9. Brody
We win. The horn goes while I’m in the medical room getting my eyebrow glued shut for the fourth time this year.
“Hold still,” the team doctor says.
I just grunt. I am. Or at least, I am trying to. This is going to go badly. Not the glueing. The doc has patched me up enough times that I am confident he knows his stuff.
I shouldn’t have hit Dorn so hard. Or so often. I took it so far. The asshole deserved it, but that doesn’t mean it was a great idea.
I couldn’t help it. I just saw red.
Rourke is right about one thing. It can be a brutal game and if I am honest with myself, that particular moment, when I had Dorn under my body and I was just thumping right into his stupid face—
That wasn’t about protection or anything other than me having enough of the guy and wanting to put him down.
Above us, the building is thumping as people start to head home happy.
I know they’ll be talking about Linus and about me, but I can’t help but wonder how many of them are worrying about how Linus is doing right now.
The doctor presses a strip along my eyebrow and holds it. His thumb smells like latex, and under that the whole room smells of old sweat. It’s a stink I’ve been breathing since I was eight years old.
“Put ice on the hand,” he says.
“Sure, doc.”
He grunts.
I jump off the bed, feeling my body complain as I hit the floor. I’m thirty-three, not old in ordinary years but I’m practically a great-grandfather when it comes to hockey. I don’t like to think about how much longer I have to play.
It’s going to be forever. Anything else? Well, what else do I have in my life? Absolutely nothing.
Unbidden, my thoughts turn to Rourke. Sweet-smelling, infuriating Rourke and my tired body immediately perks up and betrays me.
He doesn’t want me. He’s made that clear.
And he’s right. We have chemistry, I’m not denying that. The Bureau’s blood work got the fundamentals right, but that doesn’t mean we’re compatible in any other way.
Great chemistry and nothing else is just grounds for a future divorce. Best not start something that is only going to end badly.
I creak my way toward the room and the rest of the team, going the back way so I don’t have to run into anyone who wants a high five or an autograph.
I am not in the mood.
When I enter, I find the room quiet, for a win. Nobody has put music on. No one is whooping or even chatting. JP spots me immediately. He crosses the room and claps me on the back.
Marchetti shakes my hand.
“News?” I say, to anyone.
“He woke up in the ambulance,” Lewis says from over on the bench. He has his phone in his hand, and relief floods my chest.
“He’s talking,” Lewis continues. “He asked if we scored on the power play.”
Something in my chest lets go even further. He’s okay. Linus is okay. “Did we?”
“No.”
“Hope you didn’t tell him that.”
That gets a laugh, a small one, the first one, and the room breathes a little. Marchetti passes me my phone from my stall. There’s a text from my sister, three question marks, and nothing from Rourke.
That’s stupid. Why would I expect anything from Rourke? He never sends me messages. Why would he? Still, my mind keeps circling back to him. I felt him watching me the whole time. It took everything I had not to look up at him.
And why am I even thinking about him. There are more important people in my life. I find my locker and grab my jacket and backpack. “I’m going to the hospital.”
“I’m driving,” JP says. He’s still in half his gear. I’m not out of mine at all.
And then the door opens and Sacco walks in, Everett Rourke behind him.
The room stops moving.
The first thing I think is that the guy looks damned good in a suit. He stands just inside the door with his hands loose at his sides and looks at us.
The rink stink is doing me a favor for once. Nothing can hide that scent completely but the sweat from the guys and their boots helps take the edge off. I look away from him, search my backpack for my keys as if he wasn’t there at all. I’m not looking at him.
“Gentlemen,” Sacco says. “Berg’s stable. Scans tonight, more tomorrow. That’s all anybody knows, so don’t bother speculating.” He looks at me last. “Where are you going?”
“Hospital.”
“No,” Everett says. “You’re not.”
It’s the first time the room has heard him speak since the day he told us all he’d be selling us the first chance he got.
His voice does the same thing to me it always does, and I hate that it does it here, in this room, in front of everybody, where I can’t afford to feel one single thing.
I turn and look at him properly. That’s a mistake. His eyes are gray and steady, cold as the ice upstairs. There is nothing in his face that says he has ever seen me before outside of business, and I know for a fact that man has had his hands inside my waistband.
