Point Shot 01 - Two Man Advantage (12 page)

“Look, I know you’re not the type who likes to be told…well,
anything
, but that little lesson really brought the guys together. We need more of that. We need players who are willing to put it all on the line for the team.”

I forced my head to turn. It hurt worse than having my nuts bound. Just for the record, that only happened only once, okay? The guy was hot and he liked some rope-and-grope. A dude has to experiment, right?

“If you seriously think that I volunteered to be the happy hip-check boy to help this team, you’re stupider than you look,” I responded.

Buttonwood scowled. The steam had made his hair and clothes limp. The look wasn’t a good one for him. “I know why you did it,” he said sharply as he folded his arms over his compression shirt. I returned to my scientific study of water running off a Polish nose. “I also know that you knew it would be a catalyst for the men. One common goal sort of thing?”

“What. Ever.” God save me from team captains and their “There is no ‘I’ in team” mentality. “If you’re done shaking your pom-poms, Becky Sue Blowjob, I need to go see if the Zamboni driver found my spleen lying on the hash marks.”

“I know you’re in pain,” Buttonwood said. I snorted so hard water gushed into my sinuses. It was a nice touch to a shit-tastic afternoon. “But if you could just find it inside yourself to be a little less of you and a little more of Dan, you’d be a happier man.”

“Thanks, Dr. Phil. See you on tomorrow’s show when we talk about infidelity among sanctimonious hockey captains.”

The insult hit him dead center of the chest. I could hear him suck in air. I hoped he was so affronted he left.

“What the fuck did Arou see in you?” he hissed before leaving me alone with my soap and sorrow. Goody, my winning personality had me alone and agonizing again. Just find me that sappy Gilbert O’Sullivan song from the 70s for background music and I’d be set.

* * * * *

Dinner that night consisted of something from room service. I ate the pot roast, herbed potatoes, corn and brownie, then washed it down with whatever beer they had brought up. My ass had hit the bed when I came home and it hadn’t moved. I looked at the hotel room as my thumb flipped from channel to channel. What had Dan said about this place? It was impersonal? A sharp twinge at the thought of him made me groan. I rubbed the spot under my left pectoral while flipping and staring at the drapes. Maybe it was time to think about finding an apartment in Cayuga. I was here until the season ended. And as nice as room service, laundry service and a maid were, I couldn’t live like a fucking vagabond forever. Or could I?

My thumb froze when I heard the familiar voices of the Barracudas’ Stimey Lange and Bob Newkirk. Both were ex-’cudas who had moved into the broadcasting booth when their playing days were done. Good guys, even if they were a little pushy. I forced myself to sit up.

“Jesus K. Cornflakes,” I whimpered, grasping my right side. I nearly toppled over, but with some slow adjusting of my legs and ass, I managed to rest against the headboard, my bruised back cushioned by a few thick pillows. Did you ever hear the term “glutton for punishment”? That’s me. I love to be hurt, obviously. Just look at my upper body. The contusions will attest to that character flaw. As will the fact that I was watching my former lover about to play his first pro game with my former team.

It was the typical pregame chatty-chat. My insides twisted when they brought up a graphic of Dan with his minor league stats. The dude was a runty whirlpool. His power-play goals and assists were above average, as were his shots on goal and SPCT, or his shooting percentage. His eyes were brilliant blue in the picture. I was smitten. No shit, I sat there like a thirteen-year-old girl who had a tingle in her panties while watching a One Direction video. I missed him. I mean, I missed him
beyond
the normal missing of man-fucks. If this was love, then I was glad it had never come to visit old Vic Kalinski before.

I made a quick call down to room service for a bottle of aspirin, then I sat back to watch Dan Arou show the NHL just what a Baggins on skates could accomplish. And man, did he show them. The following day in the Cougars’ dressing room, Dan’s performance was the talk of the town. We all knew the man was a dynamo. Last night he’d been all over the ice whenever his line was on. While he hadn’t scored, he had grabbed his first assist and that single goal had won the game for the Barracudas. I couldn’t have been prouder of the stumpy shit.

“Hey, you see that game last night?” McGarrity asked, sitting down beside me as I wrapped my wrists with medical tape. My head went up and down. “That’ll be me in another year.”

“You’ll need to lose the skirt,” I said, giving the kilt he wore a long look. Mario laughed loudly then slapped my back. A groan nearly escaped but I held it in.

