by Sarina Bowen
That would not be necessary, Leo decided. He pushed off toward the bench and found that his legs worked fine. The trainer stayed where he was and held the door open for him. During the ten-second journey, the rink came into sharper focus. Coach was leaning over the wall, in a full rant at the referee. “Bullshit! Major penalty. Game misconduct at least!”
O’Doul was there, too, gloved hands clenched into fists, yelling at the linesman.
The ref told them both to calm the fuck down as Leo stepped over the threshold. The trainer pushed him onto the bench and began to ask him questions.
Leo tuned him out, concentrated on breathing and waiting for the haze to subside enough for him to figure out exactly where it hurt.
“Any dizziness?” the trainer asked.
“Uh . . .” Pull it together, Trevi. “Just got the air knocked out of me. I’ll be okay in a minute.”
“Is it your head or your chest? Where’s the impact?”
“Shoulder took it pretty hard. But I think it’s okay.” Leo lifted his elbow and slowly rotated the joint.
The trainer grasped Leo’s upper arm and dug his fingers in among the pads. “This hurt?” he asked. “Lift your chin.”
When he did as he was told, the trainer’s fingers pressured collarbone, checking for a reaction. “I’m solid,” he said. “Hurts like a nasty bruise, that’s all.” I hope.
“Stretch it out for a minute,” the trainer advised. “Test your range of motion.”
“All right.” Leo took a few more breaths.
“Castro. Bayer. Crikey,” Coach Karl barked. “You’re up next.”
His teammates vaulted over the wall a second later. Karl had changed up the lines. Leo was initially grateful for the reprieve. The trainer came over again and questioned him about his head and chest. “Any lingering dizziness? How’s your vision?”
“Fine,” Leo insisted. “My head is fine.”
Someone picked that moment to deliver his helmet to him. Since he’d forgotten it on the ice, his I’m-sharp-as-a-tack argument took a hit. “Thanks,” he mumbled, grabbing the thing.
The player who’d flattened him had gotten only a two minute penalty, which meant that Coach Karl kept up his cursing. Leo turned his attention to the game, where Bayer and Castro were passing the puck back and forth in the attack zone, trying to capitalize on their power play. And Leo’s vision was fine—fine enough to see the puck go suddenly winging past the goalie’s knee and into the net.
“YES!” he yelled, standing up to see the lamp light. The fact that his team scored on the power play meant that the brutal hit he’d taken had served a purpose. The game was tied up now. They just needed one more goal before the buzzer. “We can do this,” he said, unsnapping his helmet to put it back on.
But Coach called another shift that did not include him. “I’m good to go,” he called down. “Send me out.” Even though there were only six minutes left in the game, Coach couldn’t keep rearranging the lines to leave Leo on the bench. That was ridiculous.
The coach wove his way down the bench toward Leo. He grabbed Leo’s jersey and yanked it up, then stuck his hand on Leo’s ribs and squeezed.
“Fuck!” Leo swore before he could think better of it. He practically flew backward, too, escaping the coach’s clutches. The man had grabbed him right where he’d been hit.
“Yeah, I thought so,” Coach Karl spat.
“I’m fine,” Leo argued.
“Sit on the fucking bench when I tell you to, rookie.”
Jesus. First he’d been ignored, and now he was being babied. Fucking Karl. Leo was beginning to doubt that he would ever win this man’s approval.
TWENTY-ONE
The ten seconds that Leo was sprawled on that ice were the longest of Georgia’s life.
Get up, get up, she chanted internally as the ref blew the whistle and teammates swarmed. The hit he took was ridiculously hard, and too high up on the body to be legal. The ref stopped the game. High hits were so, so dangerous. Players had been paralyzed by less.
When Leo staggered to his feet, she exhaled.
“He’s okay,” Becca whispered, reading her mind. Not that it was difficult tonight—she’d had her eyes glued to one player since the puck had dropped.
