Coming in First Place (Between the Teeth Book 1)

by Taylor Fitzpatrick

  Lourdes stops just outside of his personal space, too close still, shoving his hands in his pockets.

  “Sorry about Brzezinski,” he says, after a moment.

  David bites down on the inside of his cheek. “I’ve heard all that shit before,” he says.

  “I’m sorry about that too,” Lourdes says, and David feels anger, white hot, wash over him, the worst it’s been all day.

  “Oh fuck you,” David snaps, and takes no satisfaction from the way Lourdes looks taken aback. “So fucking what if he said that shit? The only reason anyone knows he said it is because you ran your mouth.”

  “So what, I should have just let him say that shit to you?” Lourdes asks.

  “Yes!” David yells. “What, he can’t say that shit but you can hook me, and that’s all fine? The only person who can pull shit is you?”

  Lourdes scoffs. “Like a hockey play is the same thing as spouting homophobic bullshit.”

  “No,” David says. “Only one hurts. I don’t give a shit what anyone says.”

  “Bullshit,” Lourdes says. “You want to pretend I wasn’t in the same room as you when the Lapointe news broke?”

  “Oh fuck off,” David says, “Don’t act like you know me.”

  Lourdes snorts, derisive. “I don’t know you?” he asks. “Seriously, David?”

  David bites down on his lip, hard. “Go away,” he says, sounding petulant to his own ears. Hates it. “You think you’re any better than Brzezinski? You’re just here for the same thing. Not the first time a Panther’s called me pretty boy.”

  Lourdes’s jaw works. “Fuck you, Chapman,” he says finally, hoarse, but he doesn’t move.

  “You’re dumb as a fucking brick,” David shouts, watches Lourdes flinch. “We buddies, Lourdes? You want to act like buddies, you go jerk off Benson, because we’re not fucking friends. We’re not anything.”

  Lourdes isn’t looking at him when David finally looks at him head-on instead of out the corner of his eye. David gets his profile more than anything, his jaw tight, his hair curling in front of his eye, the exact strands David always wants to tuck behind his ear. He should cut his fucking hair.

  “Everyone’s right about you,” Lourdes says, so quiet the words barely penetrate, and then walks away, back toward the arena, before David can even think to ask who everyone is, and what they’re saying.

  Whatever it is, he knows it’s nothing good.

  When Lourdes is a spot in the distance, far enough that David knows he isn’t coming back, David heads to the bus doors, finding Benson and his shadows standing a few feet away. Benson’s mouth is curled up at the corner, and David wonders how much they heard. Wonders if Lourdes has jerked Benson off before. Probably has. Benson probably returned the favour, girlfriend and all. David hears things.

  He lowers his eyes so he doesn’t have to see Benson’s sneer, goes into the bus, where the air conditioning blows dry and artificial. The players already inside aren’t looking at him, and David doesn’t know if they heard him, if they were there all along or they walked by while David tore into Lourdes. He tries not to care.

  *

  He sleeps terribly. His phone’s set to silent, because he half-expects Jake to text him to come over, always awful at taking a hint. It seems like he got the message this time though, and maybe David should be glad, but in the morning, he’s just tired.

  Kurmazov takes him aside after team breakfast, before the trip to Tampa, looking as serious as usual.

  “You know I have a brother,” Kurmazov says.

  “Yeah,” David says slowly. Kurmazov the lesser. He’s an acceptable enough third-liner on the Canucks, but nothing like his brother.

  “You think we play Canucks, we lose, I refuse to see him?” Kurmazov asks. “We always lose against Canucks.”

  “Okay?” David says.

  “I hear about last night,” Kurmazov says, and David swallows, can’t look at anything except the swirl of colour on the hotel carpet.

  “Hockey is not everything,” Kurmazov says. “Family and friends are important. You need to learn that before hockey is all that you have left.”

  David looks up. “Excuse me?”

  “You are very good,” Kurmazov says. “You are better than I was at your age. But where is your family, David? Where are your friends?”

  David’s hands curl into fists at his sides. “That’s none of your business,” he gets out.

  “No?” Kurmazov says. “I am your captain, and if you are going to have fights in front of the team, you make it my business.”

  “I’ll keep it away from the rink,” David says through gritted teeth. “Is that all?”

  “That was not what I was—” Kurmazov starts, then sighs. “Fine,” he says. “Go pack.”

  David already did. It isn’t worth mentioning, not if he can use it as an excuse to walk away.

  *

  They drop the game in Tampa, go home with no more points than they left with. David’s phone is silent. His apartment echoes. He doesn’t notice.

  The Islanders host the Panthers two weeks later, and it’s as uneventful a game as they come, forgettable, the scattered fans practically yawning down from their seats. David gets a point on a Kurmazov goal, and Jake gets none because the Panthers get none, the Islanders taking it in a 1-0 win that doesn’t excite anyone.

  Jake doesn’t show up after the game, all broad shoulders, lopsided grin, too long hair, and it isn’t that David was expecting him to or anything, not like he’s disappointed. David made himself clear, and Jake listened for once, and that’s good.

