Rooster: A Secret Baby Sports Romance (7 page)

Just before we line up to begin, Kowalski skates over to me. He’s the captain of our team and an even bigger cunt than the rest of them.

“Don’t fuck this up, Irish”, he politely informs me, his stick pressed hard into my chest.

He’s about a foot shorter than me but as wide as a fucking door, which makes him look like a bowling ball. He’s had his nose broken so many times it looks like it’s on upside down and his eyebrows meet in the middle. He can play but he’s as ugly as fuck.

I swipe the stick away, and then grab it and pull it quickly towards me so Kowalski gets jerked along with it. He’s up against my chest, chin up and neck tilted back before he can do anything about it.

“When I’m done with everyone else, I’m going to come for you, in the night if I have to, when you’re sleeping. I don’t mess around, Kowalski, and I don’t like being threatened. You do your job and I’ll do mine”, I say.

Finally, he manages to pull himself away from me. “Fucking asshole”, he says and skates into position.

I get looks of disbelief from all of the players, ours and theirs, in turn, aggressive chants from the crowd and head shakes from the official. Francis has his hands up against the cage, an insane smile plastered across his face, other members of the management and training team sat down behind him wondering what the fuck he’s done bringing me here.

No one thinks I can do this. The teams, the papers, the public, the word on the street is one game and I’ll be so embarrassed I’ll leave myself. One minute and I’ll be on my ass, my nose broken and my teeth spinning on the ice like marbles.

We’ll see.

I love being put to the test and I thrive in pressure situations. If there is one person who can make this world their own, it’s me. I know how to win and I know how to get what I want.

This is it. Sticks down, eyes up, game on.

The puck drops, the audience explode in a wave of noise and everything around me melts into a blur.

Izzy

It feels weird to be back here, even weirder that one of the players is the father of my child and doesn’t even know it. I’m sat with the die-hard Rangers fans, enough rows back from the cage that neither Rory, nor the rest of the technical and managerial staff will be able to see me here.

I still have no idea how I’m going to do this. Actually, I have no idea whether I’m going to do this at all. I didn’t really think past the coming here bit, so the rest is a little fuzzy still. For people that share a human being together, we have said remarkably few words to each other, and because I never thought I’d see him again, I never really thought about what would happen if I did.

I’m here because my situation has left me with little other option, and Rory has a right to know he has a son in this world. That doesn’t mean I want us to repeat what happened in the alleyway, it just means it’s time for Rory to take financial responsibility for those incredible few minutes we shared.

Another week has come and gone, another half a dozen interviews without success. If I want to continue living in this city, and move forward instead of backward, I need someone to help me do it. I don’t want Rory to take Oscar back to Ireland with him, and as scared as I am of that happening, it’s a risk I have no option but to take.

I need a new apartment. I need enough money to pay for childcare. I need to pay for doctor’s bills and medication and if I can’t do any of that, I can’t be a mother to my son in the way that he deserves, and the way that I want to be.

I need Rory, and it isn’t fair, now that the opportunity has presented itself, for me to keep the news about Oscar quiet.

He may tell me to fuck off back to where I came from. He may deny it all and want nothing to do with me. He may not remember the connection we had in the same way at all, but I can’t leave it any longer before finding out.

I still can’t believe it and I’m not the only one. Everyone in this crowd is calling for Francis’s head. Rory is a huge man, but he’s not a professional ice hockey player and even before the game has started it shows.

He’s competent enough on the skates, but it’s clear he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing. As far as I can tell he’s had one week to come up to speed, and everything else he’s bringing over from his own sport, a kind of bloodthirsty cross between rugby, lacrosse, and field hockey.

He clearly knows how to handle himself, whether he knows how to do it while skating on ice is another thing entirely.

I fully expect him to get wiped out as soon as the game begins. The Bruins are dirty players at the best of times, most of all when they have something to prove, and I know they’ll want to target him specifically, even if it means losing the game, just to make an example. It’s no secret that every single hockey player from New York to San Francisco is up in arms about the transfer, even more so because Francis has decided to put him immediately into the first team on a salary even higher than some of the veteran players.

They don’t like their sport being mocked, even less by an Irish ex-con whose talent seems to lie solely in his physique and disposition for violent conduct. It’s a little hypocritical from some of the players, but from others, I can see where they are coming from.

I’ve been a fan of this sport for as long as I’ve been able to stand up, and I’ve never seen anything like it. Rory might be the king of hurling back in his own country, but here he’s starting as nothing more than a pawn. It’s a sacrifice Francis seems willing to make, even if it’s costing him a million dollars for the pleasure, and as they line up for the start of the game, Rory looks every bit as complicit.

Francis could well be going mad. The Rangers were at the tail end of a downward slide when I was here last year, and this season looks every bit like that promises to continue. The money to pay for Rory’s contract could easily have brought in two talented journeyman players, which might have been enough coupled with some tactical nous to shift things around in their favor. We’ll never know now, because what Francis has brought in instead, is an Irish ex-con, the father of my child and easily the biggest player on the field, even if he has no idea which position he’s playing in.

This is going to be interesting.

I just hope he survives long enough to collect at least the first month of that promised money, because if not, I’m going to have to work out a whole different plan for my future with Oscar.

Rangers have no chance of winning anything this year, and they wouldn’t even if they had the best player in their league to bolster their squad, so as long as Rory isn’t completely shit, there’s very little he can do wrong. All he needs to do is keep his head down, work hard, stay out of trouble and fall in love with the idea of being a Daddy.

