Chapter Twelve The Championship Run #3
The words echoed throughout the rink, pounding off the walls and filling the cold space.
Everyone stared at them—the other team, the refs, the few people gathered in the bleachers.
Instead of making him feel silly or embarrassed about their team’s antics, Nick felt…
powerful? Or was it empowered? He felt confident and relaxed in a way he rarely did before games.
They should do that more often.
If it works, he amended. If we lose… well, worry about that if we need to.
*
Crickets chirped in the grass around them. They were at a far end of the parking lot, shielded from view by Brady’s Jeep and the low-hanging branches of a tree. They’d taken refuge here after their game to decompress; an hour later, Nick still felt the vestiges of adrenaline buzzing through him.
Or it could just be Brady’s presence, keying him up more than was fair.
“It’s a one-to-one series,” Nick mumbled over his beer.
It was actually Brady’s beer, the last from a six-pack Nick had gifted him for scoring last game.
Gail and GG had joined them for a while, but both had people waiting for them at home, so they’d left after a beer.
Now it was just Nick and Brady, sitting a little too close together on the curb.
And no, Nick wasn’t thinking about the implications of Gail going home to someone.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want good things for Terry. He did, and Terry definitely deserved them. It was more he was a little too buzzed right now to be generous to his cousin instead of jealous of him.
“Basically, the previous two games meant nothing,” Nick went on as he brushed a firefly off his leg. “Waste of time.”
Brady rolled his eyes and snatched back his beer. “We played a good first game and they barely won, so yeah, in that sense, a waste of time. But we’ve for sure got the momentum going forward. We know it, they know it, and now we can embarrass the fuck out of them before we close it out.”
Nick leaned forward so he could invade Brady’s space. Bad idea, what with the beer and all the pretty that was Brady’s face, but he did it anyway.
“You’re gonna jinx us, you butt,” he said.
Brady snorted. “Yeah, okay. If we lose, I’m willing to take the blame for jinxing it.”
“I’m holding you to that. I’m gonna tell Gail that you did it, and she’ll never forgive you.”
“Probably not. She’s still pissed about me dropping my coverage against the Pumpkins. She pretends she’s not, but she keeps yelling at me to ‘play my man!’ and I know she’s about five seconds from hitting me with her stick.”
Nick nodded grimly. “She’s very angry for someone so small.”
“She’s actually calmed down a bit since she started dating your cousin.”
Nick made a face.
“What, you don’t like them together?” Brady teased.
He couldn’t exactly tell Brady about the jealousy thing, considering that 95% of the reason Nick had anything to be jealous about was that he and Brady had never happened.
If things had gone differently, maybe he could have talked about it.
If he didn’t still have this stupidly inconvenient crush on Brady, if the whole mess were out of his system, maybe then…
Nothing was out of his system. His system was damn full.
“Just getting used to it,” he grumbled, and drowned out his annoyance with a long squirt from his water bottle.
“They’re annoyingly cute together. It’s weird.
When Terry asked me to set him up with Gail months ago, I kinda…
didn’t think they’d click? Now I feel guilty I didn’t get them together earlier. ”
Brady nodded. “If I’d seen them separately, I don’t know that I would’ve pictured them together, so I get that. No need to feel guilty; they got there on their own time. For all you know, this was better, more organic or whatever.”
“I am going to ignore the fact that you said ‘organic’ to describe my cousin’s relationship to your D partner.”
“…you’re making this sound like some weird soap opera.”
“Going to ignore that, too.” Nick stood and stretched, his back cracking and his muscles protesting the sudden movement. He probably shouldn’t have lingered in the dark, abandoned parking lot with the cute boy for so long.
He always was a sucker for cute boys, especially cute boys that liked to talk about hockey.
“I should head home,” he said. His back would kill him if he didn’t. When had he gotten so old?
Brady followed suit and stood up. He dumped the last bit of beer onto the grass and tossed the can in a nearby trash bin.
“Yeah, same. You good to drive?”
Nick made himself actually check if he was. “Yeah, I’m good. You?”
“Yeah.”
In a true sign of his sobriety, Nick gave an awkward wave and walked off to his car (thankfully on the opposite side of the lot from Brady’s).
More and more, he felt himself learning to resist the draw of Brady’s gaze.
The spark was still there, the desire, the possibility of falling completely head over heels for the guy, but Nick was able to rein it in.
