of the novel, Colton is still healthy and has been working for several years as a sports commentator for the Rays, which permits him to remain close to the sport without risking his health.