On the Fly (7 page)

There wasn’t any
good reason why I should be the one to speak up.
Not now. Not while the Seattle Storm was behind in this game by a
goal.

I wasn’t the captain anymore—they’d
given that position to Harry. He’d been sent back to the AHL after
being called up to Portland with me last season. It was supposedly
so he could get more seasoning and experience as a leader. This was
exactly one of those moments when he needed to step up and take the
reins.

I was only going to be here for the
rest of this game, having already played the first two games of my
conditioning assignment. I ought to leave it to him, to let him
figure out the best way to lead his team. I was here to get back
into game shape. Nothing else. But I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
It just wasn’t in me to be silent. Like Zee, I’d always been a
leader everywhere I went. Unlike Zee, I didn’t have the wherewithal
to keep my trap shut when it needed to be.

I kept my head down,
staring at the tape around my wrist. “Those fuckers are winning
right now because we’re leaving the
D
out to dry,” I said. My voice was
quiet, but all the talk in the room dropped off instantly. “They
aren’t a better team than us, but we’re letting them look like it
because none of our forwards are thinking about anything but
scoring. Everyone knows we can fucking score. That’s not the
problem. The problem is keeping the damn puck out of our own
net.”

I finally looked up and saw Harry
staring at me with a look of pure relief. His name wasn’t really
Harry. It was Cody Williams, but everyone called him Harry because
he looked like Prince Harry—bright-red hair that made me think of
Rachel Shaw and her kids, who were the last people I needed to be
thinking about right now. I needed to be thinking about what else
had to be said to these guys since I’d taken it upon myself to
speak up.

Harry should be the one talking, but
he was sitting there and looking at me like I’d just saved the
day.

“
This isn’t my team
anymore, boys,” I finally said. I made sure I was staring right
back at Harry, just as hard as he was staring at me. “It’s your
fucking team. I’m heading back to Portland tomorrow, and the lot of
you are stuck with each other. You can either keep playing for
yourselves, focusing only on your own game and how best to make
yourself stand out to management and scouts, or you can start
playing like a fucking team, like Glen wants you to play. And I can
tell you one more thing,” I said. I couldn’t seem to make myself
stop. “The best way to get their attention is by playing within the
system and making that work for your game, not by trying to be a
showboat. That means the forwards need to fucking help the
D
. We need to score
another goal, yeah, but we also have to keep the damn puck out of
our own net.”

After that, I finally shut up. My
silence was overdue. Way overdue.

The horn sounded, signaling that we
had two more minutes before the third period would begin. That
meant we had to get back out to the ice.

“
Let’s get back out there
and take it to them!” Glen Garner said. He was the head coach here
in Seattle. He’d been the coach here last year, too, when I
was
the team captain up
until Jim Sutter put in the call for me to join the big
club.

Glen was all about motivation and
teaching. He was never the sort of coach who’d yell at you or
berate you for all the things you were doing wrong—like I’d just
done. He was more the guy who’d tell you the things you were doing
right, and then point out a few things you could do better. In a
way, they were the same thing. But it was always nicer to hear
criticism worded in a way that didn’t feel like an
attack.

I liked him. He was a great
guy to have coaching the young prospects. When you’re first
learning how to be a professional athlete, it’s important to have
someone in your corner. If you were on Glen’s team, he would do
anything and everything he could to help you, even if what was best
for
you
wasn’t
necessarily ideal for the rest of the
team
. He wanted every player to
perform to the top of his abilities, whatever that meant, while at
the same time finding a way to use those abilities to help the club
as a whole.

He’d done some of that with me last
season, suggesting the NHL club take me instead of one of the
younger guys when all the injuries started piling up. I probably
wouldn’t have been offered the contract I had been without that
nudge from Glen.

During this conditioning assignment,
he had been giving me all the top-line minutes Jim had promised I’d
get, but I couldn’t wait to get back to Portland. I hadn’t been
able to get Rachel Shaw out of my mind, especially with the way
she’d blushed right before I left and the knowledge that she was
going to be living right across the hall from me.

Yeah, she was far from the type of
girl I’d usually date, but maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. And
there was the definite complication of her kids and all that having
them around would entail. But I wanted to see her again. I wanted
to find out why she didn’t date. I wanted to convince her to date
me. I wanted to make her blush again, because she looked even more
beautiful when she was blushing.

I probably wanted that last one a
little too much. She had this porcelain, china-doll skin, and with
those freckles, it turned the most amazing red when she blushed—so
deep the freckles almost disappeared.

It didn’t help that Babs had texted me
a few days ago to tell me how he and Razor had helped her move in a
bunch of boxes and set up her furniture, and that she’d fed the two
of them. Hot dogs and mac and cheese—exactly the sort of meal kids
like, and exactly the sort of food young guys like Babs and Razor
still crave, even though it wasn’t what they should be fueling
their bodies with.

