Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
WES
Our coaching schedule picks right back up again the next morning, and I hit the ice ready to coach the hell out of these kids.
I had a rough start last week, letting their hot-headedness and inability to follow my instructions get to me, but I’m determined to take a page out of Jamie’s book and exercise some patience.
Don’t get me wrong, I know how to be patient—when I’m playing. But watching other guys play? Seeing the mistakes they’re making and then watching them make them all over again instead of correcting them based on my advice? It’s maddening.
The kids are listening better today, though.
I’m running some basic passing drills with my forwards, switching up the lines every so often to let them get a feel for their teammates’ style and technique.
For the most part, it’s going okay, but one kid—Davies—hogs the puck no matter what line he’s playing on.
I blow my whistle, tempted to rip my hair out by the roots. Davies has just ignored my instructions again, snapping a weak wrist shot at Killfeather instead of passing back to Shen like he was supposed to.
I call him over, and he skates up to me, red-faced and surly.
From the corner of my eye, I see Jamie watching us carefully, as if he’s assessing my coaching prowess.
Pat’s watching too, from the bench, and I’m gratified to see he’s finally quit scowling at me.
Last night Canning and I had shown up too late at the dining hall to catch the live performance, but luckily, Georgie filmed it on his iPhone.
And trust me, I’m never going to forget the sight of Pat and his four coaches shuffling around and singing the most off-key rendition of “Oops, I Did It Again.”
I don’t think Pat will forget it, either. Or stop hating me for choosing the stakes of that soccer game.
Focusing on Davies, I cross my arms over the front of my Northern Mass hoodie and ask, “What kind of drill are we running?”
“Um…?”
“Passing,” I clarify.
He nods. “Right.”
“Which means you need to pass the puck, kid.”
“But last practice you gave us that whole speech about not hesitating. You said if you have a shot, you take it.” His chin juts out defensively. “I had a shot.”
I mock gasp. “Wait—the puck made it past Killfeather? I must’ve missed that goal.”
His expression goes sheepish now. “Well, naw, I missed, but…”
“But you wanted to score. I get it.” I offer a gentle smile. “Look, I’m with you, kid. There’s no sweeter feeling in the world than watching that lamp light up. But lemme ask you something—how many forwards are usually on the ice?”
“Three…”
“Three,” I confirm. “You’re not playing alone out there. You’ve got your teammates with you, and it’s not so they can skate there and look pretty.”
He cracks a smile.
“Shen had a shot. If you’d passed to him, he would’ve one-timed that baby right in, top left corner. And you would’ve gotten the assist. Instead, you got nothing.”
Davies nods slowly, and a burst of pride goes off inside me. Holy fuck, I’m reaching him. I can see him absorbing the words—my words—and suddenly I understand why Canning has such a hard-on for this coaching thing. It’s…rewarding.
“You need to trust your teammates,” I tell Davies.
But for some reason, that wipes the smile off his face, a dark scowl taking its place.
“What is it?” I ask.
He mumbles something I can’t make out.
“Can’t hear you, kid.”
He meets my eyes. “It’s kinda hard to trust them when I know they want me to fail.”
“That’s not true.” Except even as I voice the protest, I know on some level he’s right. Some players do have the tendency to be cutthroat, to only look out for themselves. It suddenly makes sense why Davies is always looking to be the star—because he thinks that’s what everyone else is doing.
“It is true.” His gaze strays toward the net, where Jamie is talking to Killfeather.
“Especially with Mark. He fuc—frickin’,” he corrects.
“He frickin’ loves watching me screw up.
And then he lists everything I did wrong the next day at breakfast, or dinner, or when I’m trying to fall asleep. He’s all about the mind games.”
I stifle a sigh. “You’re roommates, right?”
“Unfortunately,” he mutters.
“You guys ever hang out outside of practice? Talk about something other than hockey?”
“Not really,” he says with a shrug. “I mean, he talks about his dad sometimes. I don’t think they get along. But that’s pretty much it.”
“You want my advice?”
His expression is earnest as he nods again.
“Try getting to know him. Develop some trust off the ice.” I jerk my head toward Jamie.
“The first day I faced off against Jamie—uh, Coach Canning, I mean—I was a total a-hole. Cocky, full of myself. I taunted him every time I took a shot at goal, did a little victory dance every time I scored. I swear, he wanted to murder me by the time practice was over. He told Coach Pat he hated my guts and suggested they send me back to whatever jackass planet I came from.”
