Keeping Seven

by T. A Richards Neville

  Five minutes shy of two hours, and still as sober as a recovering alcoholic, Alexis Javine walked up to the bar and shimmied onto a stool, the orange two piece she wore drawing my eyes to her without even having to look first.

  My jaw set, and I relaxed my body into the cream leather booth seat. If I scared her away now, she’d lock up and shutdown, and I would have wasted my time coming here. And one thing I hated to do was waste my own time.

  It didn’t take longer than a minute for her calculating gaze to swing to our table. It took even less time for her to discreetly lean into the woman she came with, say something in her ear, and then slide down from her stool.

  I stayed seated until she’d made it across the dancefloor and her curtain of black hair swished in time to her hips around a circular glass pillar, fat air bubbles inside pushing up through the blue water. The exit was on the other side of the room to where she’d just went, but I wasn’t chancing losing sight of her. Carlion had seen to it that her finding out we’d be here tonight landed conveniently in her lap, and I wasn’t letting her leave without some fucking answers.

  I followed after her, losing the trail no sooner than I’d picked it up. At the top of a short set of wide, black marble stairs, there was another smaller bar, this one more private and secluded. I searched the faces, but Alexis’s wasn’t one of them. I gave it another hour-fifteen, admitting defeat when I never saw her again inside the club.

  “Boys, I’m bowing out. Enjoy the rest of your night.” I put down a couple fifties on the table to help cover the tab, smiling to myself as my teammates hurled abuse at my leaving. A balled-up napkin bounced off my shoulder as I moved through the crowd, a female wail splitting my ear when another, more robust, napkin bullet met her square between the eyes.

  As I walked out of the club, past the line that stood waiting to get in, I hit the jackpot.

  Before she saw me, I ducked into one of the window arches, hiding my body behind a palm tree stem, looking like a blooper from Miami Vice. I risked a glance around the pinecone-like trunk, muttering some choice swear words to myself as Tate Ross’s hand slid up Alexis’s outer thigh, pushing deep under her plastered-on skirt to palm her ass. The public grind session could turn anyone’s stomach, but Tate helped Alexis into a white SUV that had pulled up alongside them, climbing in after her. The door closed and the SUV drove off.

  I ’d been swapping texts with Taj for over half an hour. Fifteen minutes into him hitting me with his outrageous question out of the blue, a text message from Beau dropped into my screen.

  Beau: Check out E! News section. Just don’t take it out on the messenger

  I opened Safari and pulled up E! News. The latest story on the feed highlighted my broken engagement to Julian and my concerning ability to move on quickly with LA Kings’ Beau Kessler. It seemed there were many before me who’d tried to win the attention of the centerman and failed in epic proportions, and I was the unicorn who’d made it through.

  My frown intensified as I read on, the depths dug into my background horrific to read. There were details about my dad and his athletic backstory. But the real cincher was the short, looping clip of me at the hockey game, mine and Beau’s hands on either side of the glass while the scene was mirrored on the jumbotron above our heads. My one moment of non-thinking had been immortalized for public consumption.

  For Julian to see.

  Me: Well, this doesn’t look god for me. Sorry :( What do we do now?

  While I waited for Beau’s reply, I inattentively returned to Taj’s messages, my mind a jumble of thorns while I re-read the last text to come through.

  Taj: Would I be able to play for the Junior Kings? I could live with you for a season, just to see how it goes. My rinky-dink team here sucks, and you’re in with Kessler

  Basing my next move off of my incapacitation, still buzzing off what E! was broadcasting to the nation, I put the question to Beau without thought. If he said no, he said no. Taj living with me was fine. I could do with the company. But I wasn’t sure I was in a position to go pulling any strings, I was so new to the youth team.

  Beau: Bring him along once he’s in LA. I can’t say whether the monthly fees will we waved, but I’ll see what I can do

  I delivered the good news to Taj, the bath I’d previously ran now below room temperature as I spent another hour on the phone with Olivia, ironing out the possibilities of this actually happening.

  “He can continue his therapy here, there are plenty of highly-rated specialists. I’m leaving this to you, but I’ll take good care of him while he’s with me. You don’t have to worry about that. You could even bring him and stay for a few days, check out the local school and the area.”

