9. Artie
Artie
Laughs and chatter bounce around the locker room as our excitement rises. We’re on our tenth game of the season, and we’re beating record after record for the Bears.
All of us are so pumped that the energy bubbles over in the locker room.
We still have fifteen minutes before we go out onto the ice, but we’re already feeling it.
We’re up against the Red Riders, our longtime rivals from the next state over, and we’re on their turf.
The Bears haven’t won a match with them in over seven years, but we’ve come so close every single time. But this is it. This is our game.
“Guys!” Jett shouts as he stumbles into the room. “I just caught my fucking finger in my car door!”
Everyone groans so loud it bounces off of the ceiling.
“Oh, sorry, man.”
“RIP.”
“I guess we’ll see you in hell.”
“What is it? What’s wrong?” One of our new draft players, Ash, asks.
His dad passed away right at the start of training camp, so he had time off for bereavement.
This is his first game with us as a defenseman, and we want to show him he’s made the best choice coming to play with us.
Which means he has to see every part of the team so he knows what he’s gotten himself into.
“Oh, yeah, you weren’t at training,” Jett sighs. “It was intense, man. A fancy doctor from a big hospital in the city came to run our med team, and she’s er… she’s something else. Every time we get hurt, it’s like being thrown into a cage with a demon.”
“She’s fucking terrifying. She didn’t even say a word to me the last time she needed to check out a bruise,” Johnson said. “She just poked it, glared at me, and then left me there. I sat in her freezing examination room buck naked for an hour before I realized I could go.”
“Aye, but what about that time Tanner took his shirt off in front of her, and she stabbed him?” Mathan chuckles.
I burst out laughing as Tanner scowls at him.
“It wasn’t just that, man,” Tanner says with a stark look like he’s having flashbacks. “She freaking apologized, came in close to inspect my chest, and fucking stabbed me again!”
More laughter echoes around the room. Tanner’s been so confident that he can seduce Bee that he thinks she’s just being coy instead of genuinely not giving a fuck about him. It’s awesome.
“I just don’t get it…” Tanner shakes his head with wild eyes.
“No one has ever been able to resist this chest.” He waves his hand over his bare body, displaying himself like any of us care when we all know he works out just so he can fuck omegas.
Plus, he uses tanning beds and bronzer, so he lives up to his nickname.
Bee’s like our taskmaster, keeping us all in check by putting the fear of Dr. Tully into us. She doesn’t give us any warnings about getting hurt, because everything about her says how much she hates it. Or us. We can’t decide, since she’s never hung out with anyone other than the med team.
We thought she was joking when she said, during her intro speech, that she didn’t want to see any of us, but it turns out she really wasn’t. At least when the pre-season started and we began playing proper games, we got to talk to her.
Even though our team of medics, nurses, chiropractors, and general sports therapists is great, something about her leadership gives them a sheen that fills us with pride.
Even in the space of two short months, we can feel that we’ve become better. And more than a few of us think it’s because of her.
“Remember when Anders broke his rib, and she shone the light so close to his eye that he fell off the table and broke another one?”
“I swear every time she pulls out her stethoscope, I think she’s going to strangle me,” Anders groans.
“One time, I landed bad on my knee, and she hit it with a fucking hammer even though she could already see it was mangled!”
“Don’t forget she’s doing more brain scans when we go home next week,” Orso says gruffly.
There’s a collective shudder as everyone goes quiet, because we all know what that means.
She measures us and scans our brains once a month to record any changes over the season.
Our teammates don’t like it when she throws them around, but I hate it because she treats me like any other patient.
I want to be special to her, but she doesn’t care, even when I’m right in front of her.
She’s like a sexy zombie that’s only interested in my brain.
“Can I just skip out?” Kenny says. “The last time she gave me a scan, I nearly froze because her hands were so cold.”
“Yeah, she almost snapped my wrist when she yanked my arm up to look at the gash on my shoulder.”
“Or what about that time she literally shoved Havoc onto his ass so she could get at his thighs?”
“She’s a proper sadist, man. The only people who get off on it are Mathan and Artie. They definitely have degradation kinks.”
“Nah, we just have to make the most of it because we’re the ones with pucks flying at our faces,” I say.
“Mathan always sees her more than the rest of us, so you know her the best,” Anders says. Even though I hate it when Mathan gets hurt, it makes him happy when she treats him.