Davies snickers. “But you guys are bros now.”
“Yup. And we were roommates back then, too. We were in our room after that first practice and he just sat there glaring at me for a good hour.”
“So what’d you do?” Davies asks curiously.
“I suggested we play a game of ‘I Never’. Took a while to convince him—he was still pretty annoyed with me—but I wore him down eventually.”
I smile at the memory. We’d passed around some cans of Red Bull I’d stolen from one of the coaches and gotten to know each other by saying the craziest things.
I never pissed my pants at a Bruins game.
I never mooned a bus full of nuns during a school trip to a gum factory. Those were mine, of course.
Jamie’s had been more serious—I’m not an only child.
I don’t want to play for the pros one day.
Yeah, he hadn’t quite mastered the “never” part of the game, but I hadn’t minded.
My thirteen-year-old self was having too much fun getting hopped up on sugar and caffeine.
We stayed awake until four a.m. and could barely get up the next morning.
“After that, we were inseparable,” I say with a chuckle.
Davies chews on his lip. “But Coach Canning is cool. Mark is…kind of a dick.”
I swallow a laugh. “You never know, he might end up being the coolest guy you’ve ever met.”
“I don’t know…”
I give him a good-natured slap on the shoulder.
“Just give him a chance. Or don’t. Do with that advice what you will.
” Then I snap into Coach Wesley mode, blowing my whistle loud enough to make him jump.
“Now get back out there and share the wealth, kid. Hog the puck one more time and I’ll bench you for the rest of the practice. ”
The week goes fast.
When Jamie and I were teenagers, everything took forever. A summer was a lifetime. But I’m already two weeks into my six-week stay in Lake Placid, and I can’t figure out where the time went.
After dinner with the kids on Friday night, Jamie and I have dorm duty. That just means counting heads and yelling “lights out” when ten o’clock comes. Then yelling it again when they fail to follow through.
By eleven it’s totally quiet. Jamie is lying on his bed texting someone. And I don’t like it. Not at all. So I climb onto his body, straddling his ass, my chest to his shoulders. “Hi.”
“Hi,” he says without looking up.
I drop my nose into his hair and take a deep breath of him. He smells like summertime, and I can’t get enough.
“Dude, are you sniffing my head?”
“Just checking to see if you were paying attention.”
“Mhm,” he says, tapping away on his phone.
I settle in a little further, my dick waking up to the fact that I’m this close to Jamie’s ass. Funny how he thinks it’s weird when I sniff his hair, but he’s perfectly fine that I’m about two seconds from dry humping his backside.
Times they are a changin’.
We’ve been going at it every night like puck bunnies in heat this week. Pinch me. It’s like a blowjob relay race around here. And we’ve gotten really good at passing the baton.
But my favorite thing is just to make out while we rub off. Kissing Jamie Canning is mind-blowing. I’m greedy for it, because I know in my gut it won’t last. The summer ends for me in four weeks, and Jamie’s interest in me may be even shorter. So I’ll take all I can get.
It’s one hundred percent honest to say I’ve never been happier. But of course I can’t say it aloud.
Trouble is, it’s harder every day to express any of the fuck-it-all attitude I’m famous for. And I’m not going to look over his shoulder and read the text. That would be an asshole thing to do, right?
I look. The screen says HOLLY.
The next instant I feel a fucking tsunami of jealousy. “You want to go to a movie?” Except I don’t want to go to a movie, and they’ve probably started already. “What’s at the theater this week, anyway?” I ask. As if I care. I’d rather get naked and make out.
“A chick flick and a kids’ movie,” he says. “I checked.”
“Bummer. Blowjobs, then?”
He snickers. But he’s still holding that goddamned phone. I’m not saying a word, though.
Right.
“Whatcha doing?”
“Texting Holly.”
I can’t help it—even the sound of her name on his lips tenses me up. The first and only time I met the girl, she had sex-tousled hair and a dreamy smile on her face. It bothers me that Jamie was responsible for both of those things.
“What’s she up to?” I try to sound casual.
I fail, because he turns his head to roll his eyes at me. “Is that your way of asking if we’re sexting?”
I shrug.