Chapter 5 #2
How long had it been since I’d checked my email?
“He talked to me right after my first surgery. What I said about my career was supposed to be off the damn record.”
“Well,” Amedeo said very quietly, reaching out to touch my shoulder, “he didn’t say you were the one who confirmed it. He said that after everything you had going on, he wouldn’t be surprised.”
“That fucker.” I didn’t know why I was so mad about it. If he didn’t quote me, he didn’t break any rules. But he goddamn knew what that was going to do.
He knew people were going to speculate.
It made the phone calls I’d been getting lately make so much sense.
“Whatever,” I said, reaching for the car door. “I don’t care about that troll.”
“Sure, babe,” Alessia said. She grabbed my elbow. “Want the front seat?”
“Why? For the view?”
She was silent, then laughed. “You’re the fucking troll.”
I grinned at her. Her laughter helped take the edge off my frustration, and it was easy to sit in relative silence as Amedeo hit the freeway and drove me all the way home.
“…lying in his hospital bed, looking like he’s steps from death, I knew it wasn’t that serious, but I couldn’t help wondering if maybe Nadeau was using the surgeries and knee injury as an excuse to end his career on a better note than quitting because of his sight.
Of course, that’s merely speculation. Nadeau was only quoted saying, ‘We’ll have to see what happens next season, but I’ll always be optimistic about my future with the PPHL. ’”
“The fuck I did! I would never say something so pedantic!” I shouted at my computer screen.
Wait. Was pedantic the right word? No. Pathetic? Trite?
“Banal!” I yelled, then slapped a hand over my mouth because yeah, this was becoming a problem.
It was probably a good thing no one was around to hear me ranting. The last thing I needed was to be the insane person shouting at his walls.
Pushing my fingers through my hair, I stood up, then sat back down, then stood up again. Uhg, god, I needed a stiff drink, but I wasn’t allowed to have alcohol, thanks to the muscle relaxers and the painkillers I was taking for my dysfunctional knee.
“I’m going to call him,” I told myself. Not that I had his number, but I knew people. I could call Vanya, who would call Gupta, who could convince him to give out his son’s phone number, and…
No. Nope.
I snatched up my phone and scrolled through my contacts until I hit Micah. It rang four times before he picked up, and I was half expecting voicemail because he was too busy these days walking around his garden and generally enjoying life like I wanted to be doing.
“Hey, bud.”
I took a breath. “I need you to talk me down.”
“From what? A tree? A ledge?”
“That fucking fuck Aravind Gupta wrote another article about me and said that I was quitting hockey because I could no longer see well enough to play my position.”
Micah was quiet for a long beat. “Is that what he said?”
“…in so many words.”
He hummed in thought. “Is he telling the truth?”
“I—well. It…” I groaned, tipping my head back.
“No. Maybe. I don’t fucking know. I was kind of having a minor panic attack when I talked to him, and I might have babbled a little about whether or not I felt like I could keep going.
Not that it matters because I’m pretty sure my fuck-ass knee is going to decide for me, and—”
“Naddy?”
It had been a while since I’d heard him use my nickname.
“I need you to calm down.”
“Fuck you—” I bit my tongue on purpose to keep myself from saying something worse. Micah was right. I did need to calm down. I took three deep breaths in a row, which immediately made me dizzy, but the rage and panic started to lose their edge.
“Feel better?”
“Not really.” Sitting up, I flopped forward until my head met the edge of the desk. “My life sucks right now.” He burst into laughter, and I immediately bristled. “I’m pouring my heart out here!”
“I know. I know, bud. And I get you, okay? I used hockey to run away from having to face the trauma my parents caused, which only turned into worse trauma because then I acquired a stalker.”
I knew it was more than that, of course. Micah had also dealt with the reputation of being the guy who fucked anything that moved, which turned out to be a lie he used to protect himself. The worst part about that for all of us was the fact that we’d given him so much shit about it over the years.
And the guilt was sometimes hard to sit with.
But Micah was a lot stronger than I was.
“Tiago?”
“Mm.”
“Do you want to quit hockey because your vision is going?”
It took me a long moment to answer him. “How many totally blind guys aren’t goalies?”
He was quiet, which meant he was counting because of course this fucker would know the answer. “Seven,” he finally said. “Three in Seattle, one in New York, two in Miami…” I could hear fingers drumming on wood. “Holtzmann just got traded to Dallas. So one in Dallas.”
“Yeah, out of what? A thousand?”
“Five-hundred and forty-six,” he corrected me. The pedantic little fuck. I think I was using the word right this time.