Pipe Dreams

by Sarina Bowen

  There were murmurs of agreement while everyone slugged back water and tried to stay loose. Beacon did some stretches, and then it was time to get back out there.

  As everyone predicted, their opponents were downright pissy about the ejection. Things got chippy right away, and the game devolved into a hairy melee with a lot of artless potshots taken all around.

  Beacon watched Leo Trevi get slashed in the back by a Tampa stick when the refs weren’t looking.

  “They’re desperate,” Beacon reminded the sweaty rookie as he skated by. “We like that.”

  “Right,” Trevi said through clenched teeth.

  It was a brutal period, but scoreless for Tampa. When the ref caught one of their opponents’ illegal checks, Brooklyn got a power play and used it to score one more goal.

  When the buzzer sounded, it was Brooklyn over Tampa, 2–0.

  The minute he followed his team back into the locker room, Georgia Worthington scurried up to him. “The network has your face in the clip they spliced together about the Skews ejection. And the journalists are asking questions. I’m going to have them come into the dressing room to ask you what happened, okay? Because if I put you on the dais at the press conference, that makes the incident seem like some kind of Bruisers strategy.”

  “Huh. Okay.” He stripped off his pads and tried to shake off his exhaustion. Georgia was a clever girl, and her instincts had never steered him wrong. Talking to reporters didn’t sound like all that much fun, though.

  “What do you plan to say about it?” Georgia pressed. “They’ll want to know what made you prod the ref over Skews’s behavior.”

  “I’ll just say that I didn’t want my daughter to think that hockey players were homophobic. And that we don’t ever use that word.” That made for a pretty good quote. He liked the sound of it. “If they press me, I’ll say that Elsa and I have close friends who battle discrimination, and it bothers us.”

  “Or it saddens you,” Georgia suggested. She was always massaging their language to make them sound more approachable.

  He chuckled, grabbing his jersey and hauling it over his head. “Fine. I’m saddened.”

  Sure enough, he was saddened to find three sports writers and a cameraman waiting by his bench when he came back from the showers. “Is this where the party is?” he joked, grabbing his suit pants. “Give me sixty seconds and I’m all yours.”

  He ducked back into a more private area near the showers to change, so his ass wouldn’t end up on television. Then he came back and put on a shirt while all three journalists asked their questions at once.

  “Why did you ask the ref to consider a different penalty for Skews?” “Was it part of a strategy for Brooklyn?” “Are you involved with gay rights issues?”

  “I heard the comment, and I didn’t like it,” he said slowly. He buttoned his cuffs and looked into the camera. “My child is a hockey fan. She was watching the game tonight. We talk about discrimination at home, so it, uh, saddened me to hear that word at the rink.”

  Georgia gave him a wink from behind the cameraman.

  “If a player dropped a racial slur in a game, he’d be punished, right?” he continued. “This was exactly the same thing.”

  “It didn’t hurt that Tampa lost one of their best players,” suggested a male reporter who was scribbling on a notepad.

  “I had no idea what the officials would decide,” he said, trying not to sound pissed off. “I wasn’t thinking about the outcome—only that his language wasn’t something the league should condone.”

  Georgia gave him a thumbs-up. And she was smiling, so he decided to quit while he was ahead.

  “That’s all I really have to say about it. Thank you.” He turned around and grabbed his tie off a hook. “I can hear my phone ringing,” he added. “That’s probably my little girl wanting to talk. So if you’ll excuse me.”

  The reporters scattered as they often did when he played the single dad card. But his phone was ringing. He fished it out of his bag and took the call. “Elsa?”

  “Daddy! You are amazing.”

  “Thanks, baby.” At least one fan was happy with him tonight. Sitting down on the bench, he stuck a finger in his ear so he could hear better.

  “You could totally read his lips, too. It was so nasty.” She was talking really fast. “I was like, here we go again! And then they threw him out of the game! And then you won!”

