We're a little less than a month away from release for DROPPING GLOVES, so how about a look at the first chapter to whet your appetites and tide you over?
She left to follow her dreams; she’s back to follow her
heart.
Katie Weber left her heart in Portland to chase a career in
Hollywood. Now she has returned to sing the national anthem for the Portland
Storm for their annual Hockey Fights Cancer night. Her longtime crush, Jamie
Babcock, is hurting just as much as she is. One look in his eyes is all it
takes to know that. She's done the Hollywood thing, though, and she's over it,
but it might be too late to dig herself out of the hole she’s dug with him.
Jamie’s already done everything humanly possible
to let go of Katie, but she keeps coming back, and she keeps crushing him all
over again every time she leaves. His heart has been trampled on more than
enough already. At some point, he has to draw the line. Doesn't he? Only, when
it's Katie, he's not sure that's even possible. She's in Portland again right
now, but he can’t be sure for how long.
Katie knows she has a fight on her hands, in
more ways than one, if she’s going to convince Jamie she deserves another
chance, but she’s willing to drop her gloves this time. Because in the game of
love, all bets are off.
All right...without further ado, here's the first chapter of DROPPING GLOVES.
KATIE
Cancer
sucks donkey balls. Great big, ginormous, hairy ones. There’s not really
a better way of saying it, and I’d long since stopped trying to come up with
one.
If anyone
should know how bad cancer sucks, it was me. I was diagnosed with leukemia when
I was a senior in high school. That was why I was here, at the Moda Center,
where the Portland Storm played, staring out the end of the tunnel at the crowd
gathered for their annual Hockey Fights Cancer night. If I could do anything to
help even one person not have to go through all the crap I’d had to go through,
then you could bet I was going to do it.
It might not
seem like much, singing the national anthem at a hockey game, but for me it
wasn’t about the singing or the game. It was about awareness. It was about
raising money for research and treatments. It was about being sure everyone in
this building right now knew how important finding a cure was.
The teams had
already skated out for all of the pregame ceremonies, and the arena crew had
gone through all of their music and video programming to get the crowd pumped
up for the game. Not that they really needed to do much for that. The Storm had
finally made it all the way to the Western Conference Finals last season before
falling to the Chicago Blackhawks in seven games, and most of last year’s key players
had returned for this season. Expectations surrounding the Storm were high,
regardless of the rough start they’d had. Tonight they were playing the LA Kings,
one of their biggest divisional rivals for the last few seasons. With all that
going on, the crowd didn’t need any extra pumping up. They were raring and
ready to go, whether the team was or not.
But now, the
lights dimmed and the music became more subdued, and a video started playing on
the Jumbotron. Mom reached over and took my free hand, squeezing. The thing
was, this video was about me.
It showed home
footage and photographs that my parents and some of the Storm’s players had
taken over the years, images of me at various Storm events I’d been part of,
video of me skating at the team’s annual Christmas party, and other things like
that.
A song by The
End of All Things—a local band that had made it big, not to mention my favorite
band of all time—played over the montage. I hadn’t heard this one before. It
must have been from their upcoming album, which made me wonder how Tim
Whitlock, the Storm’s in-arena entertainment director, had managed to get hold
of it. Then again, there were connections between the team and the band. Brie
Burns, one of the players’ wives, was a ballroom dancer who had worked with The
End of All Things in the past.
The lyrics
spoke of holding on to the best parts of life. That, combined with the images
that represented some of the best parts of my
life, had me getting teary-eyed. Not a good thing when I was about to have
to get out there and sing in front of a crowd of eighteen thousand or so.
Crying and talking was hard enough. Crying and singing? Pretty much impossible.
Now the video
started getting to the point where my cancer came in. Me, bald-headed, wearing
various scarves to hide the physical evidence of my chemo. I wanted to look
away, but I couldn’t. This was why I was here. This was why they’d asked me to sing the anthem tonight instead of
having the in-house singer do it. Looking away wouldn’t change anything I had
been through. I’d already tried that in multiple areas of my life, and it
hadn’t worked yet.
