Delay of Game (21 page)

“Okay,” he said after a minute. “If you’re not there, I’ll see you sometime tomorrow.”

He made it sound like a promise.

OTHER THAN BUSTER
, my house was empty when I got there at some time after four in the morning. He ran circles around my legs, almost tripping me while I tried to get my suitcase inside, yapping excitedly the whole time.

“Yeah, I know. Out of the way.” I shoved him back with my foot since he wouldn’t have a clue what I was saying. Once I closed the door and let go of my carry-on bag’s handle, he was practically trying to climb up my legs. I bent down and picked him up, and he licked my face all over, plying me with his dog breath. The whole time, his tail kept wagging so hard I worried I might drop him. He might be seven years old, but he still acted like a puppy. “Calm down, bud.” I scratched behind his ears, but that only got him more worked up.

Times like this, I hated that I had to leave him alone so much. I’d tried boarding him early in my career, but at that point I hadn’t figured out how to train him properly because of his deafness, and he had been more than a handful, especially considering his size. It was easier to find one person I trusted to come and take care of him in familiar territory than it was to send him to a strange place with strange faces.

Granted, some people might say that I still hadn’t trained him, considering how I let him run all over me so often.

I plopped onto the couch and spent a few minutes petting him until he finally calmed down a bit. It was easier to deal with my disappointment that Sara hadn’t come over while being on the receiving end of such unconditional love, even if it was just from a dog.

I really needed to get to bed, though, so I got up and took him outside so he wouldn’t start whining before I was ready to get up in the morning. Once he was out back and racing through the yard like the lunatic he was, I shut the door and took my bag upstairs.

Mom had always made it a habit to unpack as soon as we returned from a trip, and I’d picked that up from her. Even after all these years of living on my own, I’d never been able to break myself of it.

I opened the bag, took out my suits, and hung them in the closet. I’d only gotten half of my stuff out by the time Buster came racing in. He leaped up onto the bed and dove headfirst into the suitcase, nosing a couple of things out with his enthusiasm.

My phone charger dropped to the floor from his efforts. When I retrieved it, I set it on the nightstand beside me and glared at my dog. “You’re lucky that you’re cute, you bastard.”

He barked as if to signal he agreed.

I finished putting everything away and forced Buster out of the suitcase so I could put it on the shelf in the closet. He stayed put in the center of the bed while I did that and then changed my clothes. I washed my face and wished I could shave. My beard was already getting scratchy, and it had only been a few days of letting it grow.

Shaving wasn’t going to be an option for a while, though—hopefully. I might not be playing in the playoffs right now, but my team was, and that meant I was going to do whatever I could to keep them there. Yeah, playoff beards were a stupid superstition, and they didn’t have a damn thing to do with what happened on the ice. But superstition or not, they were tradition, and I damn sure had no intention of breaking a tradition.

Especially not after the boys had won tonight. We had gotten behind early due to a couple of miscues in our own end, but the boys had clawed and fought their way back into the game until they’d forced another overtime. Once we were there, Nicky had shut down the Canucks’ offense until the second OT period, when Jared Tucker—JT—had snuck in a garbage goal just by hanging out in front of the crease and getting lucky with a rebound bouncing off his ass and going into the net.

It was a hell of a lot better going home at night after a win.

It would have been even better if Sara had been here waiting for me.

I crawled into bed, and Buster grumbled at me for disturbing him. He’d already settled into his usual spot, right smack dab in the center of the bed, and was halfway asleep. I tried to get to sleep, too, but I didn’t get there easily.

Even though she’d said she didn’t know if she’d be here, I had allowed myself to hope that she would. Disappointment rose up like bile in my throat, and nothing seemed capable of washing it away.

SHE DIDN’T ANSWER
her phone when I called after practice. It wasn’t a complete surprise. Yes, she’d agreed to the compromise I’d suggested, but even when we’d discussed it, I hadn’t gotten the sense that she would hold up her end of the bargain. I’d
hoped
she would. I liked to believe that people would do what they say they would do. But I hadn’t fallen into the trap of trusting it would happen this time.

Like I’d told her that night on the phone, I knew her. That meant I knew just how ridiculously inflexible she could be sometimes, especially when it came to pushing people away before they got too close. My guess was I’d already gotten closer than she’d wanted to let me, and that had scared her, so she was pushing back.

Now I had to figure out how best to go about breaking down her defenses. I tossed my pads into my stall and grabbed my duffel bag, debating my next step.

“Jonny!” Burnzie called out from the other side of the locker room. “Come have lunch with me.”

A lot of the boys had already left for the afternoon, but he and a handful of the others were still hanging around. Burnzie hadn’t been involved in today’s practice. He’d had a maintenance day today, coming in for some physical therapy to treat a lingering knee injury that had been plaguing him for the last couple of months.

He was the kind of guy who couldn’t stand to be alone. He needed people around him all the time or he would start to go stir-crazy. Considering that, I’d never understood why he didn’t at least have a roommate to keep him company in his enormous home. Burnzie owned what might be the biggest house in all of Portland, although calling it a
house
didn’t come close to doing it justice. It was really more like a massive mansion, built into the side of the Willamette River. It was big enough that my whole family—Mom, all three of my sisters, and I—could easily live there together and never run into each other, but it was just him and his dogs in all that space. He was always having parties there, with as many of the guys from the team as would come, plus God only knew how many other people from around the city. Probably so it wouldn’t feel so big and empty all the time.

