Camp Cuts

He’s fighting to survive junior hockey. She’s fighting to build a future beyond their small town. Falling in love was never supposed to make either dream harder.

Tristan Doyle knows exactly how fast a hockey life can disappear. At eighteen, the gifted defenseman has one shot to prove he belongs with the Lake State Blades, and every rep, every shift, every cut list feels like a verdict. One mistake can send him home in shame. One hesitation can make him forgettable.

Audrey Bellamy has spent her whole life being the dependable one. At Bellamy Street Diner, at home, in every small emergency that lands in her hands, she is the girl who keeps things running. But Audrey wants more than a life built on being useful. She wants North Shore State. She wants the full pre-PT path. She wants the future she’s almost afraid to say out loud.

Then Tristan’s housing falls apart, camp pressure closes in, and the line between “temporary help” and something much more dangerous starts to blur.

What begins as late-night check-ins, stolen moments at the diner, and one unforgettable county-fair night becomes something deeper—something neither of them can dismiss as a distraction.

But dreams this big do not leave much room for softness.

As Tristan fights to stay on the ice, Audrey is forced to choose the harder road for her own future. And the more they matter to each other, the more obvious it becomes: loving someone does not make ambition disappear. It makes the cost of both impossible to ignore.

Camp Cuts is a tender, emotional, slow-burn hockey romance about first love, small-town roots, hard choices, and two ambitious eighteen-year-olds trying to hold on to each other while the lives they want begin pulling them forward.

Welcome to Blue Line Hearts—where the love story starts in junior hockey and follows one couple all the way to the big leagues.

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