School and Rock (Raptors Book 5)

by RJ Scott

  Simon huffed a laugh, but Maddie stared up at me, or at least the fuzzy place my voice was coming from, and let out a burbling sound.

  “You like that? Ignore Uncle Simon, he knows nothing, because I have more. See, your daddy stands or sits or whatever, in the way of pucks that can travel at velocities of well over a hundred miles an hour. Why he does that I don’t know, but it’s interesting. Did you know that?”

  She cooed again, and smacked her mouth, which I took as a yes.

  “You are such a clever baby,” I told her, and earned a smile from the guard on the floor who checked my pass, and Simon rolling his eyes.

  The guard indicated up the hallway. “Straight through and the door is marked visiting team.” We walked around the wide oval, passing all kinds of closed doors.

  “What else are you going to tell her?”

  I glanced at Simon, and he was biting his lip. Ass.

  “Well, to properly take a slap shot, which is what that hundred-mile-an-hour shot is, it’s all about energy.” I’d spent last night getting my head around the parts of hockey I could learn, like angles and velocity, and the types of energy, and the orbits of a piece of rubber that never stayed level. “The skater actually had to strike the ice just behind the puck, did you know that?” I bounced Maddie and stopped at a glass viewing platform, Simon next to me. From here we could see the guys leave the ice after their warmup, some kind of weird hockey thing happening between one of our players and one on the other team. They were standing in the middle just staring at each other, but when the camera panned in, I could see they were playing rock, paper, scissors.

  Hockey players were weird.

  “Anyway, the player’s stick flexes and all that energy is stored in the blade. As they contact the puck during a slap shot, they shift weight and flick their wrists, which is when the rotation causes the stored energy to release off the stick and transfer to the puck. Once the puck is struck, the amount of kinetic energy that has been supplied onto it, is equal to the amount of energy stored in the stick.”

  Simon shook his head, and did more theatrical eye-rolling, but precious Maddie was having the time of her life.

  It was never too early to introduce a child to physics.

  Simon opened the right door, and ushered me in. I wasn’t one hundred percent convinced that Maddie and I should have been at the game. This solid glass-walled area, was a special box just for the management team, and the wives and girlfriends of the players. I didn’t exactly qualify as a WAG, or management, but we were there, and I took a seat toward the front, leaving Simon in discussion with a tall good-looking guy who had his jacket off and his arms crossed over his chest. I supposed I’d find out who that was at some point, but right now I needed to give Maddie a feed, and we settled into the wide leather seat with the stunning view of the entire arena. The electric feeling in the stadium was intense, waves of people standing and sitting, whooping, walking up and down aisles with beer, some in scarlet and brown, but most in green, although I spotted some other uniforms. There was no segregation of fans, no one was scrapping, everyone seemed excited, and there were a lot of flags and towels.

  Towels. I have no idea at all.

  When the players came out for the actual game, Maddie had nearly finished her four ounces, and had reached that moment where she was fighting sleep and feeding all at the same time. Her rosebud mouth open around the teat. She was utterly beautiful, reminding me of those long nights when Emma was this little. I’d dropped everything to help Natalie, moved in, and just never left. In a way Emma was as much mine as my sister’s, and I had a sudden pang of missing her.

  I took an awkward selfie and a short video and sent it to Natalie, and she answered by calling me.

  “That’s so cool,” she said, but she sounded off, and I was an expert in my sister.

  “Did you check your sugar levels?”

  “Stop worrying, I promise I’m fine, a bit high is all.”

  “Natalie—”

  “We have pasta, you know what it’s like.”

  “Okay.” I knew better than to push, but I wasn’t there and I worried about her and Emma and I had this sudden urge to get home, which I had to fight. I was earning good money, enough to pay Natalie a huge amount of rent that she could use on anything she wanted. Like a retinopathy check, and proper diabetic care. Not only that, but to cover the co-pay on her insulin. It seemed as if Natalie and I scraped by from one pay-day to another, and things were getting lost in the mix.

