“We have a situation,” I said as a way of starting the conversation.
“We do? What’s this we?”
“Your wife, uh, Bria, she posted a drunken video begging you to take her back and saying she was sorry for sleeping with your teammate.”
He stared at me with the etched-in-granite face of a goalie and said nothing. I pulled up the video, which I’d saved to my phone last night in case Bria sobered up and decided to delete it.
“Watch this video.”
Jock took my phone and stared at the screen. I could tell by his changes in expression when he got to certain parts of the video. First was disgust for her state of drunkenness, then shock at her accusations, then white-hot, smoldering anger, then his face turned to stone. I didn’t know if that was good or bad for me. He handed the phone back to me. I braced myself for another assault, but he didn’t move from his seat on the side of the bed.
“I’m so fucking sorry about this, Jock.”
Silence. No comment. No change in expression, not even a tic in his jaw.
“If I could do over that night, I would.”
More silence. More stone-faced non-reaction. He looked right through me. I wasn’t sure he was seeing anything other than what was currently inside his head.
“I called my attorney this morning. I’ll be talking to Coach at”—I checked the time on my phone—“in about fifteen minutes. I’d appreciate it if you’d go with me.”
He still wasn’t talking or reacting. His lack of response was starting to freak me out just a little.
“Jock?” I said, resisting the urge to bonk him on the head with the nearest pillow.
He blinked a few times, and his focus turned to me. I blew out a breath and rushed on with what I had to say. “Geneva and I did as much damage control as we could last night.”
“Geneva and you?” That got a reaction out of him. Odd what he was fixating on. His jaw twitched, but I was still conscious, and his fist wasn’t planted in my face. We were making progress.
“Geneva is the one who noticed the video on Facebook late last night.”
Jock’s eyes narrowed to cold, hard slivers of light. “I need to get the divorce papers filed. I’ve been dragging my feet. There’s nothing left to salvage, and I haven’t loved her for a long time.” He gulped down the rest of his coffee and set the mug carefully on an end table.
“Let’s talk to Coach and get to breakfast. If we don’t hurry, Cave will have finished off all the bacon,” I said, trying to make a lame joke.
“I have to call my attorney. I’ll be right there.”
I waited at the elevators for him. After about ten minutes, we made our way down to the lobby to meet the coach. Much to my surprise, Ice and Coop were present also. Gorst didn’t bother to acknowledge our presence. His face was grim, as were the faces of the other two. I suspected they’d already seen the video.
“In here.” Gorst’s voice was gruff as he led his small entourage into a conference room down the hall. We took our seats with Ice and Coop on one side, Jock and I on the other, and Gorst at the head of the table.
“Let’s get right to the point. We saw the video,” Gorst said.
“You have?” Jock seemed surprised, but I’d already guessed by their expressions they’d seen it. “I spoke with my attorney, and he called hers immediately. We’re demanding she take down the video if she wants some of the items she’s demanding in the divorce. I think it’ll be down shortly.”
“Thank God,” I said with relief. “Do we know if it’s leaked anywhere yet?”
“We’re keeping an eye on it, but so far, everything is quiet.” Gorst didn’t look happy about this, and I knew I had one more mark against me, all because of one stupid night with a woman I didn’t know was married to a teammate. Gorst’s expression softened as he focused his attention from me to Jock. “How are you holding up?”
Jock did a double take. Gorst wasn’t the touchy-feely type who asked about our feelings. He was all about hockey and expected us to be the same during the season. I wondered if the guy had ever had a wife or girlfriend. No one ever mentioned it. As far as I knew, he was married to the team.
“I’m good,” Jock said. “I’m sorry my wife is causing so many problems for the team. I’m doing what I can to extract her from my life as quickly as possible.”
Gorst nodded. “If you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask.”
On that note, he stood. So did Coop and Ice. They filed out of the room, and Jock remained seated. I did too, sensing he had more to say on the subject.
