On the Button (Love On the Podium #3)

Chapter 1

ALAN

Dropping the pages I’d been studying, I pinched the bridge of my nose, rubbing at the tender gouges my heavy glasses had left in the skin. I only needed them for reading, so I rarely wore them.

“You know I could have summarized all of that for you into a nice video,” Michael said, sitting down across from me and handing over a beer.

“The numbers don’t stick unless I see them.”

He sighed, because he knew that about me. “Though I don’t see why it matters. This is such a nothing tournament. Doesn’t count towards any of your stats or standings.”

“I know.” I glanced around the room, as if looking for someone who might overhear me in the privacy of my own living room. “We aren’t working well as a team. Having some of the best curlers doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll win if we can’t work together. I’m just trying to integrate—”

“Let me stop you right there,” Michael said, a hand flat over the spread of papers. “I do know why you decided to play in this little bonspiel. I know what you’re worried about.”

“I want to get to the Olympics, but honestly…?”

“Not with this team.”

It was my turn to sigh and take a long drag from my bottle. “It was a mistake agreeing to the twins.”

“Our bank account was completely empty. We needed the money.”

“It was too high a price.”

Michael remained silent, because he knew what I was talking about.

It wasn’t just that our four-man team didn’t work well together on the ice.

As our alternate, the dynamics didn’t affect Michael as much as they did our Vice-Skip, Carol.

While Carol’s public persona gave a lot of golden retriever energy on camera, his actual vibe was a lot more vizsla.

He thrived on personal connections and closeness.

The Darren twins were not the ones to give him that.

They didn’t listen to me on the ice, they made Carol feel disconnected and anxious, and truthfully, while they could deliver a stone accurately on a perfect ice surface, they didn’t tend to adjust quickly enough to less than ideal conditions.

Neither of them trusted my calls for brooming.

They’d grown up playing in an exclusive club with all the perks and privileges and none of the adversity that made a good curler a great one. Add to that the more volatile twin, Jason, was pissed off he hadn’t been made Skip, and yeah. As a team, we were more than a bit of a hot mess.

“I was hoping a nice, low-stakes tournament might give us that final push to… I don’t know.”

“They would have to be on board with that idea,” Michael pointed out. “And they aren’t. They’re here for the potential podium run, and nothing else.”

“I’d rather give their sponsor the money back and bootstrap our own run than do it with them, if I’m honest.”

“Which explains all this.” He sat back, sipped his beer, and flipped idly through the papers on the table. “You don’t really care what their stats are in terms of whether we can beat them. You’re looking for new players.”

I nodded. “I just wish all the clubs kept stats.” I waved at a small stack of printouts from two of the clubs that would be participating in the same tournament that we had entered. “The guys from Timmins and Hurst are out. They’re all too young. No experience.”

“The Timmins guys have good stats.”

“Not very many of them. And not under pressure. Do they have stamina and grit? Stats don’t show that. Thunder Bay has a couple of potentials. I only need one.”

“You can’t replace one twin and not the other,” Michael warned.

“Oh, I have no intention of it. But I have you for Second, and Carol as Vice. I just need a Lead.”

Michael leaned over the table again. “You have to put Carol back on Lead. It’s what he’s good at.”

“And I will. If I can. He’s a decent Vice, and finding a new First will be a lot more likely than finding someone who can hold down the Vice spot.”

“I just hate that for him. He’s not thriving.”

“I suspect he’ll be a lot more comfortable with just about anyone other than a Darren brother.”

“You’re not wrong. What about the guys from the Sault?”

“No idea. Sault Ste. Marie and Sudbury don’t keep the kind of stats that would help me. Which is why I have a plan.”

Michael sagged. “Tell me.” He sounded more resigned than interested, but I laid it out anyway.

“I looked up their house schedules. Sault Ste. Marie’s club night is Tuesday, and Sudbury’s is Friday. We could go watch them and see how they play. In person.”