  That’s exactly what he wanted.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The weeks pass, uneventful. They win some games and they lose some games. Sometimes David plays well and sometimes he’s not proud of his play. He goes home and he goes to bed, and he doesn’t think of much of anything at all when he’s falling asleep.

  Kurmazov tries to take him aside again when David gets dragged out after a good win. It’s a night that even the husbands and fathers — and Kurmazov’s both — are all there, not just the young guys, so David didn’t have much of a choice. Kurmazov finds David at the end of the bar, where he’s secured himself a mostly quiet spot, asks how he’s been doing.

  David tells him he wants to work more on passing drills, because he knows he’s been missing the mark more than he should, especially with experienced linemates, and feels panic, low in his stomach, when Kurmazov looks more and more dissatisfied as he talks.

  He’s never been more grateful to Benson in his life than when he butts into the conversation, wheedling Kurmazov for permission to buy one of the rookies drinks, because someone’s first goal in the NHL deserves shots, twenty-one or not. Kurmazov turns to talk to him, okaying it. Benson probably knew he would, knew he didn’t even have to ask.

  He just likes the attention, David thinks, not charitable, knowing he’s not charitable, wondering if Jake made the kind of noises with Benson that he made with David. He bites the inside of the cheek until he stops thinking about it.

  Even so, he’s grateful, takes the chance to duck into the bathroom while Kurmazov’s attention is on Benson, carefully avoids Kurmazov the rest of the night. Kurmazov offers to help him with passes after practice the next day, which David takes him up on, and he doesn’t try to talk to David about pointless things again.

  *

  His phone is silent.

  *

  The first hat trick of David’s NHL career doesn’t make the highlight reel.

  David doesn’t usually watch the packaged sports highlights, the showy saves and goals. He finds the whole flow of a game is a more important gauge of performance, and it’s not like the Islanders are featured often anyway, no matter what they do. The networks keep their attention firmly fixed on the big markets, the teams that have an actual chance at the playoffs, the games that ‘matter’, as if the Islanders are just wasting everyone’s time. But tonight he’s glowing with pride, and he wants to see it, the
three goals he only felt, wants to actually savour the moment now that he’s outside of it.

  The team took him out after the game, or at least some of them, Kurmazov shaking him by the back of the neck, grip firm and warm, Eisler ordering David a shot for every goal, Benson taking them with unusual equanimity when David nudged them in his direction as soon as Eisler stopped looking. David had a couple beers, though, felt he deserved it, and he’s a little loose, warm from the beer, the hats on the ice, the stupefied goalie, the crowd lit up for him, chanting his name, when he turns on the TV to find the recaps.

  They don’t show his hat trick, just slide right into a horrorshow, the worst kind of spectacle. The Penguins versus the Flyers, always good for a brawl and some bad blood, though this was just bad luck, the worst kind of luck, a hard one-timer and a body at the exact wrong angle to take it.

  The remainder of the show is replays in increasingly slow motion, at every single possible angle, talking heads discussing the potential fall-out, but all David needed to see was the full-speed replay to know right in his gut: that career was over.

  They keep lingering over the details like they enjoy them: the full volume replay where you can hear Petersen scream, the distraught Penguins bench, the white-faced Flyers, some unaffiliated doctor guessing what the damage is, the Penguins captain shaky and pale in front of the outstretched hands of reporters, recorders running.

  It makes David sick, the way they suck every moment dry, but he can’t stop watching, frozen with the remote still by his hand, the whole thing a waking nightmare.

  Once they’ve spent a good twenty minutes on it, they wrap up the rest of the night in the briefest of snapshots. David’s hat trick is mentioned, but there’s no footage, just an afterthought in the broadcast. It’s an afterthought for him too, at that point.

  He sleeps like shit.

  *

  Is he okay?, David sends Jake the next morning, early, because he woke hours before his alarm and couldn’t will himself back to sleep. When he did sleep it was fractured, anxious, and he woke up in a cold sweat.

  The only time David met Petersen, he was hanging along with Jake and his friend, introduced to David as Markson’s little lady. He helped David lug Jake to bed, and seemed as unimpressed with Jake as David was. David liked him for that.

  no not rly, he gets back ten minutes later.

  Tell him I’m sorry., David sends back immediately, because he wouldn’t wish that on anyone, not the person he hated most in the world.

  Injuries happen every day, but not that kind, the kind that end a career in a second, the kind where all the rehab in the world won’t put you back together, make you a hockey player again..

  David doesn’t know what he’d do without hockey. He’s tried not to think about it, and if he does, he thinks of it as a far-off eventuality, something he won’t have to face until his late thirties, his forties if he takes care of himself. Petersen was drafted only a year ahead of David, and now he’s left with nothing. Or maybe not. David doesn’t know him.

  David wouldn’t have anything at all.

  ok, he gets back, then nothing, not when he checks it ten minutes later, not an hour later, not at all.

