Chapter 28
HOCKEY HURTS
A few days after I started staying in Barry’s apartment, the team left on a quick three-day road trip. Kate and Jeremy came over with burritos and Chinese food (I needed both) in hand to watch the game on Barry’s huge TV.
“We gotta beat Vegas tonight,” Jeremy said as he walked into the apartment donning full team apparel—beanie included. “They play fucking dirty, I hate them.”
“Vegas seems fine,” I said. “Good jerseys.”
“No, Jer’s right. Fuck Vegas,” Kate said. I was under the impression that she knew less about hockey than me, but maybe she’d been researching.
“Damn, noted.”
I was surprised to find that I didn’t mind watching the games—not in person or on TV.
It was fun, actually, and the more I learned about the game and the team, the more I liked it.
I hadn’t seen Jeremy this much since we were both living at Mom’s house before I moved out for college.
It was fun to hang out with him more, and Barry was always nice to humor him.
Jeremy whistled as he did a 360 spin, taking in the apartment. “Yo, this place is way nicer than Grandma’s.” I glared at him and he shrugged, waving his arm in the direction of the flat screen TV as exhibit A. “That guy fucking loves you to live in the murder basement over this place.”
“He does not love me.” I hadn’t told Kate or Jeremy that Barry was no longer sleeping on the blow-up mattress but in the same bed as me. They’d get their hopes way up. Too messy.
I tugged my sweatshirt away from my neck, another team-branded one from Barry’s old team.
Even if I wasn’t stealing his clothes all the time, he’d gotten me enough team clothes to have my own wardrobe of fan gear, and he looked too pleased when I wore them.
Anytime I showed up to a game in one of the jerseys, he practically preened on the ice, grinning up at me during warm-ups way too obviously.
“He loooves you and wants to have your babies.” Jeremy poked my baby bump lightly, and I swatted at him.
“Gross,” Kate and I said in unison.
“Plus, he’s already done that,” Kate said, and I glared at her too. “I do agree that he probably does love you, though. If we’re thinking about the facts here.”
I piled more rice on my plate next to the burrito and kebabs and brought it to the couch where Junior was already sniffing Kate’s plate, hoping for a morsel.
“He loves the unborn baby growing in my uterus, he’s not in love with me.”
“Babies grow in uteruses?” Jeremy asked with a full bite of burrito in his mouth.
“Yes, dude.”
“Where’d you think they grew?” Kate demanded.
“I don’t know, but like, not in the uterus. The womb?”
“Same thing,” I said, though I didn’t know this until I got pregnant either. Public school failed us both. “Either way, he loves the baby, and any feelings otherwise are likely just confused by said love for the baby.”
I took a big bite of my burrito. Halfway through chewing, when there was no banter back at me, I turned to see both siblings staring at me like they were trying to decide what was wrong with me.
“What?”
“You really think he’s not into you like that?” Jeremy asked.
On the screen, the game was just starting, the national anthem being sung by a children’s choir.
“I think even if he is into me, it’s probably not because of me as a person.
More so as me as the mother of his child.
” It felt like a lie as I spoke it, sand on my tongue.
It was the lie I’d been trying to convince myself of since he found me asleep on my shift.
The one that was getting flimsier every time he touched me, looked at me, called me just to talk about nothing when he was on the road.
“The child had to be made somehow,” Kate deadpanned. “You’re saying that he wasn’t into you that night in New York?”
I took a bite of a chicken kebab and thought about this. Barry was in the starting lineup, so the camera scanned across his face and the other four players in their white and orange jerseys. His hair was getting long, but was out of his face, gelled back, though already mussed from his helmet.
Damn, he was hot.
“He was into me in New York,” I finally said. The impromptu date, the easy smiles, the light kisses that turned quickly into deep ones, his huge hands wrapping around my waist and hauling me to him. I shifted and cleared my throat. “He was.”
“So why wouldn’t he be now?”
“It’s complicated now. He’s—” I gestured to the TV where he was staring toward the middle of the ice for the face-off.
Neither of my siblings finished the sentence for me, their faces so similar in their disbelief.
“It’s not that I think I’m not cool enough to be liked by a hockey player.” I did think that, though. Really, really did. “It’s just that in this instance I think this hockey player has clouded judgement. He’s biased. It’s the pregnancy hormones.”
Kate gave an eye roll that would have made me wither if I hadn’t grown up frequently on the receiving end of them. “Your pregnancy hormones are clouding his judgment?”
“Maybe one day, after she’s born, and he knows me better—knows we are capable of co-parenting without being together. Then he can decide if he really wants to be with me.”
Kate scoffed and snatched the remote, turning up the volume.
“You’re acting like he’s a child, but whatever.”
“I’m not!”
“You are,” Jeremy agreed. I didn’t appreciate how much of a united front those two were being tonight, but what I really didn’t appreciate was feeling like they were right.
We quietly watched the first few minutes of the game, and Jeremy slipped into his usual routine of commentating and grunting while I stewed on what they’d said.
I wasn’t trying to treat Barry like a child; I knew he was an adult who could think for himself.
I just had a really difficult time believing that his affections weren’t influenced by the baby we accidentally made together.
Pregnancy at large was a big, messy, feeling soup—I couldn’t even trust my emotions, not when things felt heightened and turbulent all the time. Trusting his felt equally impossible.
Barry’s line was back on the ice for a shift, trying to get a shot on the Vegas net, but when one of his teammates took a shot, the puck flew at Barry’s face and Barry fell to the ice. Hard.