“I know we have our differences, but for the good of the team, we have to put them aside. I don’t have to like you to play hockey with you.”
I nodded. He wasn’t saying what I wanted to hear exactly. I’d have preferred some acknowledgment that he believed I hadn’t known who Bria was, but I wasn’t going to get that from him right now, if ever.
Jock left the room, and I sat there for a while longer before my stomach reminded me that I hadn’t eaten since dinner yesterday. Even better, Geneva might be there, and I needed to see her more than ever, even if I didn’t talk to her.
I headed for breakfast.
~~Axel~~
I entered the large banquet room where the team would have a huge breakfast buffet laid out. Even though it was only Tuesday, and we didn’t play again until Thursday, there wasn’t time to fly cross-country to Seattle and back. So, we’d chill in Miami for a few days.
When I walked into the banquet room, several heads turned toward me, and the jabbering faded away. I skirted past one long table full of teammates to get to the buffet table.
What a douche.
I snapped my head around, trying to locate the source of that remark, but every guy had his head buried in their breakfasts. Well, fuck, someone on or associated with the team had seen the video, and it’d spread through my teammates like wildfire. Probably one of the WAGs. While I liked most of them, there were a few who were gossips and troublemakers, along with a couple of my teammates.
Hard saying where the origin was, only that they’d all seen it.
I filled my plate and glanced around for a friendly face. Jock was sitting with Ice and Coop, but he wasn’t exactly a friendly face. I didn’t see Geneva. Easton waved to me and pointed to the empty seat next to him. I gladly sat down.
Easton shot me a questioning look, so I read his mind and answered him. “The team and my attorney are on it,” I said simply.
“What a drunk. I had no idea Jock was dealing with shit like that.” Steele shook his head incredulously from across the table as he efficiently chewed a forkful of bacon and eggs and scooped up another mouthful.
“Does Jock know about the video?” Kaden asked.
“Yeah, he knows.”
“What’d he say?”
“He didn’t say much other than he needs to file divorce papers.”
“That much is obvious,” Steele said.
“You must be winning him over with your boyish charm.” Easton grinned like an ass and held up a fist. The other two clowns fist-bumped with him while chortling over my misfortune.
“Fuckheads,” I growled, but my bros didn’t give a shit, nor were they intimidated by my threats.
Kaden’s phone rang, and he glanced at the display. “I gotta take this.” He leaped to his feet and raced from the banquet room.
“Her again?” I rolled my eyes. I’d never seen a guy so whipped, and I’d seen my share of buddies fall under a woman’s spell in the past few years.
“Yeah. Something’s going on, but he’s not talking,” Steele said, pausing from chewing to speak.
“He’s never talking when it comes to her,” I said. My gaze drifted to Geneva as she walked into the room and took a seat with the rest of the equipment staff. She began to talk animatedly with the guys at her table, and a twinge of jealousy reverberated through me. Geneva was so beautiful and alive. A guy would think anyone who’s confined in a room with washers and dryers t
he majority of her day would be a little more jaded, but not her. She embraced whatever the job was, no matter how mundane. Her enthusiasm was one of the things that drew me to her.
“Do we even know her name?” Steele scratched his chin and pursed his lips, searching his memory. I dragged my attention back to my bros but had to rack my brain for a moment before I recalled what we’d been talking about.
“Not me, do you?” Easton asked.
“I don’t.” I had bigger problems of my own than to worry about Kaden’s mysterious girlfriend’s name.
I looked over the heads of my teammates and caught Geneva’s eye. She glanced pointedly at Jock and back at me. I nodded to let her know I’d spoken to him and indicated everything was okay. She smiled and turned back to her comrades.
Suddenly starving, I dug into my breakfast. Despite all the shit going on in my life, stress rarely affected my appetite. I returned to the buffet for seconds.
“So, my brother didn’t murder you and stuff you down the elevator shaft?”
