I kept my eyes on his, not blinking.
“So here’s what I want the D to do in the third period: I want you boys to fucking talk to each other, and to Hunter, and to your forwards. I want you talking the whole time you’re out on the ice. And I’d fucking better hear you doing it from the bench, loud and clear enough that I know what you’re planning on doing. Got it?”
Kids that are first learning to play hockey always balk at the idea of talking to each other on the ice. They think it defeats the purpose because then the other team will know what you’re planning to do. What kids don’t realize, though, is that the other team is talking to each other, too, and so it all balances out.
That was just one of those old habits that most players tended to forget about every now and then, though—a lesson we needed to relearn.
All the guys in the room made grunting noises of acknowledgment, including me. If he wanted me to talk, I could damn well talk. Before long, the boys might start calling me Chatty Cathy instead of Burnzie, if that was what he wanted.
Bergy kept staring at me until I gave him a nod.
“Right,” he said. “That’s settled, then. So we’ve got them right where we want them, as long as we can stay ahead by at least a goal. I’m not happy with a one-goal lead, though, so Zee…” He moved over to the whiteboard as he spoke and picked up a dry-erase marker to illustrate his points as he outlined what he wanted the forwards to do.
All season long, Bergy had shown himself as a coach that was willing to make mid-game adjustments based on hunches, stats, or whatever the hell he noticed happening out on the ice, and tonight would be no different.
I made note of the tweaks he wanted the D to make on our breakouts based on how the Panthers’ forwards were circling like vultures, waiting to pounce on a mistake. I made sure I understood what he wanted from our forwards, too, because that would affect everything I did on the ice. I even listened in when he told Hunter not to leave his crease to gather in the puck unless everyone else on the ice was on the opposite end of the rink. All of those things were going to play into how I went about doing my job the rest of the night.
But none of it was as important as his demand for us to talk to each other out there, at least more than we had been so far.
When we headed back out to the tunnel for the third period, Bergy was waiting by the locker room door. He slapped me on the back. “You especially, Burnzie. I want to hear every fucking word out there.”
I knew why, too. I was an assistant captain. I had to set the tone for the rest of the boys.
Colesy and I headed out to center ice along with our third line, since Florida had sent out their skill guys. The pair of us, plus Soupy, Henrik “Hank” Markusson, and a twenty-year-old Russian rookie named Vladimir Berezin, had been matched up against these clowns the whole night to shut them down. So far, we’d kept them off the score-sheet. I had no intention of letting that change, even if Colesy and I were still getting to know each other’s tendencies.
I honestly thought Bergy was asking a lot of Vladdie, putting a kid who only knew about five words of English out on his top checking line, but so far so good. Granted, he wasn’t just some kid. The guy was as big as Cam “Jonny” Johnson—who was a big motherfucker in his own right—and still growing, for fuck’s sake, and had all sorts of skill. He’d be a top-line player in a couple of years, but he was already skating like a bull in a china shop out there. If you didn’t get out of his way, he’d bowl you over or prance around you, and the next thing you knew he was right up in your goaltender’s grill. He hadn’t figured out how to elevate his shot yet, though. But once he had that down? Everyone had better watch the fuck out, because the kid was coming.
When everyone was in position, the official dropped the puck. Hank drew it back straight to me, hitting me square on the tape, and the game was back on.
I started up ice with it, but the Panthers’ forwards were buzzing. They needed to get back into the game, and they were willing to take risks to do so. We didn’t need to take risks. All we had to do was stay calm and collected, keep doing what we’d been doing—only with more talking.
Jonathan Huberdeau, one of their hotshot young wings, was all over me. Every time I’d try to find a lane, his stick would be there. I tried to force a pass over to Colesy, but Huberdeau was ready for it and Colesy wasn’t, and the next thing I knew I had to turn on my jets to get the damn puck back.
I managed to poke-check it away from him before he got a shot off, but that forced our entire team to move back into our zone to defend. Now we had to break out again.
“Burnzie!” Bergy shouted. He was standing up on the bench, both hands cupped around his mouth. “I can’t fucking hear you.”
Because I hadn’t fucking said anything. Damn it.
“All right,” I shouted to the boys, loud enough that I knew they’d be able to hear me halfway up the lower bowl in the arena. “Let’s do this.” The Panthers were forechecking like crazy, trying to get the puck away from me, and it was all I could do to play keep-away.
No matter how hard my guys tried to create a seam for me to slip the puck through, though, there wasn’t one to be found.
“Wheels!” Colesy shouted at me, and I knew exactly what he wanted me to do. There wasn’t going to be a pretty passing play to get the puck to the other end of the zone. He wanted me to skate the thing out of danger, keeping it safely on my stick.
I didn’t see any other option at the moment. Hell, I was half out of breath from trying to skirt around Huberdeau and company.
Soupy and Hank headed up ice. Vladdie didn’t know what wheels meant yet, but he caught on pretty quick when he saw his linemates heading the other direction and me coming toward him with the puck. He made his way out toward center ice, too, accidentally-on-purpose bumping into one of the Panthers’ forwards on his way. The kid needed to be careful about shit like that or he would get called for interference. He got away with it this time, though.
