Chapter Eight #2
At first, it felt like a regular game. Jax won the face-off. Vanderbilt lost the puck to Denisov, a hulking giant of a winger. Breezy got it away from the Firecrackers, and Luca sauced it to Tom, who passed to Jax, but Henderson blocked the shot.
“I hate when goalies wear number one,” Luca muttered to Breezy as they headed for the bench. “It seems so conceited.”
The second line took to the ice. Mooney’s speed had improved since last season; he must have been working at it this summer. He and Howie had another scoring chance, but one of Chicago’s D-men blocked the shot, and when Howie tried for the rebound, the goalie blocked it again.
The Sea Lions’ third line was a bit of a mess.
Fedorov had potential, but he was new on the smaller NHL ice, an odd adjustment Luca had to make last year as well.
They gave up the puck as Nieminen headed for the bench, leaving Hayes to defend alone.
But Dmitriyev was at least as good as Chicago’s backup goalie.
In the first intermission, with the score tied at zero, Lindy stalked through the locker room, ignoring all the half-undressed chests and Hayes’s wince of overblown sensitivity as a trainer held a bag of ice on the shoulder he’d smacked into the boards when the Firecrackers tried to get past him.
“Good hustle on the first and second lines,” she told them. “Keep up the shots on goal. Henderson won’t get lucky forever. Third line, I want less sloppy play. You’re giving them chances they don’t need.”
After a brief pause for Dmitriyev to translate, Fedorov bowed his head and said, “Yes, Coach. Sorry, Coach.”
Lindy patted him on the shoulder. “Good kid. Remember, it’s game one. You have eighty-one more to prove yourself. Have a little fun out there.”
The second period did start out fun. Tom caught a pass from Vanderbilt at an improbable angle and sent it sailing top shelf over the goalie’s shoulder, bypassing three Firecrackers and two Sea Lions in the way.
Their bench was jubilant, sticks tapping all around, and even Luca began to feel the vague stirring of team spirit.
Twenty seconds later, the second line replaced Tom, Jax, and Vanderbilt. Luca’s thighs burned. With the game barely half over, he had already racked up twelve minutes of ice time. He was gasping for the right moment to head for the bench when it happened.
Just over the line to the offensive side, Howie had the puck on a breakaway when Denisov crushed him into the boards so hard his skates lifted up off the ice, sending him sprawling onto his stomach.
In an instant, Breezy and Luca were beside him.
Breezy, the taller, stronger of the two of them, skated toward Denisov menacingly.
Luca spat out his mouthguard. “Can you stand?”
Howie groaned.
Luca got down to his knees. “Howie?”
“’M good,” Howie managed. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, then onto his hands.
“Did you hit your head?”
Howie pulled off his helmet and tried to push his hair out of his face before realizing he was still wearing gloves. “No, shit, I’m fine.”
He yanked his gloves off and rubbed at his face before getting to his feet, his movements slow and clumsy.
By then a referee and two linesmen had skated over to them.
The referee had his whistle in his mouth and a hand on Denisov’s chest, pushing him away from Breezy, who shouted something but hadn’t dropped his gloves.
A good call on his part; Breezy rarely fought, and Denisov, being both taller and notorious for his perpetual bad temper, would be a poor choice to start with.
Luca gathered up Howie’s gloves and handed them to him as the linesmen checked to see if he had sustained an injury to his face or neck. With nothing evident, Howie skated off toward the bench. He favored his left side. Maybe his face and neck weren’t injured, but something was.
The referee called two minutes for boarding on Denisov.
“Two minutes!” Breezy cried. “Two minutes. Are you kidding? That wasn’t a minor penalty! He could have—”
The referee blew his whistle in Breezy’s face.
“Come on,” Luca muttered. “Don’t get yourself an unsportsmanlike.”
“Okay, but did you see—”
“Yes, Breezy, I saw.” He dragged Breezy to the bench by the elbow in time for the first power play unit to hop the boards, and shit, he was on PP1. Luca stayed on the ice with Jax, Tom, Vanderbilt, and—in the absence of Howie—Mooney as a fourth forward.
“You good?” Jax asked, and Luca shot him a nod as they lined up for the face-off.
Jax was a face-off specialist at the best of times, but now, after his boyfriend’s favorite rookie had gotten hurt?
His stubbornness wouldn’t allow him to lose.