  I needed a job with good healthcare, and after this year I’d make sure that I had one. We ended the conversation with love-yous, and a promise that I would call tomorrow and tell Emma all about the game. Apparently she was studying a hockey book right now just to learn about the game. That’s my girl.

  The game was intense. Everything was so fast, so loud down there, and I had no idea what was happening. One minute the skaters were at one end, and then in the next they were racing to the other. I couldn’t even see the puck most of the time. My first thought was how the hell they kept going for however long this game lasted. Then I noticed they switched people on and off a row of seats, and even that was a carefully orchestrated ballet of moves. Only with huge guys who had strapped-on blades instead of ballet shoes, and were pushing each other into the glass.

  It was like the Barnard 33 nebula, a dance of colors and collisions that seemed random until I identified patterns. In this game the skater moved to certain areas, and it seemed to me that even the unpredictable could be seen as predictable, and ten minutes in I was actually able to see where the puck was.

  It was thrilling, but for some reason I kept being drawn to the theatrics in goal. Not that I knew what the other team’s goalie was doing, because I never even looked at him, I was staring at Colorado and the way he dared people to hurl that black disc at him.

  He was part of the unpredictable when he taunted, and shoved, and slid, and jumped, and did the splits, and that was all in the space of a minute. A flicker of admiration lit inside me when he stopped yet another speeding puck, which if my calculations were correct given an assumed viscosity of ice, and the angle of the hit, plus the height of the player and flex of the stick, was traveling at over one hundred miles an hour.

  The noise from the game below reaching the box was minimal but there were video screens for close-ups, and every time the Raptors did anything impressive there was a lot of whooping in the box. So far Maddie had slept through the entire thing, but that had already been half an hour and they weren’t even finished with the first quarter, or period or whatever they called it. There were breaks each time the puck went somewhere it shouldn’t have been, and then breaks for no apparent reason at all, but in each break I found myself looking at Colorado and how he would circle his net while bobbing his head, as if he had a tune rolling around inside his skull.

  Then he would push up his helmet and the crowd loved it when he squirted water all over his face and then tossed back stray hair. The camera crew even slow-mo’d one of those hair flicks, and that poke of interest became something different. Something that wasn’t familiar or comfortable.

  Was it possible I was kind of turned on by the action on the ice, or more importantly by Colorado? It couldn’t have been that. Surely. I was there to do a job, and it paid well, and the longer I kept this role, the better off my little family would be and the better we’d be able to face the future. Three thousand a week was nothing to be sniffed at.

  But there was something about Colorado which messed up my focus. I knew that I was not heterosexual. I’d done a lot of research in the past, but the research wasn’t me trying things and crossing them off a list, it was all from books and studies. My conclusion was that I was a gay scientist who’d rather have been reading and learning than getting messed-up and sweaty.

  In my entire life I’d had relations with two people. One of them was Owen. I was thirteen, fresh off the back of a decisive science fair win, and he was the school rebel with piercings, a
ttitude, and a potato battery that didn’t work. What the bad boy had seen in the science nerd I’d never know, but when he’d cornered me on the way home I thought it was to pummel me, and not to kiss me. That was a kiss, plus a bit of fumbling on his part as I’d stood there like an idiot.

  Nothing ever came of Owen; he moved not long after that, his dad promoted out of state, and we spent the final weeks of us being at the same school in a game of hide and seek. Or that might have just been me. I was mortified, scared, and spent way too long in the nerds’ bathroom on the third floor by the science lab. That one place in the entire school was the only spot where it was okay to talk about all things science, and I was safe there for the most part. Of course there were often incursions from the jocks, but a judicious use of thiol kept them out, reinforced by a rumor that the geeks had covered everything with poison. Nerds 1, Jocks 0.