Even though Huberdeau was stuck to me like glue, I managed to keep the puck on my stick until I got across center ice. Vladdie looked anxious to get it, so I shouted his name so he’d know it was coming and sent it his way. He bulldozed into the zone as soon as it hit his tape, and I took up my position by the blue line.
When I came off the ice at the end of my shift, I glanced at Bergy. All I got was a wink in return. At least a wink was better than a glare.
RICHIE AND BC were both snuggled up against me in their usual spots—BC stealing half my pillow with one paw resting on my cheek in a sweetly possessive kitty embrace, Richie under the blankets and curled in a tight ball next to my hip, his tail draped up over my body and tickling me with gentle movements. They were both purring contentedly when my phone rang.
I didn’t even have to look to know that it would be Keith. No one in my family would call me at this time of night, considering they were all halfway across the country and likely had been in bed for hours at this point. Most of my friends were on the East Coast somewhere, so they were equally as unlikely. There was Tanya, of course, but if Tanya needed anything she’d wait until tomorrow. She was the only person on the West Coast who I’d really become friends with as of yet. I’d been too busy trying to settle in to my new position, getting the lay of the land in this new city, and sorting out what this next phase of my life would be to go out and meet people.
I blinked in the dark as my eyes came open to find Richie’s green cat eyes glowering at me in the moonlight because someone had dared to disturb his snuggle time. As if I had any control over when someone else would call me. Silly cat.
“Sorry, buddy,” I murmured as I rolled over to grab the phone off my nightstand. “Hello?” I said into the receiver.
“I didn’t wake you up, did I?”
He even sounded like sex on a stick, damn him, his voice all deep and husky, and a little gravelly, as though maybe he had been the one to just wake up. All it took to get my lady parts thrumming was a simple sentence uttered
in that voice.
“Not me,” I managed to say, forcing my thoughts back to the here and now, where Keith Burns definitely was not. “Just my cats.”
“Cats? As in plural? I only met the one.”
“Yeah, you met BC. You might never see Richie. He’s scared of his own shadow, or at least he would be if someone gave him the idea.” Hence the curling up beneath the blankets, so if anyone else were to come upon us, he would be well masked as nothing other than a large cat-sized lump under the quilt.
“You sleep with them?”
He sounded merely curious, not bothered by the idea. He hadn’t let his dogs sleep with us last night, but I got the distinct impression that they were used to being with him all the time. Especially the little dog. She acted like she wanted to be with him constantly, no matter what. I had to wonder how she reacted when he had to travel. She might be one of those dogs that acted out on separation anxiety by tearing things up.
“You try telling a cat that they can’t be where they want to be,” I said, laughing and pushing all my worries about his dogs and their behavior out of my mind. It didn’t matter how she reacted. Not really. When I laughed, BC stretched his head over and licked my cheek, close to my ear. I laughed harder and pushed him away, not that it did any good. He got up, moved even closer than he was before, put both his front paws on my face as though to hold me still, and licked me more insistently.
“I like the sound of your laugh,” Keith said. “It’s rich. Husky. Sexy as all hell.”
Damn. So he was thinking along those lines, too. The way he said it made me flush with heat, all my thoughts racing back to last night. I needed to redirect the conversation, and fast.
“Did you have a good game?” I finally forced out.
“Good enough. We won.” His tone was low, like someone whose team had just lost a game.
“Winning should be good. You make it sound like it was bad.”
“Colesy and I had a rough go early in the game. We got better as it went on, though.”
“You and Cole are partners or something?” I really didn’t know the first thing about hockey or how it worked, beyond the fact that it was played on ice and in teams. I doubted I’d ever seen a game, and if I had it was so long ago that I couldn’t remember anything about it.
“We’re a defensive pairing, or at least we are for now. When one of us is on the ice, usually both of us are.”
“Defense. Okay, so like in football? You only go out when the other team has the ball…er, puck?”
Now it was his turn to laugh. “No, not like in football. In hockey, both teams always have a goaltender, defensemen, and forwards on the ice.” A couple of sharp barks sounded in the background, and he shushed his dogs. “I’ve got tomorrow night off,” he said after a minute. “You could come over and we could watch a game together on TV. I could explain it to you, and we could go shopping and have dinner, and…” He let his voice trail off in obvious invitation.
There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that he was thinking about a lot more than just having a meal and explaining the finer intricacies of how hockey was played, and I cringed at the idea of shopping with him. Nonetheless, there wasn’t any point in denying that the thought of spending another night with him filled me with a tingling, yearning sensation that I was going to have a heck of a time getting rid of. If he was going to have an opportunity to open up to me, then we would have to get together some more. The prospect of another night in his bed was enough that I was willing to give him at least that opportunity.
“If you don’t have to teach a class,” he added when I was too busy mulling everything over to answer him right away.
“I’m done with all my classes by four tomorrow,” I said. Actually, I was done with my last class by two, but then I had a private session scheduled with Devin Shreeve after my students left for the day. Keith didn’t need to know all that, though. He didn’t need to get too far into my personal life until he was willing to let me into his, at least a little bit.
