Chapter 7
TAYLOR
We had precious little time to celebrate tonight’s victory.
There was the usual postgame speech from Coach while we stripped off our gear, and there was some cheering and backslapping.
That was it, though, because the bus was already waiting outside.
We had to shower, shovel some food into our faces, and get our asses on the bus to head to Paine Field, where our plane was waiting.
As we walked out to the bus, though, I noticed a hitch in Vasily’s gait.
I jogged up beside him. “Hey. You okay?”
With a taut smile, he nodded. “Just… getting back into it. After…” He gestured at his knee.
I frowned. “How bad is it?”
He waved a hand, and I wondered if he knew how noticeable it was that he was trying not to limp now. “Just aches. It’ll be fine.”
I winced but didn’t push the issue. Injuries could be like that sometimes.
Even when they were healed enough for someone to play again, they could still hurt and be annoying.
And Vasily had played hard tonight. After Coach had changed up the lines, we’d played a lot more minutes than we’d thought we would—closer to what I usually played every night, but maybe more than what Vasily and his knee had expected.
Not that he’d held back. As we settled on the bus with our teammates, I couldn’t help grinning just thinking about that hat trick of his.
Sometimes when a player came down from the NAPH and mopped the floor with the PHL guys, people just rolled their eyes and dismissed him as a ringer.
And sometimes that was true—there was a reason he was in the NAPH while we were in the PHL.
But we were still pros, and San Francisco had several players who all the analysts expected to see in the NAPH before too much longer.
Their goalie had a long and storied career ahead of him for sure—he was just young and still developing.
If he wasn’t called up for good next season, I’d have been shocked.
In fact, tonight had probably been good for him.
Demoralizing, sure, but he’d faced a sniper of a goal scorer.
Vasily had multiple hundred-point seasons under his belt, and he’d been Vegas’s number one in goals and assists his third season.
Facing someone like him had to be great for a goalie’s development.
It was a taste of what awaited him when he broke through to the NAPH.
He’d handled it well, too. Yes, he’d ultimately let in four goals, three of them from Vasily, but we’d hammered him with pucks.
He’d made over forty stops tonight, most of those in the second and third periods.
In the end, he’d actually made more saves than Hoskins because Everett had a lot more shots on goal than San Francisco.
The loss wasn’t even his fault. He’d been the last line of defense, and the first lines—well, they hadn’t done so hot.
The first period had made them think they had the game in the bag, and they’d done what a lot of us did when a win seemed like a sure thing—they’d taken their foot off the gas.
And the second period turnaround from us hadn’t been the wakeup call it should’ve been.
Or maybe it had caught them all by surprise and they hadn’t been able to recover.
Either way, the skaters had been a far bigger problem than the goalie or the fact that there was a top-tier NAPH player on our side.
If the coaches were good at what they did, they’d see that.
If not…
Well, then they’d either be screaming at the team for falling apart, or telling them “Eh, they had Vasily Abashev—we weren’t going to win anyway.”
For our coaches’ part, they were effusive about our turnaround, but Coach Marks made it clear during his postgame speech that the pressure would be on in first periods from here on out.
“You all pulled it together in the end,” he’d explained, “but we need to focus on playing our game and coming out swinging, not letting ourselves get into a hole we need to dig out of. Especially since we’ll only be able to rely on some of our star power for the next few games.
” He’d paused, looking at each of us in turn.
“Lean too hard on Abashev, and I will bench him just to make you all pull your weight.”
He’d do it, too. Vasily hadn’t seemed pleased by that suggestion—he was as twitchy as any of us when he was on the bench—but he probably understood it. And he probably knew that Coach’s threat would get us all pulling our weight instead of relying on him.
We arrived at the airport not long after.
We usually took commercial flights, but we didn’t have a lot of time between tonight’s game and our next one in Calgary, so the club had chartered us a jet.
That happened maybe once or twice a season in my experience, and we were all happy to enjoy the bougie accommodations while we had them.
Petters scowled a bit as we boarded. I supposed I understood; he’d played three seasons in the NAPH before getting dumped into the PHL.