I looked to my right to find Geneva standing at my elbow. She reached past me with the tongs to snag more bacon and brushed my arm. Every cell in my body woke up and sang her name. I was getting into her way too deeply, unable to save myself despite the riptides and strong currents I sensed ahead.
“Not yet,” I said. “But the day is still young.” I managed a smile, and she graced me with a return grin. Just one tiny smile from her turned a cloudy day into a sunny one with birds singing.
“How did he take it?”
“Hard to say. He did admit he needed to file for divorce.”
“That’s a step in the right direction.”
“Yeah, the whole thing is fucking sad, though, especially because of the kids.” I didn’t feel good about my role in all this, despite my ignorance as to who Bria was. In fact, I felt damn shitty about what I’d done to a teammate. I might be a player, but I wasn’t the type of guy who did my playing in a teammate’s backyard.
“It is, but it’s best for everyone. I’m pretty sure the older kids knew she was screwing around on their dad. In fact, she used Teagan as a decoy a few times in order to meet with random guys.” Before we’d left on this last road trip, Teagan had admitted to being an unwitting pawn in her mother’s infidelity game.
“Now that really sucks.”
“It does. Mothers should be better than that.”
“Mine wasn’t. I haven’t seen my mother since I was nine or ten. She walked out on my dad and never looked back.”
“I didn’t know that. We have something in common. My mom ran off with a biker as soon as I came home from the hospital.”
Our eyes met, bound together by our shared misery and lack of mothering, among other more positive things.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Don’t be. She’s not worth the effort.”
Regardless, a girl needed her mother, a lot more than a guy did, in my estimation, but what the hell did I know? I’d grown up all right, and by what I’d seen, so did Geneva. Even if we did have our fears and Mommy issues.
Chapter 14—Second-Favorite Sport
~~Axel~~
I dreaded my after-practice hour with Jock today. I tried to get out of it by claiming I needed to spend extra time with a team physical therapist, but Ice overheard me and put a stop to it. I resigned myself to my fate rather than being labeled a whiner. I toweled off after regular practice and waited for Jock to finish his conversation with Coop.
While most of the veterans avoided me, they didn’t seem as angry as they had collectively at breakfast. Jock was treating me as if nothing happened with his usual animosity, so perhaps they’d surmised Bria was a liar.
I’d heard Jock’s attorney had insisted Bria remove the video. Her attorney complied with their requests, but I had no idea how she felt about everything.
Geneva gathered up towels and stuffed them in a large canvas bag. Our eyes met, and I had to smile. Just looking at her made me smile. Talking to her made my day. Imagine what fucking her would do.
She glanced at her brother and back to me. “Good luck with brother dearest. That video brought everything to the surface again. I wouldn’t want him to take a hunk out of your gorgeous ass.”
I chuckled. “Thanks, I might need luck more than ever today to keep my ass intact.” Every day after practice, she made a point of speaking to me before I started my daily torture with her brother in the net. I’d come to look forward to these short exchanges. Some were snarky, some were encouraging, and some were just pure Geneva. Either way, my afternoon wouldn’t be complete without those few words from her.
She winked at me, stuffed the last of the towels in the bag, slung it over her shoulders, and sauntered off. My eyes were drawn to that ass of hers, and I enjoyed the view until she disappeared from sight.
“Gorgeous ass, huh? Don’t let Jock see you drooling over his sister like that,” Steele said from behind me. I jumped, not realizing anyone had been around to hear our little exchange.
“Fuck you,” I said and pushed off the boards to skate out to where Jock was talking to Coop. Steele’s wicked laughter followed me.
I waited until Coop finally skated away, and the entire arena was empty. With only a nod of his head, Jock skated to the net. I dumped out the waiting bucket of pucks and began to shoot them toward the net, working as fast as I could, slamming them into the net from all directions. On the tenth one, I aimed for the spot between Jock’s legs and hit the back of the net. I raised my stick in celebration and did a little dance on the ice. Jock hated it when I did that, but I did it anyway. He’d get even more determined at that point, making it doubly hard for me to score, but I lived for the challenge.