“Can I pick you up at the studio, or should I come to your apartment? And do you like Irish food? There’s this pub downtown that I love. I could take you there for dinner. Great corned beef and cabbage, or shepherd’s pie, and the chocolate cake—”
“Keith?” I figured I’d better interrupt him now so I could answer these first questions before he added a dozen more. And the last thing I needed to hear about was chocolate cake. That only made me start to crave some, and I couldn’t afford to give in to those cravings right now. Not when I was going to be performing again soon.
Yeah, it was only one performance. But still. One job could lead to more. I needed to keep a closer eye on my diet than I already had been.
“Yeah?” he said after a moment, laughter evident in his tone.
“Pick me up at my apartment at five. I need to take care of my cats before I go out.” Especially if I wasn’t going to make it back until sometime the next day. “And Irish food is fine,” I added. I came from an Irish family, even if we were several generations removed from living in that country. When my siblings and I had been kids, Mom had loved to break out the old family recipes that had been passed down through the years, at least every now and then. You could say I had grown up on corned beef and cabbage.
“All right. And I’ll be sure to bring you home again so you don’t have to take the trolley.”
“Sounds like a plan to me.”
“Sounds to me like a date.”
Yeah. It sounded like that, too. It sounded a lot like a date, and I couldn’t help but feel both nervous and excited. Now I would never be able to get to sleep tonight, thinking about all the things that tomorrow held in store.
“WAIT!” TANYA’S SHOUT came from the office as I was about to head back into the studio for my session with Devin. “Come back here for a minute. I need you to do a fitting with the costume as it is now, so they can make adjustments or whatever.”
I rolled my eyes, hating the idea of having someone poking and prodding and trying to make me look good in something I had no chance of looking good in, but still I changed course and headed into the office.
Even though I’d been sure I wouldn’t get any work out of that class I’d gone to with Devin, I’d been wrong. There was a big show he was putting together in a couple of weeks. Dancers from all over the city, coming from every dance background imaginable, were going to be involved—and he’d asked me to work with him on a specific piece, just the two of us. He wanted to pair his contemporary background with Latin ballroom to make something new and exciting, something different than you would normally see, and after he’d discovered what I could do in his class, he’d said there was no one better to do it with than me.
I wasn’t so sure about all that, but I was willing to give it a try. The simple fact of the matter was that however much I might enjoy teaching dance, there was nothing that could compare with actually dancing, using my body to do the things I’d spent so many years training it to do. Try as I might to convince myself that I wasn’t equally thrilled and anxious about being on stage again, I couldn’t push the jitters aside. I felt like jumping beans were filling my belly, and they didn’t seem likely to go away until the show actually happened.
Being properly costumed was simply one step on the path to meeting that end, and it wasn’t Tanya’s fault.
“Let’s hurry up and do it then,” I said to her with a forced smile, tossing my gym bag in the corner. “Where is it?”
A woman I recognized as the costumer who’d taken my measurements a few days ago stood up from her seat near the window, a garment in her hands. “Let’s go to the changing room.”
I nodded and indicated that she should follow me, and I headed for the hall. She grabbed a bag full of pins and other torturous-looking implements and hurried along behind me.
“Strip,” she said unceremoniously once we were behind the closed door.
I tugged the baggy tank over my head and let my jersey practice skirt drop to
the floor, trying to be nonchalant about letting anyone see me in my underwear, even though I was anything but. She pulled the material of the costume—made of a shimmery, stretchy blue fabric that was way flashier than I was comfortable wearing these days—over my head, carefully adjusting it around my arms so I wouldn’t undo any of her work to this point. It came down over my body and she jerked it into place. And I just about had a conniption fit when I saw myself in the mirror.
I immediately grabbed the hem and started pulling the thing off, but she stopped me.
It had an asymmetrical hem that hung to mid-calf on one side but was cut to above mid-thigh on the other. Way too high. The last thing I wanted was to be up on a stage with that much thigh showing. They’d be able to see my cellulite and stretch marks. And if it edged higher because of the movements? No one needed to see that. It was going to be hard enough for me to try to forget about my body while I performed, but to know that the whole world could see so much of what should stay hidden? No way. I couldn’t do it.
“Hold still while I pin a few adjustments into place so I don’t stick you accidentally,” the seamstress said.
“How about I hold still while you pin an extra panel into place to cover that leg a little better?”
She didn’t respond, bending her head to the task at hand as she made a few adjustments to the neckline.
That, of course, brought my attention up higher, and I wanted more than ever to cover up. There was way too much cleavage visible. Which, yes, I realized it was not only common but somewhat expected to have some leg and cleavage and whatnot showing when you danced Latin ballroom, but most people who danced Latin ballroom didn’t look like me.
I had to fight down the urge to rip myself away from her and tear that stupid dress off.
“You need to get a better bra before the performance,” she muttered through the six stick-pins she was holding between her lips. Her gaze was focused on my boobs in a way that I couldn’t recall anyone ever looking at them before, almost clinically. “One that fits you properly. This one’s clearly the wrong size.”
In the Zone (Portland Storm 5) Page 11
