6. Everett
Two suppressants in my palm, guest bathroom, seven in the morning.
I swallow them dry and grip the edge of the sink. The man in the mirror looks like he lost a fight. Wet hair, gray face, shadows under both eyes. One night in this house.
I barely slept. How am I supposed to when an alpha who looks like Brody Callahan is just a few steps down the hall?
At two in the morning I lay there with the sheet kicked off and listened to him move around his own bedroom, and I put my hand on myself and took it off again, twice, because the walls in this house are thick but they are not that thick and he would smell it.
This is exactly why the Bureau does this.
I’m not na?ve. I know exactly what they’re doing.
They’re making me sleep in a house saturated with his scent in the hopes that we’ll give in and fuck each other’s brains out. To be fair to them, it’s a tried and tested formula.
The house is solidly built with thick stone walls between us.
It makes little difference. I can still scent him as strongly as if he were in the room with me.
Woodsmoke, in the towels, in the air of the landing, in the pillow I have slept on exactly once.
My body answers it before I have any say in the matter.
There’s also no lock on the guest room door. I told him not to come in and he hasn’t. I should feel pleased about that. Instead, the stupid omega in me is disappointed.
The first dose went down last night, and it works, mostly. The edge is off. But nothing on the market cancels out an alpha like that completely. Under the soap and the new-carpet smell of this room there is still woodsmoke, faint and constant.
Today I meet the team.
I dress with more care than I’ve dressed for anything in years. Charcoal suit, white shirt, the navy tie. I do the buttons slowly, to prove my hands can. Let them hate me in a good suit.
It doesn’t help that Callahan had the sports channel on last night.
I heard it through the wall while I answered email: Gordie Rourke’s son, taking over.
Two retired players and a host, speculating.
The word “unknown” got used nine times. At one point somebody said, “Gordie never really mentioned him.” That one was fair.
Today, in front of twenty-three professional athletes, we are going to shake each other’s hands as complete strangers. I have spent my whole career being pleasant to people I can’t stand. This should be easy.
I knot the tie tighter than it needs to be and go to find out.
I drive to the arena with the radio off, rehearsing answers to questions nobody has asked me yet. Officially, I slept downtown. The rental still smells faintly of his garage. Of him. That is not a helpful thing to notice at forty miles an hour.
Sacco meets me in the tunnel. He shakes my hand once, briskly. He doesn’t bother saying as much as a ‘hello’.
The bastard. I don’t know why he even cares.
I’d be happy to pass the team to him or anyone else.
Neither of us wants me to be here. We could be allies in that at least. For some people, it doesn’t matter if you’re as nice as you can be to them, or just as nasty.
They’re going to dislike you either way.
There’s no point putting the effort in or letting it get to you.
He walks me down a corridor lined with photographs of old players and pushes open a door. The noise behind it dies the second I step through.
The locker room is a horseshoe of wooden stalls with names over them, and it smells like sweaty alphas, and under all of it, cutting straight through two doses of the strongest suppressant money can buy, woodsmoke.
Twenty-odd enormous men in various states of gear turn and look at me at the same time.
Half of them are wearing a black patch on one shoulder with my father’s initials on it.
“Gentlemen.” Sacco’s voice fills the room without trying. “Mr. Everett Rourke. Gordie’s son. He owns this team now, so look alive.” He gestures at the biggest stall, center of the horseshoe. “Your captain. Brody Callahan.”
Callahan crosses the room with his hand already out, and the cover story gets its first road test. His hand closes around mine, dry and enormous and careful.
Heat runs straight up my arm and settles low in my gut.
This close his scent comes off him in a wave, woodsmoke and something warmer underneath it, and I have to lock my knees and breathe through my mouth.
Two doses this morning. Two doses, and he is still doing this to me.
I keep my grip firm and my face pleasant.
“Mr. Callahan.” Steady. Good.
“Mr. Rourke. Welcome to the room.”
Nothing in his face. Nothing in his voice. He gives my hand one businesslike pump, lets go, and steps back, perfectly calm. My palm keeps the heat of him for a good deal longer than that, and I am sweating through a good shirt in a cold building. It isn’t fair. Very little about this is.
