Seduced by the Game (29 page)

Once I stopped staring at
Katie and started eating, Webs finally focused more of his attention on his
meal instead of inventing new and exciting ways to torture me.

Razor stuffed a massive
forkful of pasta into his mouth. He had barely chewed and swallowed when he
said, “So, Katie…you going to prom with the same guy as last year? It’s coming
up pretty soon, eh?”

Not only did Razor eat
more than anyone I’d ever known, he was also quite possibly the most fucking
clueless guy on the face of the planet when it came to tact. I kicked his shin
hard under the table.

“Fuck, Babs!”

“Watch your fucking mouth
in front of my daughter, asswipe,” Webs grumbled at him.

Razor shrugged his
shoulders. “Sorry, Katie.” But he didn’t sound sorry.

I couldn’t make myself
look anywhere but at Katie, though. She’d ducked her head down to stare at her
plate and was as red-faced as she’d been while Webs had shaved her hair off a
little bit ago. “I don’t think I’m going to prom this year,” she said quietly.
She sounded sad. She always sounded sad lately.

Most of the guys started
up their own conversations, turning their attention away from her. They
probably didn’t want to embarrass her any more than Razor already had. But not
all of them turned away. Zee was sitting on Katie’s other side, across from
Kally. He handed her a basket of bread and asked, “Why aren’t you going?”

“Who would want to take
the bald girl to prom?” She tried to laugh it off, but I could see the pain in
her posture, just like I’d seen her fear through her bravery when she’d asked
Webs to shave her head. She passed the bread to her father without taking any.
“Besides, I’m not even going to classes right now. Out of sight, out of mind.
They don’t even know I exist anymore.”

“I’m sure that’s not
true.” Kally took a sip of his water and used his napkin to wipe his mouth. She
gave him a dubious look, but he didn’t let it stop him. “You should go anyway.
You could show them what they’re missing. Make yourself some good memories.”

Katie gave a tiny shake of
her head. “I don’t think I have that kind of courage.”

“You have a hell of a lot
more courage than you give yourself credit for,” Kally replied. When she gave
him a questioning look, he pointed at the scarf on her head.

She blushed. “That wasn’t
courage. That was fear of looking stupid with bald patches.”

“Courage,” Zee said
slowly, but his eyes were on me and not on Katie while he talked, “is doing
something you know you need to do even though you’re scared to do it.”

What was he getting at? I
took another bite and stared down at my plate. That was better than looking at
Webs with his ball-busting glares or at Zee and his meaningful glances that
didn’t really impart any meaning, at least.

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”
But then she started eating her meal and stopped talking, and that was the end
of the conversation.

After we finished eating,
everyone headed home. We had a game against Colorado tonight, and most guys
take an afternoon nap on game days.

Kally had moved in with me
when he’d been traded here because I had an extra room. I’d been living with
Brenden Campbell—Soupy to the guys—but he’d moved across the hall to live with
his fiancée, Rachel, and her two kids on trade deadline day.

It was nice having Kally
around, even if he was closer in age to Webs than he was to me. He was a quiet
guy, but he could cook, which was a definite bonus for me, and he didn’t care
if I had Razor over to play video games. Plus, he was a deep thinker. At first
I’d thought he was a little weird, which wouldn’t be too out of the ordinary
considering he was Swedish. It felt like half the team consisted of Swedes
these days, so I should know about how weird some of them could be. They tended
to stick to themselves and not hang out with the rest of us, and I’d never met
one who didn’t have some crazy habit like sleeping naked with the windows open
in January. But Kally usually had some pretty insightful things to say—the sort
of things that would fuck with your head. At least he did on those rare
occasions when he decided to open his mouth and say something.

Since the three of us—Soupy,
Kally, and me—were all headed the same place, we’d driven in for the morning
skate together in Soupy’s SUV. When we were about halfway home, Kally turned
around in his seat and looked at me with that intense stare he got when he was
about to spout off something profound and life-altering and mind fucking.

“You could give her that
good memory,” he said. Okay, so maybe he really
was
weird.

I had always known
everyone could see straight through me, and Zee and Soupy had been giving me
shit about my crush on Katie for over a year, but Kally hadn’t been around very
long. How was it that he could already tell?

“Take her to her prom?” I
shook my head. “Webs would kill me.”

“This isn’t about Webs.
It’s about Katie.” Kally shifted even more in his seat, so much that he was
practically in the back with me and had to be breaking the law sitting that
way. “Hopefully she’ll be fine in a few months or a year, and she can make a
lot more good memories—but she might not be fine. She deserves to have this
one, and her dad will see that eventually. He’ll come around. But he can’t give
it to her—that kind of memory. You can.”

“He’s right,” Soupy said,
his eyes flicking up to the rearview mirror to meet mine. “And she needs a
reason to fight. She looks like she’s giving up.”

I knew Kally was right, at
least some part of me did, and what Soupy said about her giving up made me feel
physically ill. But still… “How the hell am I supposed to get Webs to let me
take her to her prom?”

Soupy turned into our
parking garage. “You listen to what Zee said. You do what you know is right
even though you’re scared.”

“You never know how long
you’ll have with her,” Kally said. He turned around in his seat, facing forward
again. “Don’t put things off, because you might regret it someday.”

* * * *

Aaron Ludwiczak didn’t see
the Colorado player cutting across the middle of the ice toward him, not even
in the half-second before he got hit.

I didn’t notice who ran
him over. All I could focus on was how hard Luddy’s head hit the ice when he
dropped. The impact snapped his helmet off, and it went skidding across the ice
in the opposite direction of his suddenly prone body.

“Fuck!” Scotty Thomas, our
head coach, paced behind me on the bench while the trainers and medical staff
headed out to check on Luddy.