  Then there was Devin, my tall, sexy, bi-curious high school nemesis and the one person who’d come anywhere near me in terms of SAT scores. I’d actually made it past messing in my shorts and we’d moved ultimately in one heady afternoon to me receiving oral sex. Of course, Devin being on the football team as well as being a fellow science geek made him a unicorn, able to work both sides of the classroom wars with devastating and mesmerizing skill. It turned out the lure of Debbie Brazier’s boobs outweighed my inexperienced fumbling, and we never ever talked about what he’d done, and what I hadn’t done.

  And then college began and I’d been sucked into a universe that reached my soul. The vastness of space and every molecule of knowledge was there for the taking, and my sex life was second on the list. I didn’t know where I fit in the gay spectrum, but in my own head, and using a pure science fiction movie model, I was that quiet hero who would use my brains to save everyone. I wasn’t the one who was going to singlehandedly repopulate an entire planet. I’d never found someone who I even wanted to kiss, let alone touch in any way that wasn’t shaking hands.

  Yet, here I was staring down at the ice and I was having feelings about things.

  If anyone had asked me at that moment if I was enjoying this, then I’d probably have said something insane like “I think goalies are sexy and I think I’m having feelings about things,” so I’d already thought up an answer which would consist of few words. Yes, it was fun, thank you. The WAGs had been accommodating and friendly, bringing me nibbles and cold drinks, cooing over Maddie, but I was balancing caring for Maddie along with trying to stare at Colorado, so my conversation was limited.

  “Hi, can I sit?” I glanced up to find Heimdall from Thor staring down at me. For a second I lost my voice, because… what the hell? But then, over the shock I got a proper look at his face as the guy sat down, it was not Heimdall or indeed the actor who played him, Idris Elba, sitting next to me. He held out a hand, “Justin LaFayette, seventy-two, out of Vancouver” he introduced himself, and given that he was obviously not seventy-two, I assumed that was a jersey number, ergo he was a skater from the Raptors. I’d noticed that players tagged on their numbers, and sometimes even added things like wing, or D, or the country or province they came from, whatever made sense to them.

  “Joseph.” I shook his hand.

  “Colorado said you’d be up here and suggested I keep you company.” I got more of a sense of the Idris lookalike as he wriggled in the chair and had to manually grab at a cast to bring his leg to the front, wincing as he did so. “Told me you’d want to know what was happening.”

  “It’s okay,” I reassured him and waved at his leg, “seems like you might need the rest.”

  “This?” He glanced at his toes, “LBI, it’s nothing.”

  “LBI?”

  “Lower body injury, hockey talk, I won’t be playing in the cup run so I have plenty of games to show you everything.” He glanced over his shoulder, then lowered his voice, “If I don’t get traded first.”

  “Is that a possibility?” I copied him and half whispered, because it seemed like the right thing to say and do. In my arms, Maddie moved, and yawned, and on reflex I swayed a little, hoping she wouldn’t wake up until the official end of this period. She would need changing, and there was a small room set aside for that, but I’d just seen blonde WAG five disappear in there, and I had no idea what I’d talk about with her if she stopped to chat with me.

  “Depends, Coach is looking to move things around, and I’m seven of six.”

  “Is that like Seven of Nine?” I joked, but it fell flat.

  “No, six.” He looked puzzled. Clearly not a Trek fan then. I needed to remember that jocks were jocks, and nerds loved different things. I was embarrassed, and I don’t know why, because I was a planetary scientist for God’s sake, and just because I don’t know anything about hockey, doesn’t make me less of a man. “Are you okay?” Justin interrupted my self-validation in which I was spiraling back to high school.

  “Sorry, carry on.”

  “So, there are three pairs of defensemen and healthy scratches.”

  “Yeah,” I said, which was possibly the best thing to do although I did subtly shift away from him in my chair, because scratching sounded bad and I was in charge of Maddie. Also Seventy-two was a big man and as intimidating as Simon.