But Leo looked wobbly on the way back to the bench. On the rink, the linesmen were patrolling the ice, keeping a close watch on the faceoff circle, probably because O’Doul looked ready to blow like a volcano. Her father was practically foaming at the mouth down there, too. Maybe he didn’t like Leo, but he’d never take it lying down if someone pulled a move like that against one of his players.
Georgia divided her attention between the action on the ice and the trainer who began to prod Leo. Only when the trainer left him alone did she really start to relax.
Luckily, all that tension lit a fire under Team Brooklyn, who capitalized on their power play at the one minute mark. Bayer fired a missile right past the goalie, tying up the game. That should have changed the tone down on the ice. But at the next stoppage of play, after the penalized player emerged from the sin bin, O’Doul threw off his gloves. Down went the other dudes’ gloves, and O’Doul grabbed him by the jersey and swung.
The impact made Georgia wince. Fighting was not her favorite part of hockey. When she was younger, the fighting didn’t used to bother her. But now that she saw the injured players right after every game, she was no longer so sanguine. Fighting hurt. So when O’Doul did his thing, she didn’t like to watch.
“Thank God Leo isn’t a brawler,” she muttered. “I wouldn’t be able to stand it.”
“Yeah,” Becca agreed. “That would be a tricky thing to explain to your future children. Daddy hits the other boys at work, but you still can’t drop the gloves in kindergarten.”
“Very funny,” Georgia scoffed.
“Is it? Just let me know if I need to shop the spring sales for something to wear to your wedding.”
“Shh! Stop trying to marry me off,” she said. “So we spent one night together. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”
“Jeez, I wonder how loudly I can call bullshit?”
“Pretty loudly, apparently.” Georgia looked over her shoulder to make sure nobody they knew was listening.
“In the past two weeks, have you strung together fifteen minutes without thinking of him?”
“Sure I have.” While I was sleeping.
Becca snorted. “That’s gonna leave a mark,” she said, pointing at the action on the rink below. “Doulie just crushed that guy. Ooh, gross. There’s blood on the ice.”
Georgia didn’t want to look. She studied Leo instead. Was he sitting funny? Several times he put a gloved hand up to his pectoral and seemed to probe it. Each time he did that, Georgia escalated her worries about him. Was he bruised? Broken ribs?
Heart attack?
Gah.
She watched the last part of the game with dread in her stomach. Her father kept sneaking looks at Leo, too. It was rare for him to take his eyes off the ice like that. So Leo must be injured. Except Leo was obviously pissed off at sitting out his shifts. At one point they stood toe to toe, faces red, arguing.
Leo didn’t skate until there were only two minutes left on the clock. Georgia scrutinized his movements, looking for trouble. But when a world-class hockey player skates at 90 percent instead of full out, it’s not easy to spot the difference, even for someone as invested as Georgia was. His skating was as powerful and fluid as always. She could watch him all night.
I still love him.
Ack. Now there was a messy thought.
When the buzzer rang the game was still tied 1–1. Five minutes of overtime went up on the clock, and the ice team came out to shovel. Reluctantly, Georgia made her way downstairs to prepare for the after-game press conference.
There was a monitor in the visitors’ lounge, though, s
o she and Roger stood there, watching. After the overtime period began, nothing much happened for the first couple of minutes. But then Leo’s assailant got hung up in front of the visitors’ bench, trying to dig the puck out of a scrum of skaters and sticks. And all of a sudden Silas, sitting in his usual spot on the bench, jerked the door open.
His opponent went down fast and hard, sprawled halfway into the visitors’ bench area, his legs splayed out on the ice.
“Whoa,” Roger breathed.
Georgia moved so close to the monitor that her nose was only inches away. Nobody touch him, she begged. Emotions were running high down there, and she couldn’t even imagine the bench-clearing fight that might break out if the Bruisers bench let loose on that guy.
