Chapter One #2
“I’m not a landlord,” Chris explained, not for the first time in the year Luca had been living with him. “You’re my friend. I won’t take your money.”
“He offered me the same deal before you got called up,” Howie added from the back seat, buckling himself in. “But I’d already signed a lease.”
“One you should break now. He has no natural light in that place.”
Both Howie and Luca definitely earned enough in bonuses to buy their own places, and Howie should.
But Chris didn’t want to say so in case Luca got any ideas.
He liked having a roommate, even one who scoffed at the Lifetime Channel Original movies Chris watched when he felt down about the state of the world (or the state of his dating life).
Luca shuddered dramatically. “The horror.”
Chris checked over his shoulder before pulling into traffic. “Howie’s a country boy. He’s going to get Vitamin D deficiency, or seasonal affective disorder or something.”
“I thought people moved to California to get away from those things,” Howie pointed out.
“Not living in your apartment, they don’t.”
“I’m never home anyway.”
Luca twisted in his seat to study Howie. “Did you meet someone?”
A yawning pit of dread opened in Chris’s gut. If Howie—barely twenty, tall and muscular but gangly, with a hairstyle Chris would describe as a mullet’s cousin—had a girlfriend and he didn’t, he might as well give up.
“No,” Howie said as if it ought to be obvious. “I play eighty-two games of hockey a year, plus playoffs, practices, and preseason. When do I have time to be home?”
Chris exhaled in silent relief and then felt guilty. Howie deserved to find someone. He was Chris’s friend, and Chris wanted the best for him. He just didn’t want to be left behind.
“What about you, Luca?” he asked, trying to force some joviality into his tone. “Meet any gorgeous Italian models this summer?”
“Please.” Howie snorted. “Luca is the Italian model.”
Luca scoffed at them both. “I am not, and I did not.”
Chris didn’t make a habit of thinking about male models, but when he did, he thought of Luca with his long, dark eyelashes, thick straight hair always perfectly in place, and lithe, toned body.
He should have a girlfriend. It was a disservice to women everywhere that he didn’t.
Although judging by last season, he serviced women plenty.
On roadies, they all but lined up to meet him in bars, and he charmed them so thoroughly they didn’t seem to mind when he left the morning after without giving out his number.
Coupled with how grumpy and rude Luca acted most of the time, this told Chris he must be magical in bed.
He didn’t have any trouble with women or sex…
and Chris had to nip the thought process in the bud, or he would get depressed.
“Guess we get to be the only single guys on the team this year, huh? Single and ready to mingle, hah.”
No one else laughed.
“What about Mooney?” Howie asked.
Diego “Mooney” Lunes was the fourth in their little clique of young, unattached guys. All the others had five years on them, a partner, or both.
But Chris shook his head. “He texted me he was bringing a date.”
“Shit,” Howie groaned. In the rearview mirror, Chris saw him bang his head against the seat rest. “Is it down to us and the Crow, then?”
“There are worse things than being single.” Luca said it decisively, but he was staring out the passenger’s side window, so Breezy couldn’t see his face. “Jax does not date either, and Phil is divorced.”
Concentrating very hard on the upcoming intersection, Chris bit his lip so as not to mention how very taken Tom Crowler, Jax Grant, and Phil Easton all were.
He took keeping their secrets seriously.
Things on the team could change the second someone else found out, and not for the better.
The thought sometimes made Chris wake up in a cold sweat, but his opinion didn’t matter.
“There is nothing worse than being single at a team event,” Howie said morosely.
Chris winced. Since starting his dating embargo in February, he’d gone stag to team events a few times.
It had been brutal. Someone’s wife or girlfriend always happened to have a pretty friend who happened to bump into him or ask the way to the bathroom and then twenty other questions.
And every time, what seemed innocuous at first turned into her hand on his bicep and her phone number in his contacts.
Cheryl Vanderbilt’s college roommate never even went to the bathroom.
Chris didn’t mind the attention. He liked talking to people, and the WAGs were all nice, so they also had nice friends. But he didn’t want to date. He told everyone as much, but none of the women who finagled their way into his Instagram follows seemed satisfied with that.
Maybe they would be lucky this time though.
