Chapter 2
I walked along the upper observatory deck of the rink, watching the chaos going on below. It was Friday night, and the Tiny Tot Hockey team was in full swing practicing — and I meant that term loosely.
Very fucking loosely.
Six-year-olds rolled around on the ice, throwing themselves into dog piles and playing tag willy-nilly, ignoring everything the coaches said.
Well, not coaches. Parents.
They were the worst coaches ever. Kids never respected their own parents at that age, and then you gave them skates, sticks, pucks, and friends, and it got even worse.
I leaned my elbows on the metal railing, watching with a grimace. Most of the kids on the ice wouldn’t be back next year. Either they weren’t interested in the sport at all, or their parents would be unwilling to pay hundreds of dollars in fees and gear for them to fuck off.
And of the ones who came back, only half of them would ever actually be any good at the sport.
I clocked a few of those kids skating laps around everyone else at breakneck speed, some held a stick, some managed to pass the puck around as they went. Those were probably the only ones who had a chance to do something on the team.
As I scanned the ice again, I caught a player on one end of the ice and my eyes ended up stuck on the teeny-tiny little kid, dwarfed in a jersey three sizes too big, hanging to the top of their skates as they did circles around the net.
I wasn’t sure why, but there was something about the way they skated that kept me entranced. It was almost as if their feet didn’t touch the ice at all; they just walked above it.
It wasn’t textbook skating at all, but it was—fast.
And clean.
The kid stopped and turned to go in the other direction, aimlessly circling the net with zero direction from the coaches or other parents, in their own world.
But then I caught the name on the back of the jersey, and I cursed myself for not figuring it out on my own at first.
Blake.
As in Frankie Blake.
“Emmie!” A loud, sharp voice called from below me, and I leaned over the rail, looking down at the glass where a fierce woman beat on it, yelling to the tiny kid on the ice being ignored by the grownups. “Go ask for help! Emmie!”
Frankie put her hands on her hips and bowed her head, frustrated as her daughter wasted time on the ice, invisible to the coaches who were too busy either chasing after the good kids or trying to wrangle the hooligans treating practice as playtime.
And Emmie just slipped through the cracks.
Full of potential and natural skill.
Before I could believe what I was doing; I headed down to the locker room, laced up my skates, and made my way out onto the ice. None of the coaches or parents said anything to me, but I felt her eyes as I skated past the glass.
Frankie’s eyes.
I couldn’t pay attention to that though, as I neared her mini-me daughter skating herself dizzily around the net.
“Hey.”
The girl stopped skating with a fast turn and stood tall and still, like she hadn’t been doing circles for the last half hour. “Sup, Saw?”
The little girl calling me by my hockey name took me back, but I guessed it shouldn’t. She was her mother’s daughter, after all. Getting closer, her bright green eyes — identical to her mom's — burned into mine through the dark lens of her helmet.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
With an unimpressed shrug, she looked around. “Same thing I do every practice at this wasteland.”
I looked out over the chaos, trying to see it through her point of view, and almost shuddered at the pointlessness of it.
“What exactly is skating in circles going to do for you?”
With another shrug, she resumed her same path around the net. “What are speed drills going to do for me?” she countered, “I’m a goalie, and we don’t have a goalie coach.”
“You don’t have a single coach at all,” I muttered, and she clapped back with a grunt.
“No shit.”
I could feel her mother’s stare burning holes through my skin, and I glanced back at her over my shoulder. Frankie held her hands up in a what’s going on motion, and I looked back down at her daughter.
“Grab your stick,” I told her, picking up an extra stick off the top of the net and collecting lost pucks from the boards, long ago forgotten by the other players now wrestling on the other side of the ice.
“What for?” Emmie questioned, even as she picked up her stick.
“Goalie drills.” I skated out of the crease and stood waiting for her to get ready. “Defend.”
She dropped into a stance and blocked the first shot, caught the second in her regular hockey glove, and then missed the third. I hadn’t expected her to block any of them, given that she didn’t have any actual goalie gear on.
Standing up out of her crouch, she stared at me, blinking, waiting for me to say something.
“Carter!” I bellowed over the chaos, catching the attention of the head coach for the Tiny Tots league. The ice went silent, and for the first time since the first kid put skates down, everything was still. “Where is her gear?”