It starts friendly. Somebody asks if I’m keeping the arena. Somebody asks if I skate, and there’s an easy laugh when I say no. The young Swedish one, all wrists and cheekbones, asks very earnestly whether I watched the last game, and I say yes, which is true in the worst possible way.
Then a veteran with a flattened nose asks what team I rooted for growing up, and I make the first honest mistake of the day.
“None. I’m not a fan of hockey. I didn’t grow up with the game, and I wasn’t expecting to inherit this team.”
The temperature drops maybe ten degrees. Stick tape stops squeaking.
“You going to sell us?” That comes from the back, no hand raised.
“When the terms of my father’s will permit a sale, I expect to pursue one. That’s roughly two years out. Until then, this organization will be run properly and funded properly. Nothing about your jobs changes.”
“How do we know you’ve got our backs?” The flattened nose again, arms crossed.
“You’ll be paid on time, insured, equipped, and staffed. Sure.”
“Sure?” A stall creaks as somebody big leans forward. “Like what? Like when the league comes after one of us?”
And there it is. It’s the goalie, the big hairy one who came to the house last night with beer, watching me with his arms folded, and then he looks at Callahan, and something about the look lasts a half second too long before it comes back to me.
“League’s talking about making examples of guys who drop the gloves,” he says.
“Big suspensions. Where does the owner land when that’s one of us? ”
I could soften it. I know how to. The phrase I should use is “we’ll review each situation on its merits.” Instead, I look around a room full of men wearing my father’s initials, and I decide they can have the truth.
“If the league suspends one of my players for fighting, I won’t spend this team’s money or my time appealing it.
If you can’t take the punishment, don’t start the fight.
” I let that sit. “I watched grown men concuss each other for entertainment in my father’s last game.
I don’t think much of it, and I’m not going to stand in this room and pretend I do. ”
Nobody says anything. The young Swedish one is staring at the floor.
Sacco clears his throat and says ice in ten, gentlemen, and twenty-three alphas turn back to their stalls.
I say thank you to no one in particular and leave.
Callahan doesn’t look at me on the way out. His jaw is tight enough to hurt.
Nobody comes to show me out. I find my own way back down the corridor.
I don’t need media training to know how that went. I drive back to a house that isn’t mine, let myself in through the garage, and practically race back to the bedroom.
I dive into work. I’ve always been good at this. I like the math of it and — if I am honest — the money. There is something incredible about looking at a proposal, mapping out the calculations and seeing how much I get in my bank account at the end of the day.
My father didn’t bother providing any financial support when my mother left. At times, it was tight. Really tight. Stomach painful because I haven’t eaten tight. And that was with my mother making sure that I ate first.
That’s not ever happening again. And every time I get a new deposit into my bank account, that proves it. Maybe that makes me some greedy corporate banker or whatever the team thinks I am. I don’t care.
There is no way that I am ever going hungry again. Me or anyone I care about.
At some point the garage rumbles under the floor.
His footsteps go to the kitchen. Cupboards.
The fridge. Then the shower starts up down the hall and the scent of him comes through the floor warm and wet and everywhere, and I sit at a borrowed desk with my jaw set and read the same paragraph of a term sheet four times. I type harder.
The knock, when it comes, is two knuckles, twice.
No. I told him to leave me alone. We haven’t had an in-person check-in yet. I don’t know why. And I don’t care.
I don’t say anything. I’m not talking to him or dealing with him until I am forced to. He needs to go away.
He knocks again. I ignore it.
I hear the door open. I turn immediately and regret it.
He fills the doorway. He’s wearing a Barons hoodie. His hair is wet. Fresh out of that shower and smelling like the crisp air in the fall. I keep my eyes on the screen and my breathing shallow.
“Hey. So. That didn’t go great.”
“You think?” So what? What difference does it make?
“I’m not here to pile on. But I’m the captain, and it’s my job to tell you where the room’s at.” He leans a shoulder into the frame. “The room is unhappy.”
“No shit, Sherlock.” I don’t look up from the screen. “What exactly would you like me to do about it? Go back in there and tell them it’s perfectly fine, carry on beating the shit out of each other like a pack of thugs, I’ll hold your coats?”