If he’s anything like that microcosm version I saw of him too, I’d be very happy for him to stick around even longer. If he’s not, I’m also happy to have a repeat of that fucking awesome night. Again, it’s been way too long for me, and with Oscar, I don’t see that changing all that soon, not unless Brad grows some balls and comes back, but to be honest, out of the two, I know who I would choose without hesitation.

I’d choose the man in the middle of the rink, pounding seven bells of shit out of an opposition player, his stick laying on the ice to the side of him, completely and utterly forgotten, the game stopped already and the official and the official's assistant doing everything in their power to pull them apart.

What can I say? I like real men, even if they have no idea how to play hockey.

Rory is sent to the penalty box a bunch of times in the first period, but not before he makes it absolutely clear to every single one of the opposition that he’s here to do a job, whether they like it or not. Two of their player are injured in the first five minutes, one with a twisted knee from falling awkwardly and the other knocked out cold completely, which almost leads to a full on riot, both on the rink and within the crowd. It’s not exactly sportsmanlike but I’m not too bothered, the Bruins have consistently done the same over the last ten years and it serves them right to get a taste of their own medicine for once.

Rory seems to be fighting more than he is skating, but it’s having the desired effect. Even with time spent in the penalty box, the Bruins can’t seem to gather themselves enough against the onslaught, and while trying to work out how to get past this new Irish mountain, Kowalski slips in and steals a couple of goals.

It’s ugly hockey but it seems to be working and at the end of the first period, for the first time in a long time, the Rangers are actually winning.

It’s difficult to work out what people are making of him. It’s clear he’s having an effect on the game, but the crowd around me seem to be wary that even though the Rangers are winning, the way Rory’s playing jeopardizes that lead unnecessarily. When they filter onto the rink for the second period, it’s clear that Francis and the rest of the technical team seem to share that opinion.

Rory is still ready to engage in a fight when the opportunity presents itself, but he’s definitely much more subdued. He seems more confident on the skates too, a little bit quicker on the ice and happy to move forward into the opposition half even if he knows it’ll take him longer to get back.

Nobody passes to him, though, so he only gets the puck when it breaks free or when he’s able to steal it out from an opposition player, which he seems to be more than capable of achieving. When he gets the puck, which is much less often than I would like, he looks like he’s absolutely unstoppable. No-one can wrestle it off him, and he moves the stick so deftly he makes it almost impossible for someone to nick the ball out from underneath him.

A little over halfway through the second period, the ball breaks free after an attempt on the Ranger’s goal goes wide and Rory smashes a player into the wall to pick it up, driving mercilessly through one of his own players intent on doing the same. Leaving them both on their asses in his wake, and traveling slowly because of his lack of experience on the ice, he fends off two of their largest players, swatting them away like flies, while protecting the puck expertly and advancing on the goal.

With the whole crowd on their feet around the cage, Rory flicks the puck up into the air, bounces it along the shaft of his stick quick enough that no-one has even had a chance to guess what he’s doing before it’s too late, before smashing it with the full force of a speeding truck at a thousand miles an hour towards the goal.

It’s too quick for the goaltender to react in time, and with a thud that resounds around the stadium like a bomb going off, the puck catches him square on the helmet, cracking it dramatically and knocking him unconscious and flat on his ass. Kowalski is the quickest to respond, and with a simple tap in makes the score 3-0 in Rangers favor.

It’s an incredible bit of individual brilliance and I can barely believe it. I know little to nothing about hurling, other than the fact that they use sticks, and often finish games with fewer body parts than they started with. I never knew that bouncing a puck on that stick was something Rory would have any idea how to do, and I guess neither did anyone else because they certainly don’t seem to have expected to see it.

The goaltender has to be stretchered off the field for treatment, while Rory works the crowd as though he’s already won the game, and every single player, Rangers or Bruins alike, look at him with their
is this guy even human
eyes. April doesn’t even have that look in her locker, and if she does, I haven’t seen it yet. Perhaps that’s the look I gave him the night he took me into the alleyway.

When the game resumes, a third substitution on for the injured goaltender, the Rangers crowd is more animated than I’ve seen for a long time, the visiting Bruins supporters completely stunned.

There are calls to the referee to send Rory to the penalty box again for another infraction, but this time the officials let the game continue, even though there is clearly fighting from both sides.

Rory doesn’t seem to be affected by the violence of the game, and every time he skates past slowly enough that I can see him, it’s clear that he’s smiling underneath his helmet. He’s like a big puppy dog let out to play with a bunch of kittens, and what for them seems rough, is just Rory being a little bit over excited.

Sometimes he even helps the players up from the ice after knocking them down, only so he can knock them down again more quickly.

It’s great to watch, for everyone who isn’t a Bruins fan, and it’s the most fun I’ve probably had here for as long as I can remember. Even his own players seem to be taking to Rory’s particular brand of hockey, even though it’s nothing they’ve ever seen in their lives before.

No-one’s even seen anything like this before, either in this sport or any other.

Rory doesn’t come out for the last period, which results in an ear-splitting chant for his return, Francis is happy not to give in to. They give away a sloppy goal, and it's clear that without Rory to bully the opponents, the two sides are more evenly matched.  

When they pull another goal back and it goes 3-2, there is a little mini resurgence from the Bruins supporters, that’s quickly quelled when Rangers break on the counter attack, make the game 4-2 and push it out of the reach of the visiting team.

It ends 4-2, and Rangers net their first win of the season, the first win in any competition, anywhere, for months.