Chapter 20 #2
He smiled and dislodged my hand, only to lean in and take a long, slow, possessive kiss. “Keep being patient with me too, and I will keep trying to get past everything that makes me so fucking insecure.”
I held him tighter. “Anything you want,” I told him. I meant it. And I would remind him of that as often as he needed to hear it.
It wasn’t often that the league shook things up the way it did today, but the one thing I wasn’t expecting when I got down to the practice arena was a massive press conference. Or a strange man with brown skin, black hair, and a surprisingly sunny smile addressing several sports reporters.
He caught my eye as I was walking in and gave me a nod like I was supposed to know who the fuck he was. But the second I stepped into the locker room, it all became clear.
“Ding dong, the fucking witch is dead!” Rene crowed as I dropped my bag near my stall.
I stared at him, confused. I knew the phrase, but I couldn’t remember what it was from.
“He’s gone! Noah’s fucking gone.”
I sat down hard, my teeth clacking. “How? When?”
Sven dropped next to me and elbowed me, his blue eyes alight. “Last night. They did the goddamn switch in the middle of the night.”
“So man outside talking to reporters…?”
“You recognized him, right?” Sven said.
I felt a bit like an ass when I shook my head, and everyone groaned.
“Hey, give him a break. This is the man who also didn’t know what Home Alone was,” Rene said.
I wrinkled my nose. “Is not embarrassing to not know movie of neglected child and men who try to murder him.”
Rene burst into laughter as he dropped on my lap and patted my cheek.
“It’s okay, bud. That guy out there was Rohan Gupta.
He won three cups with San Jose in the eighties before he took a puck to the head and got a nasty TBI.
He had to retire after he couldn’t hold his stick anymore, but he’s a good dude. A great dude,” he clarified.
I still didn’t know, but it would be easy enough to research. I wasn’t like these other guys. I didn’t grow up idolizing the greats in the NHL. I thought the KHL was my endgame.
Sometimes they made me feel small, even if they didn’t mean to.
“I think you’ll like him,” Antero said softly. “We were at the All Stars game together during his last season. I was a rookie back then and really freaked out. He talked me through the whole thing.”
I softened. That was so much different from Noah, who had entered every room like he was trying to pick a fight with every man in there. Like everything was a personal insult and he had to make you feel less than dirt in order to feel better about himself.
What would it be like from now on?
I felt a little anxious, especially with everything to do with Micah and Hunter.
My brother was still working on trying to pin Hunter down and figure him out, and Micah was holed up in a little cottage in Wellesley near the college—off the beaten path, though no one was going to recognize either of us there.
It had been exactly one week since I’d picked Micah up from Caleb’s. One week since I’d held him and told him I loved him. One week since he’d collapsed in my arms and flayed his soul raw for me.
He loved me, he’d said. And that terrified him.
And I was doing everything in my power to make sure it was going to be okay.
But we had another roadie coming up, and the thought of leaving him behind was scaring the shit out of me. He’d become a fixture at the arena during our game nights over the last week, but he was also back to playing in Salem, which meant long-as-fuck drives every morning and every night.
He had two games off though, which meant he’d be here tonight to watch us play, and then we’d have some kind of short goodbye before I headed out on the road.
I desperately needed to trust that he could take care of himself. He’d been doing it for years, of course. Long before I came along. But now he didn’t need to be on all the time. Now he had me.
“Boys! Straighten the fuck up to meet your new coach!”
I turned my head at the sound of our GM’s voice and tried to keep my heart steady as the door swung open and Rohan walked in.
He was very tall, broad-shouldered, a very bright platinum wedding ring on his hand.
He walked with a cane, an unsteady gait, and I could see the tremor in the fingers that hung at his side.
The left side of his face also drooped just slightly—a mark of what had happened to him. Of the battle he fought and what he’d lost.
But he was smiling as he glanced around at us.
Behind him trailed a couple of reporters, and one of them looked startlingly like him. The other man was tall, thin, wearing leggings and a blue sweater that fell off his right shoulder. I could see purple shimmer on his eyelids, and his long curls were twisted into a bun at the nape of his neck.