“Hey, you know, last night us guys were talking about you,” he confided. I didn’t say squat, mostly because I didn’t give two shiny baboon asses what him and “us guys” talked about. “We were wondering if you’d be willing to toss us a nugget about our third line weakness on the face-off?”

My head turned to the left as if I were a rusty Oz-type tin man in desperate need of some neck lubrication.

“Don’t we have coaches for that?” I asked. Mario smiled wickedly at me. I knew then what was up, so I tossed out a nonchalant shrug. “Sure. I’ll pass along a few tricks. Just make sure they have someone standing by from the organ donation society to gather up all the parts that are left behind.”

“Yours, I assume?” he asked, clapping my back soundly as he rose.

“That’s the game, right?” I asked. He winked, then strode off, his kilt swinging in the breeze. I’d make sure to stop by the trainer’s office and grab a handful of Tylenol
before
I hit the morning skate.

* * * * *

This time it didn’t hurt quite as much. The split lip was kind of tender, but working away from the boards on face-off fuck-ups was less physical. Unless you ended up with an “accidental” stick in the face from a man who obsessed over soul patches. I had been in no mood for Phil Prescott, one of our
Homo habilis
defensemen. Although he couldn’t voice his homophobic comments about my chin and the balls that rested against it, he made up for his vocal impairment by high-sticking at every opportunity. After he missed the fourteenth snap from the center—which was me, in case you forgot—he got slightly perturbed. When I mentioned that I had a cousin named Nancy who could outshine him, he introduced my mouth to his spiffy black Bauer Supreme stick. Lambert made him sit out morning skate and apologize, but that forced admission of guilt didn’t help my loose front tooth.

* * * * *

Now that the beginning of the third period of action against the Charlotte Copperheads was about to begin, I was working that loose tooth vigorously with my tongue.

“Hey, Kalinski! Stop tonguing yourself and get out on the fucking ice!” Coach Lambert yelled. The din was amazing. Fans were on their feet. The house lights were rotating. We were tied 1-1 and a weird sort of vibe was pulsating among the people inside the Rader Arena. If I wasn’t mistaken, the feeling coursing through us all was optimism. We were playing well. And fuck me with a spatula, but if we kept if up for another twenty minutes and managed to score one more goal, we might actually win!

I tugged my mouth-guard out of the corner of my mouth, pushed it into place, then slung a leg over the boards. I had been promoted back to the first line for the game tonight after being knocked back to the third line for some infraction or another. No, I don’t recall what I said or did that pissed Lambert off. Just looking at me twists his nipples. Coming back to the top line should have made me proud. All it did was do a Freddy Kruger on my bowels when Dan Arou didn’t skate up to say something snarky or loaded with double entendre as we approached center ice.

The center for the Copperheads was a rowdy Russian center by the name of Bogdon Yunevich. He was a cookie cutter of Dolph Lundgren when he was all up into his Ivan Drago role in
Rocky IV.
He wasn’t as big, naturally, but he had that same chiseled-from-granite face and fjord-blue eyes. He was two-hundred-plus pounds of hurt; to that I could attest.

Hunkering down into my stance, I waited for him to utter, “I must break you.” The linesman warned us both about encroaching before he dropped the puck. I shuttled the puck to my winger, spun neatly in a
Sweet Georgia Brown
Harlem Globetrotteresque spin-o-rama move, then took the pass back from Goodman. The line went charging down into the Copperheads’ zone. We shunted passes back and forth pretty well. I stopped on point, glanced at the net, knew I had an opening, then heard Goodman shouting. Tossing aside a small opening over the goalie’s right shoulder, I sent it across the ice to my wingman. Goodman drew back and sent that puck on an air pillow across the ice. The goalie got his pads down, neatly blocking off the five-hole gap between his legs. Derek North, one of our defensive men, snuck in, grabbed the rebound before the tender could and flipped the biscuit into the basket after it bounced off the goalie’s catching mitt.

The horn blew loud and long. The fans leaped to their feet. Five guys in blue and gold got up-close-and-personal in the embracing department. Sure, I’ll admit it, being included in that hug-fest felt pretty good. Not that I planned on picking out draperies with any of the morons, but the goal had been a good one. We had gotten it in due to team work. There wasn’t much of a chance of us digging out of the divisional basement, but if the apes could learn to work as a unit then… Fuck. I was starting to think like Buttonwood. Returning to our bench, the congrats and claps upside the helmet were accepted graciously. Then it was back to hockey. We still had fifteen minutes. I tugged my lid off to towel-dry my sopping-wet head.