  “A healthy scratch is a player who is able to play but is kept out of the game for reasons. Then there is me with the injury.” He sighed. “Anyway, tell me what you know about the game.” He smiled at me.

  I peered at the tiny people on the ice. “Well, the Raptors are in red and gold, and the other team are in green. Plus there is unpredictable predictability, like chaos theory in work.”

  “Oh,” he said, and I thought he wanted me to say more.

  I tried to think of another fact, but a dissertation on the physics of rubber on ice wasn’t going to cut it. Then it hit me.

  “Colorado is the Raptor’s goalie, and I assume Ryker and Alex are down there somewhere,” I added.

  Justin grinned at me, then leaned forward in his seat. “Right, I know where to start.” He wasn’t put out that I knew nothing, in fact he was excited to start from the beginning.

  Who knew that hockey was played in three periods, and that they switched ends, and that what Colorado was currently doing was a butterfly? I know I didn’t. Justin sat with me through the game, kept me company in the breaks, helped me with Maddie by demanding he get a hold, and even found some tiny ear defenders that he admitted he’d stolen-slash-borrowed from one of the wives. By the beginning of the last period, with just four minutes left on the big Jumbotron countdown, I was on the edge of my seat along with Justin who couldn’t sit still.

  “What the hell?” I followed the man in green skating backward to his sin bin gesticulating at Ryker, who was just getting up off the ice. I couldn’t help being passionate; that was Ryker down there, and he and Tate had between them put up two goals in this game. The other team had nothing, and were getting more aggressive by the moment, trying everything to get a puck past Colorado. He was a brick wall and I felt a poke of pride on Maddie’s behalf that her daddy was out there doing so well.

  Justin appeared fierce, his hands in fists; he’d stopped telling me things, and his gaze was fixed firmly on the ice. He stood when the clock was down to two minutes and Dallas nearly scored, leaning heavily on the glass and tense as an iron pole. This was his team playing on the ice, and the poor guy probably wanted to be down there doing what he loved.

  “Fu—” he stopped himself cursing, and then the most curious thing happened. One minute to go and the green team goalie left the net, skating awkwardly over to the seats and that meant that…

  “Hang on,” I snapped and stood, lifting Maddie up to my shoulder, “too many men!” I exclaimed.

  “It’s okay, they pull the goalie to give more men on the ice,” Justin explained without glancing at me.

  “They can do that? How is that fair?”

  He didn’t answer, his hands flat on the glass. All the action seemed to move toward Colorado, the camera zooming in on his int
ense, focused look, then back out to the hustle in front of the Raptor’s net. Players were scrapping and pushing, and it was a free-for-all, and in the middle of it Colorado was steady. There was a shove, a player breaking free, and it was one of ours. The camera followed the break out move, the name Madsen-Rowe on the jersey dogged by what seemed to be every green team player.

  “Ryker, shoot, come on,” Justin murmured, “shoot.”

  One of the green guys yanked at Madsen with his stick, and he began to fall, but in a desperate shove across the ice, he let the puck fly and it headed straight for the opposing empty net, lighting the lamp behind.

  “Fu—Yes!” Justin let out a whoop of excitement, and by this time the rest of the management team had swarmed to the glass. Everyone cheered, because apparently there was no coming back from a 3-0 lead with only forty-seconds left in the game.

  That didn’t mean Colorado stopped what he was doing, he stayed in that net like a wall until the very last horn, and then the Raptors formed an orderly queue and went up to him to tap their helmets on his. Words flashed on the Jumbotron, SHUTOUT with Colorado’s name, and I was completely smitten by the game.

  And maybe with the man who’d just had the game of his life. I had this weird feeling that I wanted to whoop and holler and hug everyone, and jump up and down, but I didn’t because I had Maddie, and she was my responsibility. The joy in the box was infectious and I knew it was only game one of potentially seven, but Colorado was a God, and I worked for him, and by process of symbiosis I felt like this win was mine as well.