There might as well have been no one on the ice besides Tom and Jax as they ping-ponged the puck back and forth until one of them had a clear shot on goal.
It only took forty seconds for Jax to score, pushing them to 2–0.
The second power play unit didn’t score, but a minute after returning to five-on-five, Hayes managed a picture-perfect assist to Fedorov, who slotted the puck in under the goalie’s pads.
In the second intermission, the locker room was jubilant. They were up three–nil, and Fedorov had his first NHL goal in his first game, which meant he got the aux cable. Even incomprehensible Russian techno counted as pump-up music when the team was already pumped up.
Howie came limping out of the trainer’s office to a round of applause.
He’d smacked into the boards with his hip and shoulder, he said, but apart from some bruising, he’d be fine.
Judging by the sheen in his eye, he’d been granted a judicious application of the good painkillers, the kind the trainers saved for rougher injuries.
Lindy sent them out for the third with a warning. “They’ll be playing desperate, boys. No one wants to be shown up at home, least of all on opening night.”
Her warning proved correct. It took all of three minutes before Denisov caught a lucky bounce from Nieminen deflecting a shot and sniped a goal in the five-hole.
The Sea Lions were still up by two, but from the level of intensity on the bench, Chicago might as well have equalized.
Howie’s line, who were on the ice when Denisov scored, took it especially hard and pushed their luck, grinding out the puck in tough corners and board battles.
They got chances, but Goalie Number One blocked them every time, intent on not worsening his performance for the night.
“I hope Howie isn’t straining his hip too much,” Tom muttered, eyes on the action.
“He’s not you.” Jax tapped his stick against Tom’s.
If Jax meant to say Howie was in any way more sensible than Tom, Luca thought he would be severely disappointed.
With ten minutes left on the clock, Chicago got sloppy.
Their lacking depth meant the first and second lines, the only ones to generate any real chances, spent too much time in play and ran out of steam long before the end of the game.
Dmitriyev blocked three shots from Denisov in quick succession and shouted something at him in Russian, which had Fedorov snickering on the bench.
It would probably have been an unsportsmanlike call if the refs had spoken Russian.
Luca ought to remember that trick, although few others in the league spoke Italian, making it far less funny.
A messy shift change meant a too-many-men penalty for Chicago.
Luca winced. Now, they’d embarrassed themselves on top of what was shaping up to be a bad game for them anyway.
The fans had little mercy for how bad they must feel already, booing and jeering.
Luca hopped the boards for the power play, accompanied by Howie this time.
As soon as they reached the face-off circle, it became clear Denisov hadn’t given up the hunt on Howie.
By rights, he shouldn’t even have been on the Firecrackers’ penalty kill as he wasn’t much of a two-way player.
Had he joined it for this shift purely to settle the score with Howie?
It certainly seemed so; whenever the ref’s back was turned, Denisov crowded Howie, menace clear in every inch of his punchable smirk.
What had Howie done to this man? Denisov had a reputation as a hard, physical player, but not as a bully.
The entire time their unit was on the ice, he dogged Howie, covering him so thoroughly Howie couldn’t so much as try to catch a pass. Denisov didn’t seem to care when Luca got Jax the puck and he attempted a shot on goal, unfortunately saved by Number One; Howie consumed his entire focus.
As Luca skated toward the bench for the end of the shift, he heard Howie spit, “What is your problem, man?”
The rustle of the shift change meant Luca didn’t catch the answer, but Howie hadn’t left the ice, so he missed his opportunity to switch out for Fedorov.
Denisov trapped himself in the same double shift and lost energy fast. Howie had the advantage of speed, being smaller and slighter—a joke when compared with Luca, who was smaller and slighter by far than Howie—but when contrasted with Denisov, Howie looked like a teenager in his father’s skating gear.
When Mooney managed to nab the puck away from one of Chicago’s slower D-men, he shot it toward Howie, who gained enough space from Denisov that he managed to snipe a shot right around Denisov’s left and over Goalie Number One’s shoulder without high-sticking Denisov in the face.
Denisov would have deserved it, in Luca’s opinion.
The game ended 4–1 for the Sea Lions, and Denisov’s dark expression as he filed off the ice was rivaled only by Goalie Number One’s scowl.
“Perhaps he should change his number to four now,” Luca joked to Breezy in the locker room.
Mooney overheard, repeated it louder, and soon the whole room was laughing at the goalie’s expense.