  He chuckled. “I didn’t know that would happen—the ejection.”

  “Hans and I had an extra root beer to celebrate. I don’t know if I can sleep now.”

  “Good try,” he said. “Go to bed, sweetie.”

  “I love you, Daddy!”

  “Back atcha, baby.”

  “Hans wants to say hi.”

  “Okay.”

  “Hallo, Beak,” Hans said a moment later.

  “How’s it hangin’, Hans?”

  The German hipster laughed. “That was . . . something else. It was fun to see.”

  “Yeah. Crazy, right?”

  “I don’t know what to say. Thanks for taking a stand.”

  “You don’t have to thank me. Lot of people would have said something. And now I’m going to be accused of doing it just to gain advantage on the ice. So that’s gonna be fun.”

  “Ja?” Hans laughed. “Tell ’em you did it for your gay roommate.”

  “Uh-huh. Think of the headlines.”

  He laughed again. “Good night. I’ll pry Elsa’s phone out of her hands now.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  He hung up smiling.

  EIGHTEEN

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

  MAY 2016

  When Lauren got back to Brooklyn, the first thing she did was to push back Nate’s China trip into late June. Her old hockey-watching habits had kicked in hard, and she had a gut feeling the Brooklyn team would win this series and advance to the Eastern Conference Final.

  And, weirdly, she wasn’t sure she minded. Maybe she wouldn’t admit it aloud, but it was fun watching her boys win again.

  She’d caught herself thinking of them as her boys again, just like in the old days. For the past two years it had hurt too much to think of the team that way. But lately she felt more relaxed in their company. Now that she and Mike were on speaking terms, it wasn’t hard for her to walk into the players’ lounge in the headquarters on Hudson Avenue, handing out the media kits that Georgia’s publicity office had prepared.

  “Hey, Lauren,” Castro rumbled as he took his copy from her hands. “Do I really have to read this thing?”

  “It’s a free country, hot stuff,” she said, surprising herself with her own cheerful tone. She sounded like the Lauren of years past—the one who teased the players instead of snapping at them. “But if you don’t show up to the right press conference after the game tonight, you’ll have to answer to Georgia and Tommy.”

  She even gave Mike a smile as she handed him a copy. And she didn’t let her eyes linger on his darker ones, or feel the heat of his heavy-lidded gaze on her.

  Not much, anyway.

  The players had spent the morning with the coaching coordinators or with Ari, the massage therapist. The Brooklyn HQ had the feel of a war bunker this week. It was all hands on deck. Meals were catered into the lounge so that nobody had to leave. The publicity office was overrun with calls, which meant support staff of all stripes were pitching in.

  The thrum of play-offs fever had reached even Lauren’s frigid heart. From Becca’s desk, she helped out with whatever needed doing, while also keeping tabs on the e-mail chain regarding all the current projects in New York. She and her boss were burning the candle at both ends, looking out for the team’s needs while chatting with their Manhattan colleagues all day.

  She kept an eye on the sports headlines, too, even though it wasn’t her job to worry about t
he Bruisers’ news. There was plenty of chatter about the incident in Tampa. The league had fined Skews for his comments, and the player had issued a stuttering apology, asking for forgiveness from whoever he’d offended.

  Twitter lit up with commentary. Much of it was supportive of the sanctions against Skews, but there was a lot of ugliness among hockey fans complaining about “PC bullshit” and favoritism.

  There was some taunting to the tune of: Brooklyn can’t win without getting our best players thrown out of the game.

  Fans would say anything at all. Lauren was used to it. But around noon on game day she saw a blog post that made her skin crawl. “Tampa’s Best Move Would Be to Take Out Mike Beacon.”

  It was on a skanky site—not a real news outlet, and it was obviously click bait. But when the commentary loaded, her blood pressure spiked anyway.