  “That’ really kind of you, Angel, to take him in…” Olivia paused, quietly humming while her brain ticked over. Taj had tackled us all flat on our backs without any warning. “I’ll talk to him some more first. It’s just so left-field, I need time to process him moving away. He’s a teenager now, but he’s my baby. My heart’s racing just thinking about him getting on a plane and not coming back.”

  “Sure. Of course. Just let me know what you both decide.”

  We said goodbye and hung up, leaving me with the rest of the evening to strategize how I was going to take on Julian. I was making us look like a pair of idiots, intentionally or otherwise. And Beau wasn’t the worst that was wrong with this picture. If I could sway just a little, mold some of myself into Julian’s life permanently, the spotlight on us might not be so bright. But the separate states, the revoked magazine deal, and the complete lack of spending time together made this garbage read like there was a ring of truth to it. Because the evidence was me, and I was singlehandedly confirming most of what had been written.

  I’d done my best to ignore the signs, but they were all there. I worried I’d said yes to Julian too soon, and our relationship needed more time and work. But whether this happened now or ten years down the line, we were going to be together. So why couldn’t I just make it work and stop being so stubborn?

  But I had always sacrificed myself and what I wanted for other people. I’d made a professional sport out of it up until recently, and I owed it to myself and Julian to do what felt right and not what was expected of me. I would go to Miami for something else other than Julian to spend my time on. I needed to be productive, not just a wife and one part of a marriage. There had to be more. For my sanity and for myself. Now seemed an appropriate time to have faith that neither of us were wrong in what we’d set out to do. We’d come this far in pursuing our goals, we could go a little further.

  I wasn’t too cut up about the lack of NHL games in my future but dictated friendships that awaited me in Miami rubbed me the wrong way. Beau was someone to me, and not in the seedy, shady sense the media made him out to be. And my life here in LA still needed to be lived.

  I glanced down at the ring on my finger. So many promises in the platinum band, and I felt the weight of every one of them heavier than ever before.

  Three weeks after dropping the nuclear bomb on me, Taj flew alone to Los Angeles. I was waiting for him at LAX baggage claim, happier to see his teenage face in the milling crowd than I think I’d ever been to see Julian’s. Because I was getting a part of Julian, and I loved Taj like he was my own brother. I even saw him more than my own brother. Which was another niggling irritant I was dealing with.

  When Elena gave birth to Bear, my overexcited brain had screeched to its own conclusions that I would spend extra time in Boston, but a year in and I barely saw him, splitting myself into quarters to be everywhere at once impossible to do. It was like everyone that mattered to me was somewhere else, and I was standing my ground at the last frontier. It hurt my heart that the city I’d desperately wanted to get back to was losing its place. Julian’s home was wherever his next big contract said it was. He included me in that now, but really, I would also go where his contract ruled, because that’s what I’d agreed to do. But my real home had always been Los Angeles.
My mom was still here somewhere, and the last of my scrawny roots were still stubbornly clinging onto the west coast.

  Dressed in most of his gear, apart from helmet, neck guard, and gloves, Taj closed the zip on his hockey bag and hauled the ginormous thing over his shoulder. Since he’d moved in, that bag had taken up forty percent of my mud room. I’d even swapped out my couch for a sofa bed that we’d went out and picked together. That first day roaming Westfield Century City and Beverly Hills, Taj didn’t just fall hard for his new, nearby neighborhoods, he’d caught the attention of so many girls, I’d eventually lost count, and I knew it was going be as difficult for him to leave as it would be for me.

  “Have you got everything?” I asked him. LA traffic didn’t allow for a one-eighty halfway into a journey, and I couldn’t be late.

  He nodded, leveling a quick glance around the living room. Skates plus guards made for one extremely tall Taj. “Yeah.”

  We left for practice, arriving at the Toyota Center thirty minutes early. Taj went down to the locker room with the rest of his team and coaches, and I joined him after fastening on my skates and collecting the attendance form from the office.