The boys and I were all on
our feet, trying to get a better look. After a minute, they had Luddy up on his
knees and were helping him stand. That was a good sign—Luddy getting up—even if
it wasn’t completely on his own. That meant at least they weren’t going to take
him off on a stretcher. They’d had to do that with our starting goalie, Nicklas
Ericsson, a few months back. Nicky had only returned from his concussion a
couple of games ago. Not that you could tell anything about a concussion based
on whether a stretcher was needed or not. And Luddy could still have one.

Hard to imagine that
wasn’t the case when you saw the way he hit the ice. The arena crew kept
replaying the impact on the Jumbotron overhead, making sure we wouldn’t be able
to erase it from our memories.

The trainers brought him
past the bench on the way to the tunnel, and he nodded at us. “Give ’em hell,
boys.”

Eddie Masters, the head
trainer, stopped right in front of me. His eyes were focused on Scotty behind
me. “We’re taking him out of the game for concussion protocol. We’ll know more
later.”

“Yeah. Right,” Scotty
said. “Fuck.” He looked up and down the bench, and the two assistant coaches
came over to him. “I don’t want to screw with Zee’s line. They’ve been working
together too well lately.”

Good. That was my line.
Zee, Soupy, and I had made up the second line for big stretches of the last two
seasons. I was pretty sure all three of us liked it that way, too.

“What about moving Kally
up to take Luddy’s place on the top line?” Hammer suggested. They’d had Kally
skating on the third line this game, but he’d been all over the place while
they tried to find a good fit for him, to find someone he could have chemistry
with and get him scoring again…pretty much everywhere but the top line.

Scotty dragged a hand over
his face. “He hasn’t scored a fucking goal since he got here.” He grabbed the
clipboard from Hammer, scouring it with his eyes. You could almost see the way
he was trying to piece together line combinations in his head.

“What better options do we
have?” Hammer said. “At least for the rest of the game, and then we’ll see what
happens with Luddy. Besides, he and RJ are familiar with each other.” RJ had
taken over as the top-line center when they’d made the trade sending Sergei Ivanov
and Pavel Spanov to the Islanders.

I didn’t know if those
two, Kally and RJ, had played together much when they were with the
Islanders—at least not since Kally had stopped scoring—but they’d at least
watched each other a lot for the last few years. That could help with knowing
what the other guy would do.

“Yeah. Fine.” Scotty
didn’t look too thrilled, but he didn’t have much time to debate it right
now—the ref was heading over to the bench to speed things along. “Kally, you’ll
be with RJ and Eller now. Jonny, you’re moving up to Hank’s line. Let’s put
this one away for Luddy.”

He gave Zee a nod, and so
he, Soupy, and I headed out for the next face-off. We were up two to one
halfway through the third. Keeping this Colorado team limited to a single goal
was a pretty rare feat. They tended to score early and often, which was a good
thing for them since they had problems on the defensive side of things.

We really ought to have
scored more against them to this point, though, considering how leaky their
defense could be. The less time that remained on the clock, the more desperate
they were getting to score. Our one-goal lead wasn’t likely to hold up, but we
needed to get the full two points for a regulation win tonight since we were
tied with them in the playoff standings with less than a month remaining in the
regular season.

The officials were set to
drop the puck in our offensive zone, but Colorado had sent Zack Carson and his
line out to take the face-off. Carson had owned Zee on the dot all night.

Zee motioned all of us
over to him before we lined up, including Andrew Jensen and Keith Burns, our
top two defensemen. “I have no chance of pulling it back. Not tonight. I’m
going forward with it, straight for the net.”

“Right,” Soupy said. “So
be ready for rebounds.”

“Exactly.”

We got into position, with
me on Zee’s right and Soupy on his left. If I could get past the Colorado
D
,
I would be the first player to the crease. They should be expecting me to go to
the middle and try to help Zee fish the puck out with all the difficulties he’d
been having tonight.

Even though I knew Zee
planned to shoot it on the net, he could have fooled me. The way he was holding
his stick, it looked like he had every intention of winning possession the
traditional way and letting our
D
set up our attack. I tried not to grin
and give anything away, but everyone knew I didn’t have a poker face.

I got lucky that the
linesman didn’t mess around with dropping the puck—I didn’t have to try to keep
a straight face for very long. Zee shot it forward just like he’d planned and
confused the Colorado
D
. Soupy and I both got past our guys. I got to
the side of the net just after their goaltender made a kick save. Too bad for
him he kicked it out right onto the tape of my stick.

He was still sprawled on
the ice from the save, so I roofed the puck. It went in just over the goalie’s
glove and under the crossbar.

“That was a fucking
beauty,” Soupy shouted at me over the dual roars of the crowd and the goal
horn.

We all skated over to the
bench and got fist bumps from the guys. Scotty gave us a nod so we stayed out
for the next face-off.

Now Colorado was really
pushing back. Their forwards were skilled, speedy, and determined even during
their worst games, and tonight wasn’t anything close to that. For the next
several minutes, we were barely keeping our heads above water. If not for Nicky
making one ridiculous save after another, they would have easily tied the game
and moved ahead of us.

They hadn’t, though,
despite the fact that we were spending a hell of a lot more time in our own end
than was good for us.

With only a couple of
minutes left, RJ’s line managed to clear the puck out of the zone so they could
get off for a line change. Scotty shouted for my line to replace them. I was
halfway on the ice when Colorado sent the puck careening back in. It hit
Kally’s skate. I had to hold myself dangling over the boards so we didn’t get
called for having too many men on the ice.

He shot it back to the
other end and got onto the bench, and I was able to drop down to my skates
finally.