  Saturday’s drama aside, everyone knows Brooklyn’s real weakness. Their goal bench is the thinnest in the NHL. Without Mike Beacon they’d be down to Silas Kelly. Kelly was an early-round draft pick that hasn’t panned out. Early last season he had a few good nights, but always chokes as the season progresses. He’s never stood between the pipes during a play-offs game.

  Tampa fans are probably all fantasizing about a Mike Beacon injury tonight. He’ll be watching his back for sure.

  It was the most irresponsible piece of tripe Lauren had ever read.

  She forwarded the link to Georgia, then just sat there at her desk, stewing over it. Georgia’s reply was swift.

  I saw it. Just smack talk.

  Sure. It was smack talk that had been retweeted nearly six hundred times before five P.M. But who was counting?

  At six o’clock, Lauren accompanied her boss to the arena. She didn’t avoid the place anymore, but watching the action would be stressful for brand-new reasons.

  When the game began, it was a brutal one right from the first face-off. Both teams skated as if they had something to prove. And they did. Lauren found herself unaccountably nervous. Maybe it’s the hormones, she told herself. The medication she’d just started taking was probably to blame for the nervous stirring in her stomach. Standing in Nate’s box, watching the boys fly down the ice, it was hard to remember that she wasn’t supposed to care about this team anymore.

  For more than a decade of her life she’d watched fifty games a year. And well before she and Mike were ever a couple, her eyes used to always come to rest on the goalie. She knew his stance so well she could draw him with her eyes closed. His long limbs were loose, waiting to spring into action. Even the set of his shoulders as he watched the action was familiar.

  In a month, or six weeks at the latest, this exciting detour into her old life would be finished. She might be on a jet to China, with prenatal vitamins in her carry-on.

  Tell that to her thumping heart. Tampa made an unlikely shot on goal. She stopped breathing as Mike lunged for it. It smacked safely into his glove, but not before her heart nearly failed.

  In front of her, Nate sat watching the game with an expression as calm as Buddha’s.

  “How do you stand it?” Nate’s father asked, putting a hand on his son’s shoulder. Nate’s parents were visiting from their home in Iowa, where they were school teachers. Lauren had met them several times already. They were lovely people.

  “The tension is killing me!” his mother squealed. “Not that I understand much about the game.”

  Nate, being Nate, just shrugged.

  Lauren couldn’t sit still any longer. She popped up out of her seat and stalked over to the food table where Georgia hovered. As Lauren watched, she grabbed a cheese puff and took an eager bite. “I can’t take it,” she said, chewing. “We have to win.”

  “I know.” Lauren nabbed a cheese puff, too, and took a bite. “Let’s eat our feelings.”

  Georgia laughed. “Glass of wine? I’m on my second.”

  “Sure,” Lauren said, feeling reckless. All her old habits were already thrown to the wind. What was one more? And she would probably be giving up wine soon.

  Not to mention hockey.

  She let Georgia pour her a glass of sauvignon blanc, and then the two of them watched as closely as they dared while the game ground onward.

  If she keeled over from stress tonight, her obituary might as well read: Death by game III in the second round.

  Down on the ice, a fight broke out between Brooklyn’s Crikey and the other team’s scrapper. The fans stood up at their seats and cheered. Lauren held her breath until Crikey shoved the other man down to the ice, and the refs broke it up. But the players kept chirping at each other even as the linesmen hustled them back to their teammates.

  “Looks testy down there,” Georgia said, chewing her lip.

  “It does. That won’t be the last fight of the night. I think we’ll see one each period, and a record number of penalty minutes, too.”

  “See, I always forget that you grew up in a hockey household like I did.”

  Lauren used her best bitch voice, but tonight it was meant to be ironic. “Well, I obviously haven’t treated you to enough of my insightful commentary.”

  Georgia grinned. “You should watch more games up here with me, even after Becca is back. There’s always room for one more.”