“You know how long it takes to drive from the Sault to Sudbury, right?”

“Road trip. We can stop in North Bay and visit your folks. They’ll love that.”

“You need to study a map. North Bay is not remotely between those other two cities.”

“Well, no, but it’s only ninety minutes from Sudbury, so we could stay over at your place. Save some hotel fees.”

He snorted. “Jason and Cameron will love that.”

“They can suck it up. Team bonding. We need this. If they can do it and we don’t want to kill them by the end of it, we might have some hope.”

“I don’t love inflicting them on my parents, but I would love to see them on the farm.” He grinned, and it was downright mean. “Can you imagine?”

I really, really could not imagine the twinky twins in their designer everything picking their way through horse crap, but I, too, liked the idea of it.

“Plus Carol loves it there, and he could use the chance to decompress and commune with the horses.” He downed the end of his beer. “I’ll do it for him.”

He got up, took my empty bottle and his own to the kitchen.

“You’d do anything for him,” I whispered to myself.

Maybe it was not super wonderful of me to use that fact in my favour to get Michael to agree to my plan, but it was a net positive.

It would do Carol some good to relax where he was comfortable, with people he’d already bonded with.

It would be helpful for our strategy to see some of the other teams play in person.

A road trip would give us the necessary bonding experience as a team, or solidify my conviction that we needed someone new.

As predicted, the twins hated the idea, and refused to travel with us in Michael’s old SUV, so we let them do their thing in their uncle’s town car, with their uncle’s chauffeur.

Michael, Carol, and I took my truck since it was newer and would be less impacted by the number of kilometres we were going to put on it.

Between the three of us, the drive from Renfrew to Thunder Bay wasn’t terrible. We had fun, even. Too bad the twins refused to join us.

Strike one against my desired net positive effect.

The Thunder Bay club welcomed us with the kind of fanfare the twins enjoyed, so that was helpful on that front. It distracted the teams from playing their best game, though, so that made it difficult to decide if any of them would be good enough.

“Not if they are distracted by this tiny amount of fuss,” Carol pointed out from where we were sitting in a booth above the sheets to watch. “All of the championships and bonspiels for qualifying are televised. They’d never survive under that kind of pressure.”

If anyone would know, Carol would.

“Technically, none of that matters, because we’re already qualified for the Trials,” I reminded him.

Michael exchanged a look with him, but said nothing.

“What?”

“Watch the game,” Michael said.

A few days later, while Michael and I were relaxing on his parents’ porch under a propane heater, sipping hot chocolate, and Carol was literally communing with the horses, Michael turned his phone to face me.

“Check this out.”

“What is it?” I took the phone and looked at the image. “Who’s this?”

“The Sudbury team. They did this charity thing, teaching kids to curl, having a mini-tournament with them, and raising money for the local clubs for their children’s programs.”

“They sound like real princes,” Jason said, plopping down in the chair next to mine and yanking it forward until he’d blocked me from most of the heat. “It’s fucking frigid out here.”

Cameron took the phone out of my hand to look at the picture of the team, standing behind a couple of little kids who held one of those giant cheques. “They look like princes,” he observed, handing the phone to his twin and going inside the house.

“Shit yeah,” Jason grinned. “I’d do the curly haired one. All that fem energy—begging to get it fucked out of him.”

“You’re a pig,” I said, taking back the phone. The truth was that Jason Darren would pretty much fuck anyone. Not his nicest quality.

I expanded the image to get a better look at the players. I hated to admit I agreed with them. The whole team were not hard to look at, but two of them, the one with curly hair Jason had mentioned, and the shorter blond next to him, were especially pretty.

It was clear, from the way Curly Hair had his arm slung over Blond’s shoulder, and how Blond was gazing at him, ignoring the camera, that they were something to each other. That intrigued me.

It wasn’t like curling was the NHL or anything, but I struggled to think of anyone in the men’s circuit who were openly out. That these two guys so obviously didn’t care who knew who they were in love with was refreshing.