Dad put his hands
on the backs of my shoulders and started to knead away some of my anxiety.
Normally, at this point of the night, he would be behind the bench with the
team. Dad was one of the Storm’s assistant coaches. He had been since the season
after he’d retired as a player. He was my connection to the team, or at least
he had been my first connection. But tonight was different. Tonight, he was
with me. He’d take his spot behind the bench after this was over.
Just as he started
rubbing my shoulders, an image flashed on the screen that choked me up like
crazy and caused the whole crowd to ooh
and aah. It was one of my prom
pictures. There I was, in my ice-blue dress without anything covering my head,
crying while Jamie Babcock kissed me.
I hadn’t
intended to go to my prom. Not until Jamie asked me.
He hadn’t even been
one of my classmates. He was one of my dad’s teammates at that point, a guy who
I’d had a crush on since the first moment I’d seen him. But Jamie had asked to
take me, and I would have done anything to be with him, and he’d made it
perfect for me even if I was bald and felt like an alien. When I was with him,
I’d felt like a princess.
But I’d beat
cancer, and I’d moved on with my life—going off to Hollywood to star in an
ensemble Glee-knockoff TV show called
The Cool Kids—and he’d moved on with
his. I’d broken my own heart when I’d left, and seeing that picture right now
brought a torrent of memories and emotions flooding back to life.
“Why did you
give them that one?” I hissed at my mom, trying to hold back the massive wave
that was threatening to turn to tears.
She arched a
brow and shrugged. “I didn’t.”
“Oh, sure you
didn’t,” I said. I even rolled my eyes. My sarcasm knew no bounds. No one but
my mother would have given the Storm that photo. Other than me, only Jamie and
my family had copies of it. I definitely hadn’t given it to the entertainment
people, and there wasn’t a chance in hell that Jamie would have done it. I’d
broken his heart, too, not just my own. Why would he want a reminder of that
flashed in front of his eyes right before he had a game to play?
“I wouldn’t lie
to you,” she insisted. “Not about something like that. I wouldn’t have given
them any of those pictures. They’re too personal.”
Which was
precisely my point. My mouth was open to argue with her again when Dad squeezed
my upper arms from behind. “She didn’t. Your mom’s telling you the truth.”
“Then who did?”
I demanded.
“I gave it to
them.”
“What?” Mom and
I said in shocked unison. I spun around to glare at him. Dad had been opposed
to every guy I’d ever dated, some of them more than others. He’d just about
blown a gasket when Jamie had asked me to prom. Why would he put that memory,
that relationship, right up at the forefront of my mind at a time like this?
Dad shrugged.
“Tim asked us for pictures that meant something, that would have an impact on
the crowd.” He nodded his head toward the open end of the tunnel, indicating
all the people out there who were watching in rapt silence. “That one meant the
most to me, so I thought it would get the biggest reaction from them.”
I swallowed
hard.
The song
finished, the video came to a close, and Tim’s familiar voice echoed over the
PA system in the cavernous arena. He introduced the Storm’s starters for the
night, who each skated out to take their positions. The Kings’ starting line
went out, as well. Then he introduced the Little Starter of the game before
taking a moment to talk about the military veteran being honored tonight. Both the
Little Starter and the vet were also cancer survivors. They headed out on cue,
and the vet stood on his mark. The boy skated over to stand next to Jamie, who
patted him on the head and said something that no one could hear but the two of
them.
Then Tim
introduced me. “Katie Weber has been a member of the Portland Storm family for
close to a decade now. Her father, David Weber, played for the Storm for a
number of years before becoming one of our assistant coaches. Katie spent her
teen years here, and it was here that she was diagnosed with—and beat—leukemia.
Our organization was given the task of seeing her through her own personal
storm. We watched her grow up, and we watched her leave to become a star bright
enough to shine over a much bigger world than Portland. She will always be part
of our family, no matter how far away life takes her. Now she’s returned, at
least for this one very special night. Storm fans, please join me in giving
Katie Weber a big welcome back to Portland.”