The next two or three seconds seemed to last forever. Georgia didn’t breathe while the player curled his body back onto the ice and then hopped to his feet.
Meanwhile, O’Doul had captured the puck and run it down to the attack zone, where he scored on a breakaway.
Georgia just stared at the monitor for a few minutes, trying to make sense of what had just occurred. Then she grabbed her Katt Phone and asked it a question. “Nate, is the bench door prank against NHL rules?”
Her phone couldn’t find much mention of the bench door in the NHL rulebook. She learned that the benches for each team were required to be of equal length, with the same number of doors—two—for each side. There was nothing about yanking the door open to make the other team’s man fall over.
How crazy.
Regardless of its legality, Georgia had a PR quandary on her hands. She didn’t know whether to put Silas in front of every reporter in the stadium, or try to hide him and downplay the incident.
She had about ninety seconds to figure it out.
Georgia ran into the empty dressing room and out the other door. The first players were just clomping off the ice and down the rubber mats. Luckily, Silas was one of the first off the rink. She grabbed his arm and spun around to walk with him into the dressing room. “Nice work out there. But I don’t want you to brag about it on camera.”
Silas grinned. “Thought you might say that. I’m gonna say it was just an accident of timing that I happened to open the door then. Didn’t know their guy would fall on his face at our feet.”
“Perfect,” Georgia said. “Now come say that out in the hallway. But I’m not bringing you into the press conference, because that makes it look too official for something that was an accident.”
“Okay, boss.” Silas removed his gloves and hurled them toward his locker. “Let’s do it.”
In the hallway, a local sports reporter pounced, and Silas gave his quote about the “accident of timing.”
“That’s really your story?” the reporter drawled.
“Sure is,” Silas said, slowing down the words to match the other man’s southern accent. “I guess it’s just the same kind of coincidence your guy had when he accidentally clocked my teammate in the head.”
Georgia bit her lip to keep from laughing, then she sent Silas back into the locker room.
Of course, his teammates knew better. Their shouts could be heard even through the dressing room door. “Silas for president!” some player yelled. “Play of the year!” hooted another.
The hallway was chock-full of journalists looking for quotes from the winning team. When Georgia put her head into the locker room, asking for O’Doul, the GM told her that he’d refused to take questions tonight.
“He’s feeling beat. Take someone else,” Hugh said.
That made her job a little trickier, but if the captain had decided he was in no mood for polite conversation, she wasn’t about to argue. She pried Bayer out of the locker room to say something about his goal. He made a little dig at the other team, something about “past grudges that some players couldn’t set aside,” but it wasn’t too bad. Tonight would not be a complete PR disaster.
Lately that counted as a win.
A lot of time went by, though, without Leo showing his face. Georgia was worried about him. She checked her phone, but there were no messages. She could always go into the locker room and ask, but if something was seriously wrong, her father would be there, too.
Rock, meet hard place.
Georgia gathered her things together and went to find the bus back to the hotel.
TWENTY-TWO
Leo was prodded six ways ’til Sunday by the doctor and the trainer after the game. They did a battery of tests for concussion, shining a light in his eyes, asking stupid questions.
“What day is it?”
“Game day!” he answered cheerfully.
“Mr. Trevi . . .”
“Thursday, I’m pretty sure. But on the road, I forget sometimes. You should ask me who the president is, or something. And I’m fine. Really.”
That went on for some time, and then they probed his ribs and shoulder, which were admittedly pretty tender. But he was used to feeling beat up after a game. “I’ll take an ice bath,” he suggested. He’d offer anything to get ’em off his back. The doctor and the trainer were also worried about cracked ribs, but Leo knew from experience that it would be a day before he was sure whether the soreness could be written off as muscle aches or not.
“All right,” the trainer finally agreed. “We’ll look at you again tomorrow.”