Flying like this probably felt like a taste of what he’d had and couldn’t, despite his best efforts, get back.
He wasn’t a bad player by any means. He was a solid defenseman who was firmly in our top pair.
But a shoulder injury had slowed him down a couple of seasons ago, and he’d never quite returned to the caliber he’d been before that.
Most of the whispers and articles agreed that his NAPH days were probably over for good.
I shuddered a bit as I took my seat three rows back from Petters.
I couldn’t imagine that—making it to the top, then getting hobbled by an injury and never being able to reach that level again.
That was one of the harsh realities of this sport—shit could happen quickly, and it could permanently alter or even end a career trajectory in the blink of an eye.
I sent up a plea to the hockey gods to spare me something like that. I still had a lot of years left to play hockey—I hoped—and I just prayed like hell that an injury didn’t cut that short.
And speaking of injuries…
Vasily settled in the seat across the aisle from me. He shifted a little, then stretched out his leg, a flicker of a wince passing over his face.
Shit. What if his knee was the beginning of the end? That injury that haunted him and held him back for the rest of his career? Or shortened it? God, that would be criminal.
“You all right?” I asked.
He nodded and managed a tired smile that was a little too tight around the edges. “Probably just need to ice it. And sleep.”
“At least we’re…” I circled my finger in the air to indicate our surroundings. “The buses don’t usually have this much leg room.” I paused. “And neither do the planes, since we usually go commercial.”
“Commercial?” He gave a playfully haughty sniff. “I’ll hire a private jet of my own. Fuck that.”
“Hey, there better be room on that jet for your linemates!”
That earned me a shrug, followed by a wink.
“Yeah, well,” I said, “Commercial, charter—just enjoy flying at all while you’re with us. I think we’re on the bus for the rest of this road trip.”
“Not all of it,” Brown broke in, twisting around in his seat in front of Vasily. “We’re flying from Winnipeg to Toronto.”
“Oh, thank God ,” Nix groaned behind me. “That drive is forever .”
“And the drive from Edmonton to Winnipeg isn’t?” Brown scoffed. “That’s like fifteen hours.”
“It is not. It’s thirteen and a half.”
While my teammates argued about exactly how long we’d be stuck on the bus between Edmonton and Winnipeg, Vasily turned to me. “Don’t you usually fly to Calgary?”
“Pfft. No.” I turned up my nose and added a haughty, “We don’t need to fly when it’s only a twelve-hour drive.”
He chuckled.
“Seriously, though, we’d usually be driving to Calgary, but since we have to play in T-minus”—I checked my phone—“eighteen hours or so, we get to fly this time. On a bougie jet for once, since there aren’t any flights going there this late.”
“Lucky us,” he said.
“You get to fly like this all the time,” Brown said. “Fucking lucky. This is swanky as shit.”
“Seriously,” Hoskins said. “I can’t believe they’re going to put us back in peasant class after this.” He made a melodramatically disgruntled sound. “Goalies are too tall for peasant class!”
“You can always talk to the airline,” Vasily deadpanned. “I think some of them have livestock planes.”
That had all of us howling with laughter—hey, we were fucking tired—and Hoskins muttering a few curses.
Vasily just chuckled, and when I caught his eye…
God, he was so pretty.
Lucky for me, he didn’t hold that eye contact too long. In fact, before we’d even left the gate, he was out cold in his seat. I didn’t blame him. He’d played a ton of minutes tonight. So had I, and I probably wouldn’t be awake much longer than he was.
I always enjoyed the rare charter flight, but I was extra glad we had it tonight.
If Vasily’s knee was bothering him, then having the space and comfort would do him some good.
He was on the taller side like me—around six-two—and even emergency row seats never had enough leg room on a good day.
With a knee that was cranky after playing twenty-plus hard minutes on the ice? He’d have been miserable.
Fortunately, the hockey gods had seen fit to give him a reprieve tonight. Hopefully by the time we boarded our buses later in this road trip, his knee wouldn’t be fussing at him as much. Ditto with that long flight home on a commercial flight.
He saved our bacon tonight, and he’s been through enough.
Is it really too much to ask for his knee to stop giving him grief?