I wished I’d brought my glasses out with me. I glanced up at Michael, who nodded and took his phone back so he could read the article aloud.

“‘Local curling legend Perry Hasting.’” He paused, expanded something and squinted at the screen.

“I think that’s the one with the hair—‘and his team, currently sitting at the top of the Sudbury rankings, had a very successful day, raising…’ blah, blah, blah.

” He skimmed through the article. “Nearly ten K,” he muttered.

“Good for you, guys. Ah, Here. ‘Skip, Perry Hasting, Vice, Robbie Chan, Second, Evan Baily, and First, Shaw Kerry, expected to take the grand prize in the Northern Ontario Recreational Open in two weeks, say they are looking forward to meeting last-minute tournament entry, Olympic hopefuls, Alan Channing, Carol Renard, and the Darren twins, Jason and Cameron in what should prove to be a challenging match-up. “We plan to give those guys a run for the local podium,” Baily said when asked if he thought they could still take top honours. Just because we play in a house league doesn’t mean we don’t have skills.

And the best Skip ever.” With the full, enthusiastic backing of his team, Perry quietly agreed they might have a chance.

“I’m excited to give it try,” he admitted.

“We’ll see.” The tournament is scheduled’ yadda, yadda. ”

Michael grinned. “Cocky fuckers. I guess we will see.”

“We’ll kick their skinny asses,” Jason muttered.

“Maybe.” I was intrigued, though. That they’d taken an entire weekend to curl with a bunch of kids, raised money for their programs, and had the kind of confidence to go on record saying they thought they could be a challenge for us, all made me very interested in meeting them.

“Hey, how long are we stuck here?” Jason asked, pulling me out of my thoughts.

“I’d like to go watch them play on Friday,” I said. “See what we’re up against.”

Jason snorted. “Sure. Sounds fun.” He got up and called into the house for Cameron, asking if he wanted to go into town for the afternoon.

“So much for bonding,” Michael muttered after they drove off.

“Honestly—” I settled more comfortably under my lap blanket. “—I am less and less interested in bonding with those two. I’d rather be struggling to do this with teammates we can respect than for it to be financially easy and have to deal with those two.”

“So can we replace them before the deadline?”

“The deadline only matters if we’re replacing more than one player. We can cut them loose and take on one guy and just not have an alternate.”

Michael nodded. “I guess we’ll see.”

I wished he sounded more convinced, but I wasn’t going to change my mind. If there was any way I could get to the Olympics without those two albatrosses, that’s what I would do.

Pulling out my own phone, I started drafting an email to their uncle, who had been so heavily on board with us taking them on. I’d only been at it a minute before Michael muttered something as he handed me my glasses which he’d had in his breast pocket.

I grinned at him, “Thanks.”

He just shook his head and went back to gazing out over the horse paddock.

Things were going to change. I didn’t send the email right away, but I felt better having drafted it.

Then I started googling. Was it considered stalking if I was only interested in their curling careers?

Seeing them in person two days later threw all my careful only-interested-in-their-curling thoughts out a very high window. Perry Hasting and Evan Baily were both adorable. They were so clearly a couple and I forced myself not to flirt. Or I tried to, but I’m only human, and they were not subtle.

“Oh my god,” Michael grumbled after the introductions, when we were sitting at a table, watching their game. “You like them.”

I shrugged. “What’s not to like?”

He sighed. “You don’t get to assess their skills,” he said. “Carol and I will decide if they’re any good. You are not going to be objective.”

“I can be objective.” I waved when Evan glanced up and saw us watching.

“I can be objective,” Michael sing-songed at me. “Put your moon eyes away and get your game face on. This is serious.”

I couldn’t help a crooked smile. He was right. Of course he was right. This was serious. Very serious. Very seriously adorable young men who I very much hoped were also excellent curlers. Otherwise, I was going to be one sad son-of-a-bitch after tonight.