That was my
cue. I white-knuckled my microphone with both hands and headed out of the
tunnel to the purple carpet that had been laid on the ice. The entire arena was
on its feet, applauding and screaming. I’d always loved being in front of a
crowd, but I still got stage fright. Being on The Cool Kids hadn’t helped with that at all. If anything, it had
made it worse. For the last four years, I’d been doing all of my acting and
singing in front of cameras and crew. But these days when I did something in
public, the audiences were bigger, and everyone seemed to think they knew me, not the character I’d played. That
was clear enough from the number of people in the stands wiping tears from
their eyes.
Most of the
people in the audience wore the typical purple-and-silver Storm jerseys I’d
come to expect during my years here, but a few people had the road whites on,
and a smattering had on Kings black and silver. It was easy to spot the pink
Hockey Fights Cancer version of the Storm’s jerseys in the crowd, like the one
I was wearing. The whole crowd was holding up signs they’d been given when they’d
come in tonight, bearing the names of people they loved who had cancer, or
maybe people they’d lost to cancer.
Mom and Dad
followed me to the carpet. Both of their signs had my name on them.
I smiled and
waved, trying not to let the turbulence of my emotions swallow me whole, but it
seemed like a daunting—maybe impossible—prospect. I felt as if I would fall to
pieces the moment I opened my mouth to sing, but this was different from my
usual stage fright. It was bigger and more confusing, like a giant ball made up
of rubber bands, each one representing a new, massive, devastating emotion, and
the bands were contracting in on themselves. It was squeezing the life out of
me.
“Please rise
and remove your caps,” Tim said, not that there was any need for his reminder.
Everyone was already on their feet. The rest of his words were drowned out in
the unending applause. He was in the scorer’s box, the small space across the
ice from the team benches that separated the two penalty boxes. I caught his
eye across the distance, and he gave me a nod.
Nerves or not,
it was time. I took out my pitch pipe, blew into it to find my key, shoved it
back into my pocket, and did what I’d come to do. Somehow I got through the
anthem without completely shattering, which I considered an absolute coup. Now
that I was done, though, all I wanted was to run off the ice and find somewhere
I could break down for a minute. But it wasn’t time for that yet.
Tonight, the
Storm had planned a ceremonial puck drop to go along with all of the other
special events, and they’d asked me to do it. Dad took the mic and pressed the
puck into my hands. He kissed my cheek before taking his spot behind the bench.
Mom hugged me and headed down the tunnel. I wanted to go with her. I wanted to
be anywhere but here, doing anything but what I was about to do.
Because it
meant I would be inches away from Jamie.
Dustin Brown,
the Kings’ captain, came out and took his spot on one side of me. He said
something, looking right at me, but my head was filled with the buzzing of a
horde of bees, and I couldn’t make his words out. I couldn’t pay attention to
him with Jamie skating over to stand across from him on my opposite side. All
my attention focused in on Jamie like a laser beam.
In his skates,
he was even taller than normal, towering over me despite my Jimmy Choos. His
hockey pads only emphasized his muscle, making him seem larger than life. Even
with a bit of distance between us, I could see the creases in his cheeks where
his dimples always came through. With every year that passed, he looked less
like a boy and more like a man, but I hoped he would never lose those dimples.
If this had happened
last season, it would have been Eric Zellinger coming out for the ceremonial
face-off. He’d been the Storm’s captain for over a decade, but there had been
an expansion draft over the summer, and both Zee and goaltender Hunter Fielding
had been claimed by the league’s new team, the Tulsa Thunderbirds. That had left
the Storm with an opening for a new captain.
Just before the
start of the season, they’d held a press conference to announce that Jamie was
it. I’d been in a meeting with my agent, Derek Hatch, in LA when it was all
going down. We’d been discussing various auditions he wanted to send me on, the
direction he thought my career should take after the end of The Cool Kids, but I hadn’t been able to
focus on anything Derek had said. My phone had kept buzzing with updates about
Jamie and the Storm until, eventually, Derek had sent me on my way and told me
to get my head straightened out so we could make a plan.