“There aren’t many WAGs around anymore,” Chris said, “and I don’t think any of the Swedish ones will try to get you to go out with their friends.”
He certainly hoped not. Last year, he and Howie went on a disastrous double date with two of Allie Hayes’s closest friends after she spent an hour or so talking them up at a nightclub when Chris was too drunk to say no.
Howie spent the entire date talking to one girl about her homemade makeup brand that she sold via social media.
Chris spent the same amount of time with a beautiful, clever woman trying to figure out if he was attracted to her at all. He still didn’t know.
Allie Hayes stopped talking to both of them afterward.
Chris never figured out whether it was because he hadn’t called her friend or because her husband had gotten into a fight with the rest of the team not long afterward.
She never said. And asking for feedback on dating skills was weird, or Chris would have done it years ago.
Chris used to get along so well with the WAGs.
He’d bring a date to every function, each one blonde, beautiful, and interested in a future as an NHL wife.
They seemed to fit in well, though the relationships all fizzled out after two or three months.
It had all been so easy before he realized he might not be interested in a future as an NHL husband.
He’d probably run out of women interested in a potato-faced guy anyway, no matter that he played in the NHL.
He’d even gotten a new haircut over the off-season in the hope it would help, not because he wanted to date again but because standing next to Luca in every photo op made him realize how good guys could look when they tried.
Unfortunately, the shorter cut only emphasized his big, clumsy features.
“I would love to meet Swedish women,” Howie said. “They’re gorgeous, and they wouldn’t understand me being a dumbass.”
Luca turned toward him, the sparkle in his eye indicating he was about to destroy someone verbally and enjoy it. “Kilian,” he said, using Howie’s given name for the very first time. “No one, in any language, would mistake you for a genius.”
Howie kicked the back of the passenger seat hard, and Chris spent the rest of the car ride trying to keep the peace between them.
Handily, it distracted him from how fast everything was changing.
As soon as they got to the barbecue, the distractions ended, and everything resumed, changing faster than Chris could prepare for.
Coach Morris—real name Ben Sinclair—was there.
Coaches usually didn’t come to casual team events, but he’d stopped being their coach.
Now, he was just Phil’s husband, loitering around the grill in his glasses and a shirt with a funny slogan on it.
It made Chris itch to watch. No one asked what Ben was doing there and why Phil kept touching him—little everyday, casual glances of his fingertips across the back of Ben’s neck or the curve of his hip.
Everyone seemed to accept his continued presence, and no one looked at them askance. No one except Chris.
When their new coach, a woman named Susannah Lindbury (“but call me Lindy”), introduced herself, the party went downhill.
Not because of Lindy, she seemed great. Luca and Howie immediately attached themselves to her.
Howie asked questions about her Olympic career because he had encyclopedic knowledge of international women’s hockey teams for the last two decades, and Luca asked about her plans for the team.
Chris wanted to know about those things, too, but he was more concerned about Hayes and Vanderbilt sharing unsubtle, mocking jokes in the far corner of Phil’s garden, and the Russian contingent going grim and silent.
He’d been afraid of this.
Last season, they’d had a choice: keep Ben on as their coach, knowing he was secretly a reporter investigating the team owner and defensive coach using insider information to bet against the Sea Lions, or retire Ben and get a new, valid coach.
The team had already splintered by then, with Hayes and Vanderbilt on one side and Tom, Jax, and Phil on the other.
Chris had done his best to bridge the gap by suggesting working with a charity, a youth shelter, as a form of team bonding.
He’d done brunches and dinners with the D-core and sucked it up through a hundred brutal practices with a defensive coach who wanted to see them fail.
It’d paid off in those last magical weeks of the season when the team banded together and made it to the Western Conference Final.
But now, with Lindy being hired, what more could he do?
Some guys in sports took pride in how closely they resembled Neanderthals.
Hayes and Vanderbilt only occasionally respected Breezy, so he couldn’t convince them to take a female coach seriously no matter how many times she’d been in the Olympics.
Worst of all, Phil still hadn’t said what his new role would be.
“Are you moving?” Chris asked him. “Did you sign somewhere else? Are you coaching Juniors?”