Chapter Ten
Ten
Jaylen
This is bad. This is very bad. I rush over to Lucy, who is out cold, toppled over the team’s bench. She’s bleeding from her head, and I’m responsible. When I find her pulse, I let out a long sigh of relief. I softly call out her name and tap her on the shoulder, trying to wake her up.
What is she doing here anyway? This is not an ideal situation for my first practice on the team. I’m trying to stay under the radar, play well enough that Coach Pete keeps me with the squad and doesn’t demote me to the minors. Instead, I’m standing over my one-night stand, hoping I didn’t kill her.
Immediately I assume everything she told me last night was a lie and she’s an overzealous fan who must have been stalking me for months—why else would she be rinkside right now? How long has she been following me around? Was her hard-to-get attitude last night a cover? Worst-case scenario, she’s not a fan, but a hater who’s trying to sabotage my second chance.
Lucy looks like she did this morning when I sneaked out of the hotel room. Her cheeks are rosy and her eyelids are a smudged smoky gray. Blood trickles down her head, and I remind myself not to jump to conclusions before she regains full consciousness.
Before the athletic trainer can get over to us, she starts moving her limbs and slowly blinks her eyes open. Thank god.
“Motherfucker!” she shouts into the echoey empty arena. Her words carry all the way up into the nosebleed seats. She grabs her head but drops her hand away when she realizes she’s bleeding. She turns to me and gives me a look similar to the one players give when they’re trying to fight you.
“I’m so sorry, Lucy,” I say, helping her up into a seated position.
Coach calls an end to practice and all the guys shuffle off the ice and back to the locker room. I stay with Lucy and help her to her feet. She doesn’t say much while the team trainer and I assist her down the hall to be seen by the team doctor, Dr. Sara Baker. Lucy moans and groans loudly as we make our way to the treatment room. The trainer applies pressure on the wound with gauze and as the once-white cotton soaks bloodred, I feel absolutely terrible for what I’ve done.
“Thanks, JJ. Why don’t you go hit the showers while she gets stitched up,” our trainer suggests.
Judging by Lucy’s glare, it’s probably best that I get out of the way.
When I come back, her forehead is bandaged up and she’s sipping on an electrolyte drink. Her skin is ghostly pale, even for her. The blood dripping down her face might be gone, but her menacing glare is still on full display.
“So, what’s the prognosis, Doc? Is she going to live?” I say, hoping a joke will lighten the mood. It does not. I swear Lucy just snarled at me.
“She has a minor concussion, but she still has all her teeth.” Dr. Baker hands Lucy an ice pack to hold against her head. “Take it easy today. Ice and get lots of rest. I’ll see you back in five days to get those stitches out. Sound good?” Lucy nods and Dr. Baker begins cleaning up her supplies.
Lucy’s eyes hit mine like laser beams. “Do you always have to lie to girls to get them to fuck you?” she says to me without stuttering.
My jaw drops. Damn . She got right to the point.
“I’ll give you two some space,” Dr. Baker says, reading the room. She leaves the mess and quickly makes an exit.
“You took a puck to the head. Your memory might not be the most reliable right now.” She was fine omitting personal details last night. It’s hard to believe hitting her in the face with a puck is the second-worst thing I’ve done to her.
“You said you were only in town for one night. Let me guess—you have a girlfriend?” Lucy points her drink at me like a pirate with a sword. If I get any closer, she’ll likely bonk me on the head with it.
“I don’t have a girlfriend.” I hold my hands up in the air as I defend my innocence, while she forces me to walk the plank.
“That’s exactly what someone hiding a girlfriend would say.” Lucy scratches at the back of her neck.
Her right eye twitches and her nostrils flare. I didn’t want to go into the whole embarrassing story, but I guess I have no choice. I think if I told her to google me, she would toss the bottle at my head.
“I was supposed to be on a flight home this morning, but things changed,” I say, slowly inching closer, careful not to scare her away. “When I ran into you last night, I had just found out that I was cut from the team. I was trying to take my mind off the fact that I didn’t have a job, and you were fun. I got a call this morning from my agent while I was at the airport telling me that a last-minute roster spot opened up. So, here I am.”
“Happy to have been a distraction,” she says, lowering the bottle. “Seems I’m really good at that.” She gestures to her forehead. Then she opens up a granola bar—one I recognize from our players’ lounge—and begins to aggressively chomp her way through it.
Give me a break. I didn’t mean to say it like that. Pressing the pads of my fingertips into my forehead, I squeeze my eyes shut and try to hide, but the guilt finds me like a flare in the night. I can’t keep doing this to myself; this is what got me cut from this team in the first place. I can’t let my emotions distract me from securing a multiyear deal at the end of this season. Lucy was a welcome distraction last night, but I can’t have her rinkside throwing off my game.
“Hold on,” I say, dropping my hand. “What are you doing here? I play for the Rainiers—don’t you have some feminist punk band to front?” My suspicion of her grows. I can’t have her lurking around here trying to mess up my opportunity. I feel terrible for hitting her in the head with a puck, but who stands rinkside without keeping their head on a swivel looking out for rogue deflections?