Easier said
than done.
So now, here Jamie
was, looking at me with that same hurt look in his eyes that I’d seen every
time I’d come back to Portland in the last four years.
The look I’d
put in his eyes.
The look that
ripped me apart.
The pain in his
gaze might even be more intense than usual right now. Probably because of that
damn prom picture Dad had given them for the montage.
Jamie glanced
over his shoulder toward center ice, then looked back at me with a wink. “They’re
ready, Katie,” he said, indicating the slew of photographers and videographers who
had lined up opposite us.
I nodded,
swallowing down my feelings, and dropped the puck.
He gathered it
up while Brown shook my hand and gave me a friendly, cursory pat on the
shoulder. Then Jamie handed the puck back to me and wrapped me up in his arms.
I almost let
out a sob. Almost. He’d hugged me countless times before, but this was
different. He had all of his hockey gear on, the pads and whatnot, and I could
hardly feel him underneath it all. We
were touching, but it felt distant. Cold. I shivered, wishing I could draw
closer to him and feel the warmth of his heart.
He pecked me on
the cheek, causing an excited titter to run through the crowd, but it was ice
that skittered through my veins. I wasn’t sure if the coldness was from him or
from me, or simply because of the mountain range that stood between us these
days.
“I’m glad
you’re here, Katie,” he said, his voice all rough like gravel crunching under
Cam Johnson’s pickup truck. His words were so quiet I could barely hear him
over all the arena noise. He sounded completely unlike what I was used to. He
gave me a grin, just enough to make his dimples pop out momentarily, and then
he skated away.
“Me too,” I
murmured to his retreating form, only I wasn’t entirely convinced that he’d
meant it. None of this would have felt so detached if he really wanted me here.
I was pretty sure—almost positive—he hoped I would be on a plane tomorrow,
flying back to LA or maybe to New York like Derek wanted. It had to be easier
for Jamie if I wasn’t here. I knew that, for me, it didn’t hurt as much without
the constant, daily reminders of what I didn’t have. It was easier when we were
apart.
My cheek
tingled where he’d kissed me. I locked that up in my mind as tightly as I held
the puck he’d handed me, while I walked across that purple carpet and back
toward the tunnel. Several of the guys on the team skated over to shake my hand
or kiss my cheek as I left, and Dad caught my eye and winked. I didn’t hear
anything they said to me, though. My head was too filled with fading memories
and a confused outlook on the future.
Derek hadn’t
wanted me to come here at all. You’re
bigger than this, he’d told me as he passed over a stack of scripts and
another pile of travel arrangements. He expected me to get on a plane tomorrow,
fly to New York, and make my mark on Broadway. To go to all the auditions he’d
arranged for me. To follow the path he’d laid out for me, just like I’d done
every step of the way for the last four years, despite that I’d hated so many
of the things he’d asked of me that and I was still uncertain what I wanted.
Coming here might not have
lined up with my agent’s plans for my future, but it had accomplished one
thing: I was more confused now than I’d been in a long time, and that could
only mean that there was something here worth sticking around for, even if I’d
end up heartbroken again.
JAMIE
Katie
spun around and flew past her mom like a flash, racing away from the ice
like a winger on a breakaway. I was pretty sure that picture from her prom had
hit her as hard as it had hit me, so it didn’t surprise me that she was running
off like that. There was a chunk of me that wished I could do the same. I didn’t
have that kind of freedom, though. I had a game to play, so I had to get my
head screwed back on straight.
Not such a
simple thing to do with the knowledge that Katie Weber was still somewhere in
the building. She was close enough I could still feel her essence lingering
around me and only hoped that she wouldn’t stick around too long on this visit.
The longer she stayed, the more of me she would take with her when she
eventually left again.
Because she
would. Leave. She always left.