At least it meant that Babs got to
eat, though.

And at least she got some help with
things a woman didn’t need to do by herself. Moving furniture and
boxes was hard work even for big, fit guys.

I needed to stop thinking about her so
much, especially right now. I had the last period of this game to
worry about—twenty minutes of hockey where I needed to play to the
absolute best of my ability, especially after telling these guys
how they hadn’t been, laying it all out there.

The boys all got up and started
heading through the tunnel to the ice. One goal wasn’t too much to
make up, not with the bunch of highly skilled offensive prospects
the Storm had playing.

Glen held me back for just a second
before I could skate out with the rest of the guys. “You said
exactly what they needed to hear, you know?”

“
Yeah,” I mumbled. I knew
they needed to hear it. But they needed to hear it from one of
their own, not from me.

“
Just keep playing like
this when you get back to Portland, okay? Don’t change anything
about your game.”

I nodded and started to push past him,
but he held me back again.

“
Don’t brush me off on
this,” he said. “Hockey is just hockey, no matter what level you’re
playing at. You were trying too hard earlier in the season. Last
season, too. That’s why you got hurt.”

He was right, and I knew
it, and it pissed me off. I didn’t know how to
not
try too hard, though. Not when I
needed to show the world that I belonged, needed to prove to Jim
Sutter that he hadn’t made a mistake in taking a chance on me,
needed to prove to myself that I wasn’t destined to be a career
minor leaguer, nothing more than a journeyman going from team to
team and league to league in a desperate attempt to prove my
value.

“
Yeah. All right,” I
said.

Glen slapped a hand on my shoulder
pad. “At this level, you’ve got all the confidence in the world.
Just take that back to Portland with you. Slow the game down. Let
it come to you. You’ve been trying to force it, and that never
works.”

I kicked the toe of my skate against
the locker room wall, not looking at him. “It’s easy to say those
things, but it’s fucking hell to actually do them.”

“
Yeah.” He headed down the
tunnel. “But that’s why you’re making the big bucks this year.
You’ve got to figure out how. So do it.”

If only I had a clue how to let
go.

I got on
the road early Sunday morning, well before dawn, not even
sticking around for breakfast with the boys I’d been hanging out
with for the last week. I didn’t see any reason to stay in Seattle
any longer than I had to, even though I didn’t have to be back in
Portland to join the NHL club until Monday. Besides, I still felt
weird about having been the one to speak up last night when it
should have been one of them.

By the time I got back to the condo, I
was ravenous. Once I’d parked, I grabbed my suitcase and made my
way to the elevator. It was only after I got into the building that
I realized I should have let Babs know I was heading home so early.
They had had a game last night, too, one on the road, so it would
have been a really late night. More than likely he would be
sleeping in this morning, considering today was a scheduled day
off.

I doubted he had a girl over or
anything like that, but how was I supposed to know without having
talked to him? We didn’t have any rules in place about overnight
guests. I made a mental note to talk to him about that sometime.
Soon. Just in case. Better to have it all out in the open than to
run into an awkward situation. He’d probably never stop blushing if
I interrupted a private moment with Katie Weber or some other
girl.

I got off the elevator at the twelfth
floor and made my way down the hall. I was almost to my door when
Rachel’s opened and her little boy came out carrying a plate piled
high with pancakes and sausage links. He had a huge missing-toothed
grin that made him look like a hockey player.

Out of habit, I let my tongue slide
over the flipper tooth on the bottom row of my own teeth. I’d been
wearing it for over a decade. Someday, after I retired, I’d get
something more permanent put in place. There wasn’t much point in
doing anything permanent now, though, when I could lose more teeth
at any moment.

The boy’s sister followed right behind
him with a bowl of fruit salad. She wasn’t smiling, and when she
saw me she looked flat-out alarmed. “Mommy?” she said warily,
looking back into the open doorway.

Shit
. I didn’t want to scare the kid.

“
I’m on my way. Y’all go
on,” Rachel called from inside somewhere. “Let’s surprise Mr.
Jamie.”

Hearing her voice again, that sexy
accent, shouldn’t have affected me like it did. Despite that,
hearing Babs called “Mr. Jamie” had me laughing out loud. The fact
that she was going to feed him again made me want to kiss her. Damn
it, I had to stop thinking about kissing her. At least while her
kids were around. Still, I guess Rachel had taken to heart what I’d
said about him potentially burning the building down.

The little boy didn’t seem fazed by my
presence in the least. He waltzed right over to stand in front of
my door, but he didn’t have a hand free to knock. “Hey, Mister,” he
said, cocking his head way back. “Can you knock for me?
Please?”