We kept it up for an hour until we were both sweating profusely and our bodies were spent. Jock pulled off his mask and wiped his face on a towel draped across the top of the net.
“Good workout,” I said, attempting to make conversation as I had every time we finished our drills together. Usually, Jock grunted something unintelligible or cursed at me under his breath. This time he did neither.
He met my gaze with an assessing one of his own, as if he were sizing me up for the first time, evaluating my strengths and weaknesses of character, rather than my physical abilities. He almost smiled, but his eyes were as hard and unyielding as they had been. In fact, the anger and dislike so clearly written on his face every time he laid eyes on me were dimmed considerably. I sensed we’d crossed some invisible boundary, because he appeared more receptive. I had to try one more time.
“I’m sorry.” My gaze didn’t waver, and I hoped he could see the sincerity in my eyes and hear the regret in my voice. For a long moment, he held my gaze, then looked away. He picked up his helmet decorated with the caricatures and names of his five children and tucked it under his arm. I wondered if he’d had Bria on his helmet previously or if she’d never been on there.
“Sorry? For what? Hitting too many into the net?” he said with the ghost of teasing smile.
“Nah, I’d never be sorry for that. For this mess I created because I was a careless horndog.”
He leveled me with a look I really couldn’t interpret. “You didn’t know.”
I blinked a few times, almost lost my balance on my skates, and struggled to stand upright. He chuckled.
“Don’t make me stop hating you.”
“I would never think of depriving you of that pleasure.”
“Good, because if I couldn’t blame you, I’d have to look at myself and wonder why I wasn’t enough to please her.”
“No man will ever be enough to please that woman.”
“You’re probably right. Truth be told, I stopped trying to years ago.”
I indicated his helmet with a nod of my head. “Did you ever have her name on your helmet?”
He looked down at the shiny surface of his goalie mask and back up at me. “Not for a long time. We stayed married these past few years for the kids. In the beginning, she
was my life. I had her name on my very first NHL helmet. Fuck, I even have it tattooed on my bicep. Never have a woman’s name tattooed on your body.”
“I don’t plan on it.”
Much to my surprise, he kept talking.
“After the last kid was born, she had her tubes tied, and things shifted after that. We haven’t been a loving couple in years. She went her way, and I went mine. My mother left me as a child, and I didn’t want to ever do that to my kids, so we had an unspoken agreement. I pretended things were good for the kids, and she was discreet about whatever she was up to. Until you.”
He wasn’t in love with her anymore. I could tell that, but her sleeping with a teammate had stung his pride. “I’m so sorry this happened.”
He merely nodded, his face unreadable once again. Then he skated slowly off the ice. I waited for a few minutes, contemplating what’d just happened.
I might just be breaking through to Jock and healing some of the hurt I’d caused.
~~Axel~~
Following the workout with Jock, I had the rest of the afternoon and evening to myself. The team didn’t play until tomorrow night. While it wasn’t always good to leave a bunch of young hockey players to their own devices, I wasn’t carrying that Puck Brother torch very high tonight.
One of the reasons I suspected the team had sent me back down to the minors during the preseason was because of my partying and not taking the game seriously enough. This time I was all about the game, and my partying was nonexistent because of my rededication to my sport, of course, and my screw-up with Bria. My disinterest in chasing women and drinking until I passed out had nothing to do with a certain stubborn goalie’s sister. Not one damn bit.
After dinner and a swim in the hotel pool, I joined Easton, Kaden, and Steele in the bar. Kaden had ordered a huge plate of nachos and was digging into them with the gusto of a man who hadn’t eaten in days. As my grandfather was fond of saying, the guy must have a wooden leg or something. He never put on a pound. When Kaden wasn’t eating out, he was cooking. And, man, could that dude cook.
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