I’d told her years
ago that she should go and chase her dreams, so I couldn’t really blame her for
doing the very thing I’d suggested. But fuck if it didn’t hurt like a son of a
bitch every time she showed up and smiled at me like nothing had changed.
She wanted us
to be friends. There was a part of me that wanted that, too—being her friend
would be better than not having her in my life at all, or so I thought—but it
was hard to do when I saw the way she let her boyfriends treat her.
At the moment,
she might not be dating one of the shitheads she’d hooked up with in Hollywood,
but it didn’t matter. That didn’t mean she was kicking them to the curb and
making room for me, for the way I really
wanted things to be between us. The fact was, Katie wasn’t going to stay in
Portland. She was an It Girl now, a Hollywood
starlet with people clamoring for her attention, and that meant she needed to
get back to Hollywood so they could keep fawning over her. Her show had been
cancelled, but it was only a matter of time before she got cast in something
else, and then she would be gone again. Out of my life. Probably dating some
new asswipe. Leaving me to be the brooding bastard I’d become.
Enough years
had passed that, as long as she was away from Portland and not on the news too
much, I was able to push her from my mind. I hadn’t watched The Cool Kids because that was a wound I
didn’t want to open, and sometimes TMZ left her alone for a stretch. As long as
she didn’t hit the mainstream news too often, I could almost pretend she had
only been a dream. It wasn’t too bad, then. Without having her around, I could
be the same guy I’d always been instead of the miserable grump I turned into
when she was here but I couldn’t have her.
Like now.
I tried not to
be that guy, but it was hard to brush things off when it felt like someone was
stomping on all the broken pieces of me to be sure they were a puzzle I would
never be able to put back together.
“Hey,” my
brother Levi said. He was a couple of years younger than my twenty-four—he and
Katie were the same age—a defenseman in his second year with the Storm. He
tapped his stick on my shins harder than necessary to get my attention. “Earth
to Jamie. Game’s about to start. Stop chasing after her in your fucking head.”
I gave him a
terse nod and took a quick lap around our end of the ice to refocus. We were
only a couple of weeks into the new season, my first as the captain of the
team, and things had started off badly for us. There wasn’t any good reason for
it, either.
We’d had some
turnover in personnel on the ice from last year, but not too much. Zee and
Hunter were with the Thunderbirds now. A couple of guys had changed in free
agency, and there’d been a trade involving a few of the younger guys who hadn’t
fully found their spots on the team. But the core that Jim Sutter, our general
manager, was building around was all still intact, the coaches hadn’t changed,
the systems were exactly the same… Essentially, there was no good excuse for
why we’d taken a slide in play to start the year. Tonight, we needed to get
back on track, and as the captain, it was up to me to set the tone for the rest
of the team.
It was time. The
carpet had been removed from the ice, and all the photographers were gone. The
officials were in place, and my linemates, Riley Jezek and Aaron Ludwiczak,
were already skating to center ice for the opening face-off. I headed over to
join them, pushing aside all thoughts not relevant to the game at hand.
The puck
dropped, and the Kings won it cleanly back to Matt Greene, one of their defensemen.
I was closest to Greene, so I went straight for him and laid a bruising check
on him, dislodging the puck so that either RJ or Luddy could grab it and we
could get to work.
The crowd went
wild as Greene went down hard. He was a big body. Hitting him like that had
been enough to rattle the teeth in my head, so I knew he’d felt it more than
he’d been prepared for. Luddy stole the puck and cycled it with RJ. I shook off
the impact and skated in to join them. After a hit like that, my head was fully
in the game. I couldn’t afford to think about Katie Weber right now.
I had work to
do.
“That’s
a bad fucking call,” Mattias “Bergy” Bergstrom, the Storm’s head coach,
shouted as the ref who’d blown his whistle skated by our bench. “You fucking know
it, too. Brown was diving.”
The ref turned
his head and shouted a few choice expletives back in Bergy’s direction, neither
backing down nor admitting he might have made a mistake. It was a mistake, though. We’d been guilty
plenty of times tonight, but in this instance, it wasn’t our fault. Levi just
happened to be near Brown when the guy lost an edge and went down. Guilty by
proximity.