“Tattoo shop, but good guess. I’m painting a mural outside your locker room,” she says with a mouth full of granola.
I pull another bar out of my pocket and offer it up. She snatches it out of my hand without a thank-you, like a tiny feral animal.
“Great, so you’ll be around the rink a lot.” I pace around the room, silently plotting a strategy to avoid the hallway. I’ll have to walk around the rink and enter from the visiting team’s bench. An inconvenience no doubt, but a potentially necessary step.
“This is not great. What about me right now is screaming great to you?” Her tone is so threatening it’s unmistakably rhetorical.
I know she’s trying to prove a point, but I forgot how cute she looks when she’s angry. She’s making that face she made when we first ran into each other, all squinty eyes, scrunchy noise, and jutted jaw. I cover a smirk by running my hand over my mouth.
Lucy lets out a long sigh. “I think I’m just having a bad 1,461 days,” she says, dropping her interrogation in favor of self-pity and scratching—a lot of scratching. She claws at her arms and legs like she’s trying to escape her body.
I inch closer to her and that’s when I smell it, but I take another bigger inhale to be sure. “Why do you smell like Icy Hot?” She smells like a candy cane, and a bit like my hockey gloves.
“Because I smelled like booze, premarital sex, and sin this morning,” she says in a low voice, through her teeth. “I rubbed some essential oils on my skin and now I can’t stop itching myself. Maybe I’m allergic to assholes.” Her voice is shrill as she claws at her neck.
The closer I get, the more visible the red welts on her blotchy skin appear. I head over to a cupboard and grab the antihistamine medication. I’m no stranger to anaphylactic shock; I once rubbed up against a PB&J on a flight home from a coast-to-coast road trip and thought we were going to have to pull an emergency landing in Kansas.
I want to remind her that she was moaning my praises into the early morning, but I’m not trying to make an enemy, so instead I say, “To me, that sounds like a lovely evening.”
Lucy doesn’t have to like me, but if I’m going to see her around the rink, I hope we can at least be cordial. I don’t need her sabotaging anything for me in the name of revenge. I’m still trying to crack the team’s opening-night lineup.
“It was fine.” Lucy tosses the pills into her mouth and takes a swig of her drink. She hops off the table and presses her ice pack against her forehead as she walks past me.
I follow. “Where are you parked?”
“I rode a scooter here.”
“Those things are so dangerous. I have a rental car out back—I’m giving you a lift.” I need to get verbal confirmation that she isn’t going to spike my water bottle with laxatives.
“I’m not getting in a car with you—you just tried to kill me.” She stomps out of the room and down the hall, headed to her disheveled heap of belongings.
“It was an accident. You’re not supposed to wander around practice anyway. You distracted me.” My voice is louder than I would like, but she is so good at baiting me, and honestly, I like it when she does. I take a deep breath and reel in my emotions. My adrenaline is still hot from practice.
“You shot the puck at my head,” she snaps back. Her face is flared and she squeezes the gel ice pack so tightly it might pop. As guys are leaving the locker room, they walk briskly past us to avoid interrupting our heated debate.
“That’s not my shot. My shot is at least ninety-eight miles per hour. That was a deflection.” Now we’re face-to-face, arguing over a technicality, when I should be begging her not to sue me.
“You’re awfully good at deflecting. You can’t seem to stop,” she says with a smirk. Her color is back. Her cheeks are pink, and the red splotches on her neck and wrists have faded significantly. We both take a step back. I unclench my jaw and her posture relaxes.
“You’re right. I’m sorry. For everything. Obviously, for hitting you in the head with a puck. But I’m sorry if you thought I was lying or only using you as a distraction. I had a fun night, and I meant that.”
“Me too.” She drops the ice pack to her side, so I can see her full face.
She’s so hot, it’s distracting. I can’t even think straight when I look at her, which is bad because if I can’t think straight, how am I going to skate or shoot straight? I need to end whatever this is right here, right now.
“Look, you should know that I’m not at a place in my life right now where I’m looking for a relationship.” I start to give her my typical line about how I can’t get into anything serious, how hockey is my main focus, blah-blah-blah, but she cuts me off.
She tosses her head back and starts laughing hysterically, like the villain in a cartoon. I think she might be severely concussed, and I consider running to grab the doctor to take another look at her.
“Fuck you. I have eight stitches in my head, a colossal UTI brewing between my legs, and my boss so far up my ass that she can see that disgusting, sorry excuse for a granola bar I just ate. Look at me. I am still in last night’s outfit. Spare me the line—I know the line, and if anyone gets to say it right now, it’s me.”
Lucy pivots away from me and speed walks toward the laundry room, which she mistakes as the way out. I discreetly point her to the correct exit, and she rolls her eyes and leaves without saying another word. I think about running after her, but I’ve already caused enough of a scene for one day.
A heavy hand drops on my shoulder. “I see you’ve still got square wheels when it comes to the ladies,” Wells says, chirping me.
“I don’t know what the hell just happened. I have had the weirdest twenty-four hours of my life.” When I stepped on the ice this afternoon, determined to make a lasting impression on my first day back in the NHL, this was definitely not what I had in mind.
“Maybe you need a little weird in your life.”