He was very, very pretty. And if it weren’t for Micah, I might have introduced myself.
“Don’t mind the press. They won’t be here long,” Rohan said as he walked over and took a seat in the chair the GM had set down. “I just wanted to do a quick get to know you before practice starts since I know this was kind of dropped in your lap.”
Being that he was captain, Alexio made himself the apparent liaison between players and coach, which was fine by me. It took pressure off me to focus on this because I didn’t have room for it.
I wouldn’t. Not until we got this Hunter bullshit taken care of. So I tuned out and thought about Micah until Antero nudged me, and I looked up to see everyone staring at me.
“Sorry. I wasn’t paying attention.”
The room burst into laughter.
“Fuckin’ Maxy,” someone to my right said.
I offered an apologetic grin. “Has been long week. Too much going on.”
Rohan nodded. He didn’t seem upset. “So long as you’ll have your head in the game.”
“I will have whole body in game, don’t worry,” I assured him.
He chuckled and nodded. “Well. Thank you for entertaining me and welcoming my son.” He gestured to the man in the sweater. It made sense. “He’ll want to talk to each of you, but then he’s moving on to the PPHL for a while.”
My heart jumped, and I wanted to ask if he was going to sled or blind hockey. If he was going to Micah’s team or Jonah’s. If he was going to go be all attractive and nice and charming to my boyfriend and—
Well.
Fuck.
This was hard. I wasn’t prone to jealousy, but right now, I wanted to wrap myself around him and hiss at this poor man for my entirely imagined scenario.
Turning away, I started to kit up, and I was most of the way through my leg pads when a body slid beside me on the bench, and I realized it was Rohan’s son.
He was even better-looking up close.
“Ivan, right?”
I bristled, but I also didn’t mind that this man was calling me Ivan. “Yes. Best goalie—except for Ferris, who is rookie. You talk to him?”
“You mean one of like four South Asian players in the league?” the guy asked with a slight sneer. “Yeah, I talked to him. He’s amazing.”
I grinned. “He is also going to be best goalie ever.”
The guy stared at me, then stuck out his hand. “I’m Aravind Gupta. You can call me Ara. I’m with ESPN PPHL Online.”
I frowned. “PPHL? Why you reporting here, then?”
“Because the Glaciers were the first team to openly embrace co-training with the PPHL blind league, and it seems like it’s improved your game over the last two seasons.”
“Yes. They are good guys. Amazing players. Goalies for the Legend and Fury are monsters on ice. Wouldn’t want to play against them, you know?”
He shot me a curious look, then shrugged. “So you’d say you learned something important?”
“Many things. Good plays, but different. Their puck is not the same, and the net is smaller. Also the sticks. But it help me learn to listen, not just watch. And to pay attention to the way the puck is moving and not just track with my eyes.”
He held his phone a little closer to me, and I realized he was recording. “And you don’t feel like they’ve made your game more…difficult? Having to share an arena, having to change things around, or—”
“No.” He blinked at my tone, but I didn’t care. I could tell I was being baited. “What is that saying? There is room for everyone at the table? Anyone who complains is just bad player if he can’t adapt.”
“Does that apply to Zeki? He didn’t say anything today, but there are rumors going around he attempted to kill the integration program before it got started.”
I burst into laughter. I couldn’t help it. “You ask him who his boyfriend is?”
“Uh—”
“Because trust me, if he feel that way before, he changed his mind now.”
“Interesting.”
Alexio was probably going to kill me for that, but he also wasn’t shy about his love for Jonah or his bias when it came to the Legend now that he was their biggest fan.
“Is that all? You don’t seem to appreciate the teams, so if you’re looking to talk shit—”
“Not at all,” Ara said. “I just wanted to get some idea about how it all works. I mean, surely the players aren’t blind blind, right? That wouldn’t be possible to play the way they do if they couldn’t actually see the puck.”
I stared at him for a long beat, then stood up and brushed past him as I reached for my stick and mask. “You have a lot to learn. Maybe turn off mouth and turn on ears.”
And then I left him on the bench looking a little confused, maybe a little irritated, but wearing a small smile all the same.