“About fucking time you learned to share your toys, Kalinski,” Lambert said beside my left ear as he patted my well-padded shoulder. “There might be some hope for you yet.”

“I sneezed,” I said into my towel.

“Yeah, and the puck just slipped from your stick to his?” Lambert asked. I nodded, peeking over the top of the damp towel. “Gesundheit.” Coach rubbed my sweaty head with his palm then returned to shouting at his players on the ice.

Lowering the towel, I nodded at the guys on the bench who were looking at me oddly. Guess they never saw a redheaded Pole before. I glanced up at the scoreboard to see the goal replay. It wasn’t the prettiest thing I had ever seen, but it had got us up by one.

It was a frigging junkyard dog-fight for the remaining fifteen minutes. The trainers on both teams were working the OT big-time. There wasn’t a man on either bench who wasn’t exhausted, bloody, bruised or bedraggled. With a minute forty left and us still tenaciously hanging on to our lead, I got clocked in the chest by the Russian center for the Copperheads. His stick slid up over mine and clanked me in the mouth. He pulled four in the sin bin for a high-stick that drew blood and I did a bit of self-dentistry. That loose tooth was barely attached and flopping loosely in my gum, so I reached in and yanked the fucker out. Good thing McGarrity’s big Italian-Scottish ass was beside me, or I might have toppled to the side. That hurt like a
motherfucker.

The trainer had some sort of epileptic seizure when he saw the hole in my gum. I spent the rest of the game with gauze packed into my face. Try cheering a win like that. I did, though. And I even gave a post-game interview to the local press after spitting out the rolls of cotton. Yeah, the night was a pretty good one. You know, considering…

I was headed to my icy Escalade an hour later, wet red hair frozen to my skull, when I was cut off by a big black Chevy Silverado.

“Hey, Kalinski, you think you can knock back a beer with that hole in your head?” Mario asked after his window went down.

“Are you asking me out on a date, McGarrity?” I asked, stepping up to Mario’s personal version of a monster truck. The entire frame vibrated with horsepower. Talk about overcompensating.

“You give head?” he asked, leaning casually into his steering wheel.

“I even swallow.”

“Then yeah, I’m asking you out,” he chortled. I inhaled the hot air billowing out of the open window. “You’ve got to buy your own beer though.”

“Fucking cheapskate Scot,” I grumbled. Mario threw back his head and laughed.

“Meet us at the Cracked Cup over on Lakeside Drive,” he said.

I said I would, pounded his roof, then hustled it to my Escalade. My balls were just about frozen solid by the time the heater core was making with the hot. I was sitting on my hands as two little holes appeared on the frosty windshield. My back pocket vibrated. I slid the cell out then turned down Disturbed’s “Down With The Sickness”
,
a song I always held to be my personal anthem. Just check out the lyrics and you’ll see why. I stared down at the incoming call avatar. My tongue went to the tender spot where a tooth had recently lived. I prodded the hole. My eyes watered.

Dan’s image was blurry. I knew somewhere deep down that I shouldn’t respond to the call. He was in Boston. I was in Cayuga. Relationships with travelling athletes are precarious at best. Ask Mrs. Buttonwood. The phone danced in my palm. Not talking to him was killing me. He needed to move on, though. My heart constricted tightly. The phone stopped ringing. I gulped loudly. Fucking hell. My brow dropped to the steering wheel with a heavy
thunk
. My hand rested on my thigh. The phone began trembling again. I poked at the gap in my gum with more vigor, the smack louder now that there was this big hole in my face.

“For fuck’s sake, Arou!” I snarled, yanking the phone to eye level. The text rolled across the tiny viewing screen.

Congrats on win! I hate city. Love the team. Miss U like hell, Vic. Hit me up when U can. Need favor. <3 Dan

The really stupid-ass thing about my reaction to that short text was that the heart before his name was what made me double over as if I had been rabbit-punched in the kidneys. I thought extracting my own tooth had hurt. Seeing that stupid text-talk heart made me physically ill. Like nearly hurling my meal ill. I reached my “Fuck This!” limit, tossed the cell onto the passenger seat and peeled out of the stadium lot. I figured it was too late to get some attention from a dentist, but I knew the perfect place to dull the pain in my upper gum while dousing the fire of misery in my lower belly.