“He’s my rookie,” I say.
“He’s my player. And there are camera crews at that hospital already.” He doesn’t raise his voice. “You are the story now, Mr. Callahan. If you walk into that lobby, the story walks in with you.”
Mr. Callahan. No one fucking calls me Mr. Callahan. Even the papers call me Brody or just plain Barons 8.
“So I’ll sneak in.”
“Seriously?” He raises his eyebrows and looks me up and down.
Somebody snorts. Actually snorts.
Okay, fine. Maybe I’m not the kind of guy who can sneak in easily.
“Tremblay can go,” Everett says. “One more. Someone nobody photographs.” His eyes go around the stalls and land on Marchetti, and I watch him make the same read I’d make: sober guy, quiet.
“You. No jerseys, no gear bags, nothing with a logo. I’ll call ahead and get someone to meet you both outside.
Go around the back toward radiology. There’s a back door there. ”
“Since when do you know the hospital’s back doors?” I say.
“Since my father had his second stent put in there and didn’t want it in the papers.” The room goes still. Nobody knew about any stent. From the look that crosses Sacco’s face, almost nobody.
“I’m the captain,” I say. “I should be there. I’m not going home just to stare at my phone and wait for updates.”
“Yes. That is exactly what you’re going to do.” He takes one step closer, and I scent the sweet aroma of orange peel. “You have done enough for him tonight.”
The room makes a low sound. He’s out of line and everybody knows it.
“That’s not—” I start.
“He’s right,” Sacco says abruptly.
I startle. What? Sacco is standing up for him now? What fresh hell is this?
“Tremblay and Marchetti go,” Sacco continues.
“The rest of you go home.” He puts his eyes on me and keeps them there.
“You especially. Go home, Callahan. Ice your hand. Talk to nobody. When the league calls tomorrow, and they will call, you say the words ‘through my representative’ and nothing else. You hear me?”
Everett is looking at me too. Both of them, coach and owner, shoulder to shoulder, one message. It would take an hour to explain to anyone in this room why that’s the funniest thing that has happened to me all season.
Go home. Sure, Coach. You have no idea.
“Fine,” I say.
I get my bag on my shoulder. Nobody says anything. JP catches me at the door, hand around my arm above the elbow, same grip as the bar, and says, low, “I’ll call you from there.”
“Tell him I’ll come tomorrow.”
“I’ll tell him you cried.”
“Haha. He’ll believe it too.”
I go out past Everett Rourke close enough that our sleeves nearly touch. Neither of us moves an inch out of the way. His scent slams into me and I keep walking.
The drive home is twenty minutes and I spend all of it wondering what they’re going to hit me with.
Instigator, aggressor, game misconduct. That’s two minimum. If they’re looking to make an example? I don’t know.
Say four. Four is survivable. I’ve missed four games with a groin pull and the world kept turning. We won that season too. Only just.
My hand throbs on the wheel in time with my heartbeat. I run the video from the ice back one more time, the whistle, Linus turning his head to find the play, the hit arriving a full second after everything had stopped. The sound the glass made.
I’d do it again. That’s the truth and there’s no use lying to myself about it in my own truck. Whatever number they hang on me, I’d do it again.
The house is dark. His rental isn’t back. He’s probably cozying up with Sacco now that the two of them are suddenly best of buds.
I don’t turn the lights on upstairs. I go down to the basement, wrap my bad hand until it’s a club, and get on the bike.
If I sit still in that quiet upstairs, I am going to start replaying the sound of the glass again. My head is a mess. Berg is going to be okay. I took hits like that when I was a kid on the ice. He’ll probably survive them too.
I don’t want to think about the other injuries. The career-ending ones. I’ve been lucky. Others I know have not.
I ride until my legs burn worse than my face and then I keep going, sweat running off my nose onto the crossbar. The gym is the one room in this house that’s all mine. There’s no scent of orange down here. Nothing down here but me and the wheel whirring.
I go back upstairs, my legs so numb, I almost fall off the bike, then go back down again when my head starts filling with stupid thoughts.