  “I’ll do that,” she said before realizing it was never going to happen. The invitation was nice, but she knew she couldn’t follow through. These weeks with the team were cathartic. They were helping her to let go of some of her own grief about times gone by. But if she stuck around she’d just end up staring at the goalie’s well-padded backside all night, trying not to imagine how things might have been different.

  That wouldn’t be healthy. Not even a little.

  The game ground onward. It was 1–1 near the end of the second period, and she and Georgia were practically dancing a nervous jig. Lauren was on her second glass of wine and Georgia had finished all the cheese puffs.

  The door to Nate’s box burst open and Rebecca marched in. “What’s the score?” she demanded.

  “One to one,” Lauren and Georgia said in unison.

  Nate turned around in his seat, his face unreadable.

  “Don’t start,” Becca said immediately. “It’s not that late and I can’t sleep if the game’s on.”

  He turned around again, his focus back on the ice.

  Becca grabbed Georgia’s wineglass and sipped from it.

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to . . .”

  “Shh!” Becca silenced her. “It’s one sip. Don’t alert my jailer.”

  Georgia fetched a soda for Becca and then fixed her with a stare. “How’s it going, anyway? I haven’t heard much from you since the party in Bal Harbour. Are you still staying at Nate’s?”

  “Nope.” Becca took a long sip of the soda, and Lauren could swear her eyes looked a little shifty. “Back in my own apartment.”

  “Okay . . .” Georgia waited for more information, but none was forthcoming.

  She was spared from further grilling because Tampa got the puck away from Trevi and turned toward Brooklyn’s defensive zone.

  “Baby, no!” Georgia yelped.

  Everyone in the box tensed as Tampa rushed the net.

  They fired on Mike, who deflected a shot off his stick. But the rebound was tight, and he had to dive for a second one.

  Nate’s box held its collective breath while Brooklyn tried to clear it. Tampa took aim again and two players charged the net—Skews and his left wing. When the winger shot, Mike slapped the puck away.

  And then Skews plowed right into the goalie.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Nate said, losing his calm expression for once. “Don’t you dare start a . . .”

  He didn’t even get the words out before Mike threw off his gloves and lunged for the other man.

  • • •

  Mike hadn’t really lost h
is cool in a long damn time. But when the asshole he was now famous for benching so recklessly ran into him, he just snapped.

  Later, he wouldn’t even remember dropping his gloves or skating out of the crease. There was just the guy’s stupid smirk, and the pounding desire inside Mike’s chest to knock it off his face.

  There was no skill to his attack, it was all just adrenaline and instinct. He grabbed Skews’s sweater and swung. The punch connected, but not well. And once his opponent shook off his surprise, he was swinging, too.

  Mike ducked and then switched hands, punching the other man in the face mask, which flew off. The next thirty seconds were a blur of fists and grunts. His face stung and his right hand was killing him. Maybe the fight lasted sixty seconds, but it felt like an eternity before Skews finally lost his footing and fell, bringing Mike down on top of him.

  The refs jumped in to pull them apart, and Mike was left panting, his pulse wild.

  He hadn’t been in a fight in three years. And wouldn’t this be fun to explain to his child?

  There was blood dripping off his face. He knew he looked bad when Henry—the trainer—skidded out on his street shoes to take a look at the damage.

  Fuck.

  “I’m fine,” he insisted even before Henry reached him.

  The guy pressed a cotton pad to his cheekbone and winced. “You can’t play when you’re bleeding everywhere.”

  “There’s four minutes left in the period,” Mike said, skating backward. “You can have me then.”

  Henry fussed a minute longer. But then he stepped carefully off the ice, and play resumed.

  Mercifully, the last four were played at the other end of the ice. Somehow the fight had lit a fire under his guys. They skated like demons, which led to an ugly goal by Trevi in front of the net with less than thirty seconds left in the period.

  Yaaas! They had the lead!

  The doctor and the trainer clucked over him like hens during the intermission. They used some kind of nasty medical glue to seal up his face.