The man glanced over at Emmie and then at me, looking dumb as shit. “She’s wearing it.”
“Her goalie gear!” I snapped in frustration. “She’s a goalie!”
The man shrugged half-heartedly. “We don’t need another goalie, we have one,” he said, nodding to a kid on the bottom of a dog pile, screaming for his mommy, before turning away, giving his attention to the kids he deemed worthy. The boys.
I could almost feel Frankie’s mind boiling as I locked eyes with her through the scuffed glass.
This was what she meant when she said her daughter needed her.
She was risking physical pain to protect her daughter from the bullshit she knew Emmie would face.
Not on my watch. No fucking way.
Turning back to the small girl standing in the crease, I put my hands on my hips. “Do you want to play with these kids?”
Emmie looked up at me and blinked. “They’re the only team for my age.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
Again, she blinked and looked out over the group of boys, actively ignoring her like she didn’t matter to them. “No.” She looked back up at me and stood an inch taller. “But I want to beat them.”
Five minutes ago, I couldn’t have told you what Emmie Blake looked like, let alone what she was capable of doing on the ice.
And here I was, ready to commit myself to helping her prove that the people who were supposed to be nurturing her natural-born interest and talent were the ones unworthy — not her.
“Then we practice,” I nodded to her. “Hard. Every Friday.”
Emmie’s face lit up slightly, but she reined it in to give me a hard glare. “You’re going to help me? Why?”
I gnashed my molars to keep from calling her out for being as stubborn as her mother when someone offered help.
“Because you deserve to have someone that will,” I said as the coach blew the whistle, signaling the end of practice.
“And when you’re far better than everyone else, they’ll have no choice but to put you in. ”
“Thanks,” she said almost wistfully before skating off to the locker room.
She wasn’t one to fuss over stuff, apparently, and I kind of liked that. I recognized that.
Instead of heading back into the locker room to take my skates off, I headed to the bench where Frankie paced, waiting for me.
“What happened? What did she say?” She rapid-fired the second my skate touched the rubber mat. “Why do they think it’s okay to treat her that way?”
I leaned back against the boards, eyeing her up. She looked frazzled and tired, but in the same breath, she was still strikingly beautiful. She had always been, even when she was younger.
Age didn’t dampen that at all, even if life tried to wear it out of her.
“I’m going to talk to Rick. Carter doesn’t have what it takes to run that team, and if I can’t get him to realize that, then I’ll coach Emmie myself,” I said, and Frankie stopped pacing suddenly, staring at me like I had four heads.
“Why—”
“I swear to God, woman,” I groaned, holding my hand up and cutting her off. “Just say thank you and feed that kid something with protein for dinner. I’m going to blow her over with my bad attitude if you don’t.”
I wasn’t sure why, but that seemed to catch her off guard and irritate her. Instead of snapping at me like she always did with the guys when she was at the bar, she simply nodded her head curtly. “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“Frankie!” Stew, the crotchety old man who ran the snack bar across the rink, yelled over the PA system for the whole place to hear. “Toby’s treating the nacho cheese machine like a drinking fountain again! Get your damn kid before I sell him to the circus!”
Frankie audibly sighed and picked up her bag. “I have to go.”
Before I could say anything, she walked away toward the snack bar, slinging her arm over Emmie’s shoulders on her way by the locker room, and I stood there, watching.
Why? I couldn’t tell you.
But my feet didn’t move again until I watched her pick up a squirming, cackling little boy with a cheese-wiz smile off the counter and carry him off under her arm like a football toward the exit.
Only then did I tear myself away from the sight of her and her family, and head toward the office I already knew Rick would still be in, pretending to work while he watched hockey on TV.
The Tiny Tots coaching crew was in desperate need of restructuring.
And he was the man to get it done.
“I need your help next Friday night.” I said as I finished sanding a cabinet door.
My best friend looked up from his spot across from me, working on his own door. “What’s her name?” Eli winked and took a drink of beer before going back to sanding. “I mean, it’s been a hot minute since we tag-teamed—”
“Shut up.” I cursed, second-guessing even involving him in the whole thing, but I was up a shit creek and needed help.
“I’m coaching the Tots on Fridays from now on, and I need someone out there with actual fucking skills if I have a hope or a prayer of making something useful out of the time committed. ”