I get back on the bike.
The garage rumbles overhead at midnight.
I hear the car door. The connecting door. His footsteps cross my kitchen, stop, cross back. Then I hear him on the basement stairs, which he has never once used.
He comes down them now.
He’s lost the tie somewhere between the arena and here. His top button open, jacket still on, phone in his hand.
He stops at the bottom of the stairs and looks at me, and I stay on the bike, coasting, chest heaving, dripping, and watch him take in the room. His gaze slips to my taped hand on the handlebar.
“You were told to ice that,” he says.
I shrug, feeling a fresh ache as I do. “Not like I’m going to need it for a while.”
It comes out more childish than I intend.
“I’ve been on the phone.” He holds the thing up like evidence. “The league office. Then the league office again. Then a sponsor’s damn lawyer. Why they have a say is beyond me.”
“How many?”
He looks at me for a second. Down here his scent has nowhere to go, same trick my kitchen pulled on night one, and it rolls across the rubber floor and climbs onto the bike with me. Orange peel. That dark honey thing underneath. I stop pedaling.
“Six,” he says. “Minimum. The hearing is expedited — two weeks from Thursday. They may go to eight.”
I stop spinning.
“Six games.” I get off the bike slow. “Guys have done exactly what I did and gotten two. There’s fifteen years of two. Ottersen got three and he broke a glove hand—”
“You’re not them.”
“No kidding. I—”
“Why did you have to do that?” He’s close now. Too close for a man in a suit to stand to a man dripping sweat, and neither of us fixes it. “If you didn’t want to be made an example of, you should not have volunteered so beautifully.”
“Fuck you. It’s how the game is played.”
“Don’t I know it.”
We’re a foot apart. Again. There is a whole gym down here, four hundred square feet of it, and the two of us are standing in one, the same way there was a whole kitchen upstairs.
I can hear his breathing change. I watch his eyes drop to my mouth and come back up furious about it, and my blood goes loud, and every bad idea I own presents itself at once.
His phone buzzes in his hand. Neither of us looks at it.
“Six games,” I say, quieter. “It’s a quarter of what’s left. It’s the playoff push. The room needs—”
“The room needs its captain to stop handing the league ammunition.” But it comes out lower than it started, and slower, and his eyes have gone dark in a way that has nothing to do with hockey.
“You agree with them,” I say. “Six games. You actually agree.”
“I’m not going to spend money appealing a fighting suspension.” A muscle moves in his jaw. “Yes. I agree with them.”
“Did you even try?”
“No. They’re right. It’s long past time that an example was made.”
“You fucking dickhead.”
He surveys me with those dark eyes. “You knew what would happen. You knew.”
“You’re supposed to have my back. It’s your job.”
“No, it’s not,” he replies stubbornly. And I don’t know if I want to punch him in the mouth or kiss it. Both.
That’s the thought that stops me arguing. Instead, I just sigh. “We’re done here.”
“Fine.”
Neither of us moves.
The furnace kicks on somewhere behind the wall. His scent is everywhere now, in the rubber, in my sweat, wound into the iron smell of the plates, and I’m about to do something that I can’t take back, I can feel it coming the way you feel a hit coming, and then it changes.
The orange goes sweet.
Not the way it’s been sweet all week, under everything, driving me quietly out of my mind.
Sweeter. Riper. The honey underneath it warms and thickens and turns into something that lands at the base of my spine and spreads, and my mouth floods, and every muscle I own comes to attention at once.
I’ve been around omegas my whole life. Locker room staff, teammates’ mates, my own sister.
I know what I’m smelling. Any alpha alive knows what I’m smelling.
He’s started talking again. Hearing procedure, dates, representation. Blah. Blah. Blah. I’ve stopped hearing words.
“Everett.”
Maybe it’s the first name that does it. He stops mid-sentence, and I watch him actually look at me, and whatever is in my face makes him take one step back.
“You need to go upstairs,” I say. My voice comes out wrong. Low, and not entirely mine. “Right now.”
“Excuse me?”
He doesn’t know. He’s flushed and he’s furious and he genuinely doesn’t know yet.
He’s going into heat.