The basic gist
of the ref’s response was that Bergy needed to stop complaining and get his
team to play a clean game, or else. There were a lot of implications at play in
the or else part of that equation. The
team could be issued a bench minor and we would have to kill off yet another
penalty. Bergy could get fined by the league for abuse of officials. They could
probably kick Bergy out of the game if it came down to it. There were lots of
ways for this to escalate, and none of them would be good.
“Fucking dive,”
Bergy said under his breath, but at least he stopped there. He wasn’t the sort
of coach to lose his cool with the officials, not like our former coach, Scotty
Thomas, had always been. Scotty had been more than a little hotheaded. Bergy
was the type who tended to calmly let everyone know what he thought, setting
the example he wanted us to follow.
He usually
reserved his yelling for specific moments and specific individuals. Zee had
been on the receiving end of it a lot, but Bergy didn’t usually yell at me. He
got his point across in other ways, like keeping my ass planted on the bench
when I fucked up.
Regardless of
all that, right now it didn’t matter if the other guy had dived or fallen or
what. The only thing that really mattered was that Levi was on his way to the
box for a phantom tripping minor, and we had to kill our seventh penalty of the
game—a game that we were trailing by a goal. We were only halfway through the
game, but we’d already been penalized more times than we should have been in a
full sixty minutes, at least if we wanted to keep Bergy happy. Still, there was
a lot of time left on the game clock, which meant there was a lot of time for
us to either fuck up some more or get our collective act together.
“Keep your
fucking head in it, 501,” Andrew Jensen shouted across the ice to Levi. “We’ve
got this.” Jens clearly thought we were going to be able to straighten up and
pull ourselves out of the hole we’d been digging. Or maybe that was just the impression
he wanted to give off.
At times like
this, there was a part of me that wondered if Bergy and Jim had made the right
choice in naming me the Storm’s next captain. I never knew what to say to help
the boys out. Guys like Jens and Keith Burns were a lot more vocal. They always
knew the right thing to say, and Burnzie had even been an assistant captain already
for a long time. Shouldn’t he have been the new captain? Or maybe Soupy, who had
been the other assistant captain for the last few years. Any one of those guys
would have made more sense than me, along with at least a half a dozen other players
on the team.
None of them were
wearing the C on their chests,
though. I was, and I didn’t have the first fucking clue how to lead this team.
We went to a TV
timeout, and I made the mistake of looking up at the Jumbotron. Through the
whole game, every time there had been a break, they’d been making more tributes
to cancer survivors and doing things to draw attention to the warning signs
someone needed to be aware of when it came to their own health. This time, they
had a camera on Katie up in the owner’s box. She was sitting with her mom and
several of the guys’ wives, each of them holding up a sign with a symptom of
leukemia printed on it. Katie looked like she was a lot more relaxed than she
had been when she’d left the ice, but the last thing I needed was to start
thinking about her again. Not right now.
I turned my
head away to stare at the ice in front of me.
“You dated
her?” Grant Wheelan asked me. Wheels was a guy Jim had brought in over the
summer to mentor me. I wasn’t sure he could teach me how to lead this team any
better than Zee had in all the years I’d been watching him, but maybe he would
surprise me. Mainly Wheels just talked to me a lot. So far, the biggest thing
I’d learned was to do things the way I wanted everyone else to do them. Lead by example. Wheels had drilled
those three words into my head every chance he got. He also liked to remind me
I was supposed to be having fun, not taking everything so seriously all the
time. I wasn’t so good at that one.
“Fuck,” I
muttered under my breath. Then I shrugged. “Kind of. I guess so.” We’d never
really technically been a couple, even though I’d taken her to her prom. I’d
wanted to, but she’d been so young and had cancer, and then she’d left.
He made a
grunting sound next to me. “Bet Webs would be happier if she was dating you
instead of the guys she’s been all over the news with.”