  A couple weeks of practices already under his belt, Taj gelled with his new bantam team as well as could be expected. Todays practice was a longer one, hence my being there. And the first half hour centered around speed skating and edge control.

  For a little bit of fun, I sent the players to the benches and called them out to the ice in alphabetical order, stopwatch in hand to time their individual laps around the rink.

  Thirteen and fourteen-year-old boys were competitive assholes. And even though this exercise was planned in fun, there were plenty of young players sitting on that bench who hated to lose, didn’t matter it was against their own teammates. I’d accompanied this particular group to quite a few of their home and road games, as extra adult supervision, and one of the players must have had his own stick-making machine at home, because I’d witnessed him snap at least six in half. His reasons were all different, but mostly the same. Puck didn’t go in the net. Snap. Linemate missed a tape-to-tape pass. Snap. Lost a game, even though the other team played harder and cleaner. Snap. Messed up on the backcheck. Snap. Other team gets a point. Snap.

  Holden Wilson was a hockey stick serial killer. It annoyed me his parents couldn’t say to him, ‘you know what, kid? those damn things cost money. So unless you’re paying for the endless supply of wasted composite yourself, do us a favor and stop smashing them up!”

  One of the forwards, a small thing with flowing brown hair, raced round the boards like a bullet, his yellow and purple jersey billowing out behind him in the wind. His teammates jeered him as he crossed the red paint, the time on my watch confirming the fastest recorded out of all the laps.

  Taj hadn’t done too badly, either. Every practice he showed improvement, and I might have sworn off from any more of Beau’s games, but he’d made it known Taj could cash in on tickets anytime he liked. And tickets weren’t cheap, not even for the star centerman. But that was the type of guy Beau was. Good through and through.

  When the session was over, with five minutes until their practice began, the players hit the ice to warmup and shoot some pucks. The team clown, Daly, skated a circle around me as I stood by the door and pulled off my gloves, hands forming a triangle over his head in his twisted rendition of a pirouette.

  “Beautiful,” I said, smiling. “You’ve been practicing that, haven’t you?”

  “Mom asked me to book some slots with you. Is that cool?”

  “You want to figure skate?”

  “Skate better in general,” he said, twirling on one blade. “Work on that core and weight distribution. Strengthen my center of gravity.”

  I eyed Daly with a narrowed look. “You just made all that up, didn’t you?”

  He grinned from behind his cage. “Most of it. You got some time for me? After school or whatever?”

  “I’ve always got time for you. Is your mom here?” I looked up into the stands, browsing the rows of faces.

  “She’s here.” Daly chased my line of sight. “Don’t see her, though.”

  “No worries, I’ll find her.”

  I scheduled Daly in for the following Monday and then left the rink with Taj after practice. Abandoning our stuff in the car, I parked downtown in Santa Monica, a couple blocks from 3rd Street Promenade.

  “Do you wanna eat?” I asked Taj. “I’m pretty hungry, so you must be starving.”

  Globes of warm light hung from trees spread out along the promenade, the languid foot traffic moving in both directions. The sun had set hours ago, a cool chill from the ocean replacing the earlier humidity. A man sat playing an outdoor piano, and I pointed to the waffle place behind him. “How about chicken? We could eat outside.”

  Taj nodded. I told him to find us some seats while I stood in the short line.

  I gave the server an order of two fried-chicken waffle sandwiches, paid, and stood off to the side to wait, the next person in life shuffling up to the window.

  Two girls sat across from Taj, the gaze of one flicking to him sitting alone. I smiled as the two girls whispered to each other, glanced again at Taj, and then the taller of the two, with dark curly hair and tiny, stonewash denim shorts, stood up and approached him. They talked for a minute, and then she sat down beside him, perched on the edge of the seat.

  “Hey. Your order’s ready!”

  I turned at the voice and grabbed our food. “Thank you.”

  “Hey,” I said to Taj, simultaneously smiling at the girl whose eyes speared to me in fleeting surprise. I handed him the two baskets of chicken sandwiches. “I can come back…” I left that open for Taj to fill between the lines. Far be it from me to intrude.