Leo took a quick shower, trying not to hiss when the hot water hit an abrasion on his neck. Then he went to suffer in the ice bath, as he’d promised he would. At this facility, the thing was just a plastic tub and a cold tap, which some helpful soul had running at full blast. He put his hand in the water and then wished he hadn’t. With a sigh he stepped in, one leg at a time, and then sank quickly below the surface, up to his chin.
Some people swore by the cold bath as a way of staving off muscle aches, but Leo had never been convinced that it accomplished anything more than shrinking his nuts down to pebble size. He counted to three hundred and then got the heck out of there, drying himself with blue-tinged fingers and cursing the inventor of the ice bath.
By the time he’d fumbled his shaking limbs into his suit and shoes, the press conference was over and the bus had already left with the first group of players. The dressing room was almost empty. And by the time he’d hefted his duffle bag to leave, the only other player in there was O’Doul. The captain sat fully dressed on the bench in front of his locker, his head tipped back, as if he were reading a treatise off the ceiling.
When he caught Leo watching him, his chin snapped down, allowing Leo a view of the bandages on the side of his face. “You okay, rookie?” he asked Leo suddenly.
“Yeah, sure. I’m not sure why everyone is freaking out over this hit. It’s just another day at the office.”
“Maybe ’cause you didn’t see it.” O’Doul tapped his fingers on the bench. “Looked reckless as hell. If your body had been positioned differently, coulda been ugly.”
“Good thing it wasn’t, then.” Leo took a step to the side to see how big the bandage on O’Doul was. “You okay? That looks kind of brutal.”
“’Course.” O’Doul stood up quickly. “Just a flesh wound.” His Monty Python accent wasn’t terribly accurate, but Leo wouldn’t call him on it. “Want to walk back? I don’t feel like waiting for the fucking bus.”
“Sure, why not.” Leo held the dressing room door open for O’Doul to pass through.
“Are you the last ones?” a young man with a Bruisers’ ID hanging around his neck asked in the hallway.
“Yeah, Jimbo,” O’Doul confirmed. “Thanks.”
The young man went into the dressing room they’d just vacated, probably to start packing up their gear. It felt strange to Leo to just walk away from his gear after a practice or a game. But these days it was someone else’s job to pack up his pads and his equipment and transport them to the next facility.
Weird.
/> He and O’Doul exited the rink via the back door near the parking lot. Leo didn’t know exactly where they were, but he could see some fans waiting over to the left, probably hoping the home team would come out and sign jerseys for them.
O’Doul pointed right, and the two of them wordlessly avoided the crowd in favor of a slightly longer walk around the exterior of the rink.
In his pocket, Leo’s phone buzzed. He drew it out, noticing that O’Doul did the same. “You get this text?” Leo asked. It was an automated message from the travel team, asking his location and whether he needed transportation.
“Yeah,” O’Doul grunted. “Just reply to it and they’ll leave you alone.”
Walking back, Leo texted. Thanks.
O’Doul shoved his Katt Phone into his pocket. “They’ve got the geolocation working all the time. If you ever rob a bank, leave the Katt Phone at home.”
“Good tip.”
“Though you must not be a criminal, or Kattenberg wouldn’t bring you on board. He’s the most sophisticated miner of data in the business, I’m told. He probably knows your shoe size, how many fillings you have, and your kindergarten teacher’s first name.”
“Millie,” Leo offered. “But I think she’s dead now.” They reached the main drag, and the hotel lights were almost on them. “Thanks for, uh, throwing down for me tonight.”
“Anytime. You’re wearing the sweater, I’m gonna have your back.”
Leo chuckled. “I know it’s not personal. You’d defend even the most irritating rookie.”
To his surprise, O’Doul gave him a playful check with his elbow and said, “You’re not even the most annoying guy on the team. Gotta work harder if you want that title.”
“Damn. Okay. I’m on it.” A man in uniform opened the hotel door for them, and they went inside.
“Night, college boy,” O’Doul said without a glance over his shoulder. Then he broke away, heading for the bar.