Of all the guys on the team I might choose to go have lunch with, he was pretty much the last I would have thought of. It wasn’t that I disliked him. I just wasn’t so sure he and I really lived in the same world all the time. I liked my peace and quiet. I liked my modest house. To me, there was a time and a place for a party, and it wasn’t every single weekend in my home.

I had to eat lunch, though, and I didn’t know where I would find Sara since she hadn’t answered my calls. I’d been thinking about going up to the hospital to visit Scotty and see if I would run into her there, but whether she’d be there right now or not was a crapshoot. Going out with Burnzie seemed like as good an option as any. I could try calling her again after, and hopefully then she would answer.

“Yeah, let’s get out of here,” I said, shrugging on a T-shirt.

He wanted to go to Kells, an Irish pub in Old Town that he claimed had the best shepherd’s pie known to man, and the corned beef and cabbage was supposedly good enough to write to his Irish grandma about. I didn’t particularly care where we went. I wasn’t picky. We left my truck at the practice facility since it would be on his way home after we had lunch.

He parked in the lot across the street, and when we walked through the door of the pub, the host greeted him like an old friend.

“Your usual booth?” he asked, grabbing two menus from behind his stand and heading toward the back corner of the bar without waiting for an answer.

“When have you ever known me to sit anywhere else, Tony?”

“Never. It’s still polite to ask.”

The bartender looked up and waved at him as we walked by. They were treating him like he was family or something. How the hell often did he eat here?

There were only a handful of other patrons in the place at this time of day, even though it was a Saturday. It was later than most people would eat lunch but too early for the dinner crowd. We slid into our booth, the one closest to a small stage in the corner. It looked like they had live music, probably regularly, and all of the TV screens over the bar were tuned to sports news.

“It’s been packed in here during your games,” Tony said. “Standing room only. Nice to see the Storm back in the playoffs.”

“Not as nice as it is to
be
back in the playoffs,” Burnzie said. He’d been with the Storm a couple of years longer than I had. Long enough that he’d actually seen some playoff action early in his career. I’d only seen the playoffs from back home in Winnipeg, watching it on TV. That was nowhere near the same thing as playing in them. I was a little closer now and could tell that without even touching my blade to the ice.

“They gonna shorten your suspension?” Tony asked me. I must have given him an odd look because he kept talking, trying to explain himself. “You’re Cam Johnson, right? They can’t really suspend you for ten whole games. It wasn’t
that
bad, what you did. Besides, it’s the playoffs, man.”

“It
was
that bad.”

“But come on. Ten
playoff
games? I thought they always treated suspensions so that two regular-season games were the equivalent of one playoff game. That’d mean you should get off after five. You could maybe be back before this series is over.”

I didn’t see any point in discussing this. The suspension was automatic. The hearing had already come and gone. “It is what it is,” I said.

“You could appeal to the commissioner,” Burnzie said.

Which was exactly what my agent, Jim, and the coaching staff had all encouraged me to do. That wasn’t me, though. I wasn’t the kind of guy who thought he should get off easy for whatever reason. I preferred to take the consequences handed down to me, whatever they may be, and move on with things.

I looked at my menu to redirect the conversation. That kind of talk made me uncomfortable. Burnzie took the hint, and we ordered our food. Tony headed off to inform the kitchen what we wanted and to bring us our drinks.

“So.” Burnzie sat back against the bench, taking up a casual position that looked anything but casual. “Some of the boys are worried about you. Zee, Soupy, Webs, me…a few of the others, too. I wanted to see where your head’s at.”

“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just what it sounds like.” He shrugged. “Look, I’ve been suspended before. Zee has, too. We know what it feels like, how it can make you beat yourself up. Plus, you’re not really hanging out with the boys right now. Jens said you were pretty much always up in your room on the road unless something was going on that you were required to be at. You wouldn’t go out for a beer. You didn’t tag along even though you weren’t going to drink or go find some guys to hang out with in some other capacity.”

That was about Sara, though, not about beating myself up. I didn’t know how she’d feel about me telling anyone else what was going on with us, though. She’d probably told Dana and the other girls by now, but that didn’t mean that any of the guys knew, and it didn’t mean she wanted any of the guys to know.

Besides, then there was the whole issue of how the boys would feel about me being with the coach’s daughter.

I shook my head. “I’m not beating myself up.” Except over what to do about Sara, but that was another matter entirely.

He raised a brow. “Then what’s going on?”

Tony came back and delivered our drinks. “A couple more minutes on your meal.”

When he was gone, I leaned forward, resting my elbows on the table. “Nothing’s going on.”

“Bullshit. I’ve known you four years. You’ve never been like this—so withdrawn from the rest of the guys. You’ve always been quiet, but this is different.”

It was different. He was right about that much.

“There’s a girl,” I finally said, steering clear of who that girl might be.

His eyes lit up with that, and he gave me one of his trademark smiles that always seemed to make women melt. “Nice. So at least you have a good reason for avoiding us, then. Sexting, that sort of thing.”

I gave him a noncommittal grunt in response. It seemed like that was enough, at least to appease Burnzie.

Tony brought our meals out, and soon we were eating and talking about the Trail Blazers’ NBA playoff series, and all thought of me and whatever was going on with me was pushed to the side.

At least for now.