Chapter 14
PERRY
Was it crazy of me to wish Channing hadn’t picked tonight to show up? My face still hurt. I was tired. I wanted a night alone with my boyfriend, a good, long sleep, then time to really talk this through in plain English, no subtext, before we faced him again.
Too bad for me, I guess.
We waited for Channing to get out of his truck and come over.
I took a step back when all the doors of his truck opened, and Carol and Michael joined him on the pavement. Carol’s hair was back in it’s braid, but Michael and Channing had released theirs from the restricting elastics.
“Glad we caught you,” Channing said.
“Why?”
“Can we come up and talk?”
“No, I don’t—it’s too many people. Too late.” It was an old, panic response, probably brought on by having recently been punched in the face, but I couldn’t make myself take it back.
“Okay.” Channing—Alan—held up a hand. “That’s fair. But we wanted to talk to you both before we had to leave town and since I don’t know what your jobs are, I wasn’t sure we would be able to catch you in the morning.”
“I’m a barista. He’s a mechanical engineer,” Evan said.
“Ev.”
“Well, you are.”
“I’m a draftsman. I draw the things the engineers… engineer. Anyway, why? What do you want?”
“It probably didn’t escape your notice that we’re short two team members now,” Alan said.
“You don’t say.” I crossed my arms over my chest.
Alan pressed his lips together to stop a smile. “Yes, well.” He turned to Evan. “I couldn’t help but notice that you delivered a very nearly perfect game. Very high nineties, at least.”
“We don’t keep those kinds of stats,” Evan said. He puffed up a bit. “But yeah. I had a good day.”
I snorted. By good, he meant phenomenal. Alan wasn’t wrong about his stats. We didn’t officially keep them but I had a rough approximation for all my guys in my head and Evan had done really well today. All weekend, in fact.
“You curl at a world standard, Evan. You must know that.”
Evan shifted from foot to foot but said nothing.
“You’re only one man down,” I pointed out, waving at Carol and Michael.
“And we’re a package deal,” Evan said, throwing an arm around me. “You don’t get one without the other.”
“Ev,” I said quietly, patting his hand. “Take a breath, babe.” Because I wasn’t going to let him turn down what I thought Channing was about to offer him on account of me.
“Don’t panic,” Alan said, calm as ever. “I wouldn’t dream of anything else.” He turned to peer at me. “You know your stats were almost as high as his, I’m sure.”
They were. But he didn’t need me to tell him that, clearly. I stared back at him.
“For fuck sakes, Al.” Carol Renard stepped up beside him. “We want you both. To join our team, évidemment oui?”
“Oui?” Evan asked with a slight squeak. “Is that a thing? You can replace two players?”
“If we do it now, make it official, and win a lot of shit between now and the Trials, yes. We can,” Alan assured us. “But the wire is literally a few days away for you to be registered as part of our team for qualifying as a Wild Card.”
“What about you?” I asked, looking past Alan to Michael. “It’s your spot he’s giving away.”
“I’m just their alternate.”
“But you could step up.”
He shook his head. “I’m not physically up for that. Just playing the two games this weekend made me sure of something I’ve been trying to avoid thinking about. My back won’t take the kind of schedule required. I’m stepping down to coach. So I’ll still be part of the team, just not a player.”
“So it would be Alan skipping,” Carol said, “Perry, you as Vice, Evan, you’d keep your second slot, and I would be First.”
“Why would you give up your Vice spot?”
“The only reason I was Vice was because neither of the twins had the temperament for it. We were already an unbalanced team. This is going to be a perfect fit.”
“You hope.”
“Of course we hope.” He smiled. “It’s a lot to throw at you, I know. And we wouldn’t have chased you down to your parking lot if time wasn’t of the essence.”
“What about the alternate?” Evan asked.
“Well, we were hoping to speak with your Vice, Robbie, about that.”
“You want three new players? The Association will never go for that.”
“Right now many of the teams are shuffling. We won’t be the only ones this close to the deadline to announce our lineup, and we won’t be the only ones with this big a change.”
“If we say no, you’re screwed,” I pointed out.
Alan studied me. “If you say no, we wait four more years.”
I glanced over his shoulder to Carol and Michael. “You guys are awfully calm. Isn’t this a huge gamble?”
Michael shrugged. “We were”—he made air quotes—“encouraged to take the twins on.”
“By who, doesn’t matter,” Alan said, a warning tone in his voice.
“Suppose not,” Michael agreed. “But when that happened, Alan predicted they would crash and burn before the qualifiers even got started. He was right.”
“It was pretty close,” I said.
“The point is, he was right. He picked our trainer, who got me off a walker after my accident and back onto the ice, and a coach who managed the twins as well as anyone could have. If he wants to pick the new team members, I’m willing to go with his recommendation because he hasn’t been wrong yet.”
“What if it’s personal?” Evan asked.
“I’m sorry?” Michael blinked at him.
“What if his interest in us is as much personal as it is curling?”
“Ev, really?” I asked.
Evan just bounced. “I’m not going to hide anything. Whatever happens between the three of us, personal, team-wise, or whatever, you know me. I don’t play pretend. I’m literally incapable.”
I sighed. “He’s not wrong.” I looked to Alan again. “You have to know that about him at the start. And like he said, we’re a package deal.”
Alan nodded. “This isn’t a surprise.” He looked from me to Carol to Michael. “I can’t tell you now how that plays out,” he said to them.
“Don’t go licking each other on the sheets, and I don’t see a problem,” Michael said.
“Between the sheets, do whatever you want,” Carol agreed, waving a hand at us all. “The game is the game. Your game is your business.”
“So.” Alan swivelled back to us. “That’s you with the hammer, then, looks like.”
“I need to think about it.” I glanced at Evan, whose bouncing was too pronounced for anyone to miss. “And it’s been a long day so we’d like to go home now.”
“Yes. Of course.” He pulled a small square of paper from his pocket. “My contact information. Please ask Robbie to call me? I would like it very much if he could be part of the package.”
I raised an eyebrow at him.
“The team package,” he clarified.
“I’ll talk to him.”
“Thank you.”
“Come on,” Carol said. “Let them go home, Alan. Allons-y.”
We watched, silent, hand in hand, as they got back into the truck and drove away.
“What just happened?” Evan asked.
“I think we might have just become Olympic hopefuls.”
“If we say yes.”
“If we say yes.”
“And the other thing?”
“I guess we’ll see.”
Evan sighed and kissed my knuckles. “I guess we will. Let’s go.” He tugged me to get me moving towards the building, and ultimately, our bed.