All three of us gasped, leaning closer to the TV.
“What happened?” I whispered.
“And it looks like Barry Wright took a puck to the face,” the announcer said. “On the ice now while the medical staff comes to check him out.”
In the slowed down replay, sure enough, the puck barreled toward his face and slipped just under his visor.
He pushed to his feet, which was a relief, but I went tense all over seeing the bright red blood streaming down his face as he skated off the ice.
He disappeared immediately down the hall and away from the view of the cameras.
“Holy shit, that was brutal,” Jeremy said.
“Is he okay?” I was standing, but I didn’t remember getting up. I had both hands on my hips, completely distressed watching the replay again before the game went on without him, the commentators still talking about it.
“Not that uncommon,” Jeremy said. “I bet he’ll be fine.”
“Could he have a concussion? What if they make him play with a concussion?” I asked.
“It’s okay, Hannah, he’s going to be good,” Kate assured me. I believed them, but also, my heart was racing like he might never be okay and maybe he’d have lost an eye from a puck hitting it—could that happen? If the puck hit him right in the eye?
I went to the kitchen for water, mostly so I could do something that wasn’t standing in front of the TV stressed. After downing two glasses, I went back to the couch where both my siblings looked at me with sympathy.
Kate squeezed my forearm.
“He’ll be okay, Han.”
My phone buzzed on the coffee table, drawing my attention. I peeled my eyes from the TV to look down at it.
Barry.
I snatched it from the table and swiped to view the message.
Barry
He’s okay.
This is Tivo btw
Tivo—Niko Tivoli—was one of the rookies, barely nineteen, who Barry talked about sometimes. He looked up to Barry and had been out for the last few games with a leg injury.
Barry
Needs stitches though. Says he’ll call after.
Hannah
Thank you
I locked the phone, looked up at the TV, then unlocked it to read the messages again.
“He’s getting stitches,” I reported. “But he’s okay.”
Jeremy and Kate looked at me with a mix of pity and knowing. I didn’t ask what they were thinking. I knew what they were thinking. They thought I was a fucking mess, more gone for Barry than they already thought he was for me.
I knew they were right.
Barry finished the game with a swollen, stitched up cheek, and had two assists before the end of game.
Thirteen stitches in an L shape on his cheek on the left side of his face.
They were uncovered during the game, though he had to wear a fishbowl helmet to keep the injury protected.
In the locker room interviews after, one of the reporters said he still looked handsome, maybe even more so with the stitches and Barry laughed, this sight of his wide smile calming me some.
It was another hour before he called me, and I was in bed—his bed—holding my pregnancy pillow for any shred of comfort when I still felt shaken from the game.
It was a FaceTime call, and I wiped my cheeks before answering.
This had become somewhat of a routine while he was on the road: bedtime calls, both of us looking at our phones like we were together for real.
“Sweetheart,” he said, all sympathy as soon as the call connected and he saw me.
“I wasn’t crying,” I said, but my face never let me hide my tears. My cheeks would be puffy and eyes red until midmorning.
“Okay. It does kinda look like you were, though,” he whispered.
My chest tightened, wishing he was here to wipe his calloused thumbs across my cheeks. Half of his face was swollen and the skin beneath his left eye was an angry mix of colors peeking out from beneath the white bandage that covered the stitches.
“You looked really rough,” I told him. My lip wobbled without meaning to; I tried to control it but, again, my hormones were out to get me.
“I thought you said hockey injuries made me look handsome.”
By hockey injuries, I’d meant the little horizontal cuts so many of them seemed to get on their noses from their helmet visors at some point in the season.
Barry had come home with that specific injury a month ago, and assured me it was a common one; his nose wasn’t even broken.
He hadn’t needed stitches that time, though.
He looked much, much worse now.
“Rugged was the word I used, I think.” My voice trembled, and I cursed and closed my eyes.
“Were you worried about me?”
I’d never wanted to have him here so bad—never wanted to have anyone here with me so badly.
I wanted to grip the front of his hoodie and smell his neck and let him wrap his arms around me and kiss my head as many times as he wanted.
I wouldn’t even tell him to stop or that he was being too romantic, I’d just let him do whatever he wanted.
“Obviously, yes,” I muttered, incapable of lying. “Jeremy told me that every season players get hurt, like hospitals and broken bones, and a few years ago a guy died from a skate?”
More tears fell from my eyes, and Barry gave gentle shushing sounds through the phone.
“I don’t know why I’m crying, you’re obviously fine.” I roughly wiped my cheeks. “I’m just pregnant and tired and my house is so far from being put back together and—” I hiccupped again. “You had so much blood on your face.”
“I know. I’m sorry it was scary.”
I sniffled.
“You’re the one who’s hurt, you shouldn’t have to be comforting me.” We both gave little laughs, mine pitiful.
“Thanks for worrying about me,” he whispered. Junior decided it was a good time to make his appearance, walking up the front of the pregnancy pillow and demanding I scratch him. “I think Junior worried about me, too.”
“It’s so crooked that he likes you more than he likes me. I saved him from the literal streets, paid his vet bills, nurtured him back to health.”
“He doesn’t like me more,” Barry denied, but Junior was purring extra loud now that he could see Barry on the screen. “He’s just got recency bias.”
I closed my eyes, still smiling, the emotional roller coaster of the evening thoroughly caught up to me. I didn’t even try to say goodbye, certain he would say he wanted to stay on. And if he didn’t, I might have asked on my own.
As my breathing evened out, I knew he’d have said yes.