“Fucking right,
I would,” Webs said from behind us before he moved on to talk to Blake Kozlow
about something.
That was
definitely a change from all those years ago. I wasn’t sure I would agree with
that assessment. I’d changed a lot in that time, and I wasn’t sure it was for
the better. “Doesn’t matter what Webs would be happier with,” I grumbled. It
pissed me off that Wheels was trying to make me talk about this right now when
all I wanted to do was pretend Katie wasn’t even in the state, let alone in the
building. “We aren’t together, and that’s not going to change any time soon.”
“That’s too
bad,” he said.
“I wouldn’t be
too sure about that, if I were you,” Soupy put in. His name was really Brenden
Campbell, but everyone except his wife and the Storm’s GM called him Soupy—even
his two adopted kids. I glared at him, and he shrugged and looked back at the
ice. “Just telling you what I see, is all. Up to you to figure out what to do
with it.”
He had always
had a bad habit of doing that—telling me things I didn’t want to hear.
The TV timeout
came to an end. It was about time. At Bergy’s signal, Wheels and Cam Johnson
headed over the boards to take the face-off.
“Soupy, Babs,”
Bergy said once they were gone, his tone returning to normal. “Be ready to go.”
I nodded, but I
kept my focus on the ice.
“I’ve got
Jonny,” Soupy said to me. At least he was back to talking about the game
instead of trying to tell me how to handle my personal life.
The Kings had a
potent power play this year, always dangerous. They moved the puck well,
changing up the point of attack in an effort to get a clear shot in on our
goaltender.
Our boys moved
as a unit—one guy shifted to block a passing lane, and the other three adjusted
their positions accordingly. Jonny dropped down to block a shot from the point,
and our D managed to get their sticks
in the way and clear bodies out from in front of the net so Nicky could see
where the puck was coming from. Finally, after almost a full minute of being
hemmed into our zone, Wheels poke-checked the puck and sent it flying down the
ice, and those guys were able to get off for a change.
Soupy and I
piled over the boards as soon as they came off—me about a second behind him
since Wheels moved about as fast as molasses in a Canadian winter—and we headed
into position.
The Kings
switched to their second power play unit and got set up in our zone. They moved
the puck back to the point on my side. I dropped to a knee, ready to block a
shot, but he passed it to the other point. Soupy tried to get into position to
block the shooting lane, but his knee buckled under him, and he went down with
an agonized shout.
The shot got
past him. Jens got just enough of his stick on it to deflect it away from
Nicky’s net. I let myself glance over long enough to see that, no matter how
hard he tried, Soupy couldn’t get himself up.
The Kings
cycled the puck back to the point again. I did my best to cover two guys who
both had bombs for shots, but there was only so much I could do. One of them
pulled his stick back to load up. I went down. A shot blew past my ear and went
in the net.
I skated over
to Soupy, pissed at myself even though I couldn’t figure out why. “You going to
be all right?”
“Can’t put any
fucking weight on it,” he said.
“Broken?”
He shook his
head. “Felt something snap, but not bone.”
That made me
think it was something like a ligament. Ken Archer, our head trainer, came over
and talked to him for a minute before deciding it was safe to move him, at
least. I gave Soupy a hand and helped him up, draping his arm over my shoulder
while Archie did the same on the other side so we could assist him off the ice.
The whole time, I was thinking I might have just witnessed the injury that
would end his career. I hoped I was wrong.
Wheels clapped
a hand on my shoulder as soon as I took a seat next to him on the bench. “You
know,” he said. “You never know what’s going to happen. Watching what just went
down with Soupy is proof enough of that. If you want something, you should go
for it.”
“What the fuck
are you talking about?” I groused, more agitated than confused.
“You know what
I’m talking about.”
I did.
Apparently, I still couldn’t hide
what I was feeling. Not only that, but I was just as messed up over Katie Weber
as I’d ever been. What the fuck could I do about it, though? If she was going
to leave, there wasn’t anything I could do to stop her…and I knew she would
leave.
She always did.
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