People glance at us as Mathan and I pull on our goalie kits, and my mate blushes as Orso rolls his eyes, because we all know it’s true. I thought I was smitten when we first met her, but Mathan has fallen so hard for her that I swear he’s deliberately getting hurt just so he can see her.
“I don’t understand. It can’t be that bad, can it?” Ash asks.
“You don’t get it yet. You haven’t seen her when she’s in full doctor mode,” Kenny says.
“She’s scary as fuck, dude,” Tanner adds.
“That’s why you’ve joined our team at the perfect time,” I say with a grin. “‘Cos all these guys are massive scaredy-cats, so they are so focused on not getting hurt that we’ve all become better players.”
“That’s bullshit. You can’t not get hurt when you’re playing hockey,” Ash says.
“Don’t worry, you just keep playing how you normally play and then get back to us in a week once she’s treated you two or three times.” I laugh.
“Alright, that’s enough of that,” Orso says, clapping his hands to get our attention. “We’re out in ten, so make sure you’re fully kitted up, and stop fucking around. Think of how Dr. Tully would react if she heard you gossiping about her?”
A shudder runs through the locker room again, though I’d be interested to see what she would do. I kind of have this fantasy of her dressed up in spandex, wielding her scalpels like throwing daggers as she hunts us down.
“You know what the goal is,” Orso says. “And I don’t care if you get hurt or not, as long as you play your best. We want that puck in the back of the net more often than theirs.
Dr. Tully is going to be rinkside watching us, so don’t forget she’ll be there to patch you if you do something fucking stupid.
Is that clear?” He glares at the whole team, and we nod hurriedly, everyone silently vowing not to let the other team touch us or the puck.
It doesn’t matter if it’s not possible to go no contact during a game; the guys will do their best to make sure they don’t come out with any injuries.
“Okay, one last thing!” Coach shouts as he enters the room with a big yellow box under each arm, and another round of groans goes up.
“Come on, now, don’t be like that!” he says cheerily as the boxes land on the floor with loud thuds.
“One each! I want you lot holding them up to the camera so the crowd can see them!”
We shuffle forward as he slices open the boxes to a hundred oat energy bars.
Goldies are our official sponsors. The company is run by the Chang conglomerate, and to get their sponsorship, our owner agreed we’d carry these Asian-inspired oat bars on us all the time.
They’re simple flavors you find anywhere, but each one has a twist, and everyone seems to only like one kind.
I grab three: chocolate and wasabi, blueberry and soy sauce, and crunchy melon, then shuffle back to Orso and Mathan to hand them out.
They both sigh and swipe them before they pick up their helmets. Orso’s been extra careful with his helmet recently, especially because of how much Mathan and I nag him if he tries to skate without one.
“It’s not all bad! At least they keep us healthy so we don’t have to see Dr. Tully!” Tanner laughs as he tucks his bar into his waistband.
The thing is, no matter how much people shiver when they think about how roughly Dr. Tully treats us, she’s our lucky charm. Even if no one says it out loud, she’s the reason we’re climbing through the ranks.
We had an intense training camp, so maybe we just improved over the summer. But a team doesn’t go from a three-time win rate compared to last year in two months without something pretty spectacular happening.
And Bee is spectacular in every way.
When everyone is ready and dressed up in our bright yellow and brown uniforms, and we’re waiting in the tunnel to be called out onto the ice, Ash leans over to me and taps my shoulder.
As the backup goalie, I don’t get to play that much, so they put me on the bench next to the back side of the gate.
Then I don’t get in the way of the guys jumping over the boards to get onto the ice.
With the least amount of training, Ash won’t get as much action, so they’ll sit him near me.
“Hey, were the guys being serious? They weren’t just hazing me or something?” he asks.
He’s only twenty, and he played for two years in the AHL before making the team at this year’s camp.
I nod, smirking at him. “But no matter what they say, Dr. Tully is amazing! If you get hurt, she’ll fix you up so quickly it’ll be like you were never off the ice. She’s magic.” Though I’m definitely biased.
“They made it sound like she’s more likely to hurt me than the other team is.”
“Well, play your best, and then you’ll find out!”
As we skate out onto the ice to stretch and wave to our fans, I instinctively search for her. Bee stays on our side of the rink, near the coaches, so she can talk to them if they need an update on any of us.
I finally spot her. She sits on her seat all prim and proper, her arms folded, her glare etched deep into her face. Even from thirty feet away, her gaze bores into us, and I love it.
The other guys are grinning as well because we can all feel it’s going to be a good game.