  “Oh, no,” the girl said, standing up. She was pretty. “Bye.” She tucked her curls behind her ear, scuttling off with pink cheeks and an abashed smile.

  My eyebrows inclined at her hasty retreat. I sat beside Taj. “She’s cute. Was she asking you out?”

  “I’m not really sure.” He spoke quietly as he rubbed the back of his neck, like the girl could hear from all the way across the promenade.

  “Then she probably was. You should go ask for her phone number if you like her. You know it’s okay for you to have friends over? It’s your house now, too.”

  So many girls had shown interest in Taj, and he didn’t seem to notice a single flushed-face or flirty glance.

  “Naw,” he said, handing me the basket with my sandwich in. “I’m good here with you.”

  Christmas came and went, slipping by unnoticed and overshadowed by the buzz of a playoff spot.

  Rebecca went home to New Jersey to spend two weeks with Tabatha, and Angel and Taj flew to Boston. It hadn’t made any sense for Angel to come here, since I still had practice, and she only had a few days off from coaching. Hockey seasons, even youth seasons, didn’t let up just because the holidays had arrived. It was a busy time of year. So, I’d spent it with Dog, volunteering for a couple hours on Christmas morning at the shelter with Angela, where I’d first laid eyes on Dog.

  I’d pumped thousands into the run-down shelter that was mainly run by one person, Armando. A twenty-year-old who’d obviously been in need of some extra help for a while. Angela had even roped in some of the other guys off the team to show their face and take pity on the animals, making an entire fucking production out of it.

  But that was Christmas. Three days before New Year’s Eve, I was on a chartered plane with the rest of the team to Boston. We played the New England Patriots on Sunday, in the final game of the season. We were all tired, but that Super Bowl ring was no longer a distant dream, a tall tale you hear whispered about in fantastical fiction. There was no ‘next season’ excuse anymore. We’d fought tooth and nail, finding our footing as a unit early enough in the season. The feeling was surreal, and no one was getting too excited until the uncertainty had been eradicated. We’d come this far, but there was further to g
o. The playoffs were just the beginning.

  I scrolled through the mess on my phone. A new video had been uploaded to Alexis’s channel, and she was claiming responsibility for apparently coming between me and Angel. To compliment her blatant bullshit, a story had recently hit the gossip headlines, circulating and spreading like dry heat breathing on wildfire.

  It had somehow gotten out that the wedding had been put on hold. I’d fallen into the trap of the infamous, single, Miami life, and Angel had found solace in the arms of a certain hockey player whose face I was sick and tired of being beaten with.

  Tugging my earbuds loose, I lifted out of my seat on the plane and made my way farther back, lowering into the vacant seat next to Tate Ross. At first, he didn’t notice me, his head bobbing to the beat of whatever song played through his Beatz. I did him the curtesy of pulling them off his head.

  His eyes snapped in my direction, a frown tapering his brows. “What the fuck, man?”

  “I couldn’t have said it better myself, Ross.” I spread my hands on my thighs, settling into the seat, making the most of the stingy leg room. Wearing a suit during a flight felt like it had been prison issued. Even without my jacket on, I was restricted and uncomfortable. “So, you and Alexis Javine, huh?” I raised my eyebrows and blew out a breath. “That wasn’t very smart of you.”

  Ross moved his edgy gaze to the oval window and the pale blue sky above the clouds. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I leaned into him, sucking up his airspace and planting my forearm on the plastic armrest. “I know it was you behind the stories.” He blinked, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. “Listen, we’ve all been there. Fresh out of college where you were the king on campus. But no one gives a fuck on this team who you used to be, or how fucking famous you were in your dead-end hometown. You must be delusional off Alexis’s phenomenal pussy if you think you can walk onto my team, make a fucking idiot out of my sister, and make a quick buck outta me for your desperate, lying girlfriend. If those videos aren’t off her fucking channel by tonight, I’ll make it my personal business that whatever time you’ve got left in Miami is as fucking miserable as you are.” I stood up. “One more thing. Lose Rebecca’s number and forget you know her name. Give her some shitty excuse for why you’re such a spineless dick because, after that, you don’t get to talk to her or look at her again.”