Mostly.
To be fair, it’d taken him months to get this deep, it would probably take months to get back out of it again.
Proud of himself, he ignored the pang in his chest.
*
“I will fucking smack you, you snow my goalie again,” Little Douche snapped and crowded into Nick’s face.
Nick gave him an obvious once over. “I got a cage on, and you don’t even have a visor. You really wanna start shit when you wouldn’t even be able to hit me?”
Little Douche’s mouth dropped, and he took a step back, suddenly aware of how exposed he was if it came to a fight.
“You don’t hit people,” he scoffed, his bravado returning with each word. “Last I heard, you get hit.”
“Yeah,” Nick admitted, “and what happened to the guy that did that, huh?”
“Back it up!” the ref said, preventing them from escalating a completely pointless pissing match. Nick wouldn’t get into an actual fistfight, and despite the implications, he wouldn’t let Brady (or anyone else) get into one on his behalf.
Still, it was fun making Little Douche squirm.
If he was too busy looking over his shoulder, he’d fuck up on the ice, and Nick could take advantage.
As much as he enjoyed watching Little Douche scamper off to his side of the ice, taunting him wasn’t nearly as gratifying as embarrassing him on the scoreboard would be.
“I’m gonna need another hat trick,” Nick later said to Brady on the bench. “You gonna send me some passes to make that happen?”
“I realize that of everyone on this team, I care the least about superstitions and jinxing people, but that’s bold talk for someone who’s had half a shift and spent that time nearly getting into a fight.”
His heart skipped a beat. Brady’d seen that? “I did not almost get into a fight.”
“Sure. So I assume Little Dube was complimenting your skating?”
“Something like that, yeah.” Nick gave the crooked smile that had gotten him out of trouble once or twice with his mom, his grandma, and literally no one else ever.
Brady rolled his eyes but didn’t comment.
Huh. Maybe it worked on his mom, his grandma, and Brady Derek Jensen. Good to know.
The fondness receded as a whistle blew, and his attention was drawn back to the ice. It was telling that he didn’t notice Brady disappear for a shift until well after he’d returned. Even then, he only noticed because Brady was farther down from him and yelling at Guy to hold the puck.
Nick was about ten times more engaged in the game than he usually was.
Normally, he would watch other people’s shifts, he’d yell out tips or encouragement, but he’d also talk on the bench or fix his tape or adjust his skates.
The game wasn’t always his priority, not unless he thought he needed to be ready to jump onto the ice.
Today he was a hundred percent tuned in. He watched every play. He kept tabs on the refs, the goalies, and even the other bench. Any conversation he had was about the game, the next shift, the last shift, win win win.
It was a feeling he remembered from high school.
In the middle of a race, it was just him and the asphalt under his feet.
One breath in, carefully measured on the exhale back out.
The burn of his muscles, every bump and groove on the path, his heart pounding in his ears and drowning out any sound beyond his even stride carrying him forward.
That was a little purer and simpler than hockey, where there were other players and dynamic situations that required and rewarded quick thinking. Still, it was the same level of attunement, grown to encompass the whole rink. He breathed in the game, held it in, and breathed it out.
His play was better than usual. He could feel good things coming, goals and assists and penalties going their way. In a zero-zero game, anything, anyone, could tilt the ice, and Nick was determined to be that person.
“GG,” he said, pulling him aside before a faceoff. The ref looked annoyed at the interruption, but it was a running clock and not her team. She’d let them squander a few more seconds without complaint.
“Yeah?”
“Let them win it.”
GG narrowed his eyes. “Why would I let them win a draw in their own zone? They’ll just clear it—”
“I’m going to go for it. I’ll pick it up before it gets back to their D, then I’ll shoot.”
“Or you could line up behind me and shoot when I win it to you.”
“Hurry up, boys,” the ref called. She tossed the puck up and down. “Don’t got all night, and I’d personally like this one done before OT.”
“Just one sec,” Nick promised, then whispered to GG, “trust me. This is a speed play, and I can do it.”
GG grumbled all the way to the faceoff dot, but he put his game face on as he squared up with the other team.
It was beautifully, hilariously wrong to watch GG stand there, staring, as the puck dropped and he didn’t move a muscle to stop the Mother Pucker’s overeager center scooping it straight behind him…