  *

  good game, he does get three days later, after a two-point night. Maybe not another hat trick, but it was a good game, a win against Boston, which is rare for them. He had a textbook five-hole goal and one he set up for Kurmazov to tap in while David took the flak around the net. Jake had sent him those kinds of texts earlier in the season, only when David actually had a good game, not just when he got a point or a goal, and David had sent back Thanks., or nothing at all, because he wasn’t exactly sure what to say.

  This time he sends back You were really good last night., because he watched a few highlights, and it’s the truth. He’s sure Jake’s been told that by plenty of people already, that he knows exactly how good he was, but when Jake’s name flashed in his messages David’s heart had been his throat, and it’s an unpleasant feeling, there’s nothing good about it, but he likes the alternative less. He wants to keep feeling it if he can.

  David tries his best to have good games. Not that he doesn’t do that by default — he can’t try harder, because you can’t try harder than 100 percent, no matter how many idiots talk about putting in 110. But he tries to have good games, and for once he wants Jake to have them too, to play well every game, because then David can text him and it isn’t weird.

  David spends Christmas in New York. It’s been snowing all week, and the airports are busy, and it wouldn’t make sense to go back to Ottawa just for two days, not if there’s a delay on the way there, maybe no flights out at all, Ottawa under even more snow than New York is. He could miss a game, and that’d be a disaster.

  So he stays there, finds a nearby church that offers midnight mass. He hasn’t gone since he was a young, so young his father was still around, the last Prime Minister still in office, and they had to go because that was part of his mom’s job too.

  The current Prime Minister isn’t an Anglican, and David hasn’t gone in years, didn’t even like it as a kid, the whole place solemn and stuffy, more people looking at their row as they sat with the Prime Minister than the Reverend up front. It’s less like that this time; still solemn, but in a way David appreciates, and no one’s craning their neck to look at where he’s sitting.

  He falls asleep right after he gets home, sleeps in, even, waking up at ten to a missed call from his mother and a text from Jake. merry xmas!! it says, and David doesn’t know if it’s a mass text — it probably is — but he still sends Merry Christmas. before he tucks his phone away and goes to make himself breakfast.

  They play on Boxing Day, thankfully, get right back into it, a few of the Canadians bemoaning playing on a holiday, which gets eyerolls from the rest of the team, other Canadians included. They win that game, and the next, and the one following that. They go into January hot, lose a game in overtime but stay undefeated in regulation through the first week, including a game on David’s twentieth birthday, and David feels like maybe this year’s going to be different.

  It’s a stupid thought, and he’s reminded of that when they drop three straight as soon as the fans start perking up, the team slipping into a funk that wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t gotten excited about it, about playing like a legitimate contender. Even Kurmazov, typically unflappable, looks dejected. David wishes he hadn’t had the thought in the first place.

  They play the Panthers at the end of January, after losing as many games as they’ve won. They’ve just gotten in from Tampa — another loss — when David gets a text from Jake, just good luck, and he wants to send the same, but it feels like betraying something. He sends See you on the ice., though, just so Jake knows he’s seen it.

  It’s about as uneventful a game as they come, the kind that bores even David a little. Both goalies are airtight, but there are no real chances either, no pretty plays, just two fatigued teams going easy against a weak opponent. It’s a blank slate into overtime, a blank slate after OT, and then finally a shootout, because someone has to win.

  The Panthers are the ones that do, another loss to add to the Islanders’ tally, though at least they wrung a point out of it. No one’s particularly proud of themselves, but no one’s particularly upset either, the mood in the locker room feeling like a collective shrug, a team that’s given up. David doesn’t want to give up, it’s too early still, but the feeling’s starting to overtake him too.

  He’s still dripping from his shower, trying to avoid the small crowd of reporters who seem no more interested in talking to him than he is in talking to them, when his phone buzzes in his suit pocket, and he snatches at it.

  u busy? he reads, and he bites his lip hard against an involuntary smile, just writes back No., slipping his phone back in his pocket and getting dressed.

  Jake’s leaning against the far wall when David walks out, which is something that David’s almost gotten used to seeing. He smiles w
hen he sees David, smaller than the big, beaming grin he usually aims at him — at everyone, really — but a smile. David tentatively smiles back.

  “You hungry?” Jake asks, shoving off the wall.

  “I just had a protein bar,” David says honestly, and then when Jake’s face drops, just a little, “But we could get drinks or something.”

  “Coffee,” Jake says.

  David doesn’t point out that it’s way too late to be drinking caffeine. He thinks that might not be the point. He doesn’t really want to stick around either, in case Benson wanders out and tries to invite Jake somewhere.

  He’s right about it not being the point. After an awkward cab ride where David tries to think of something, anything he can say that will stop Jake from drumming his fingers against his knees like he never did in Toronto — tries and fails — they end up at a coffee shop.

  Jake doesn’t actually order coffee, getting some sort of complicated smoothie that the girl behind the counter seems to have memorised. He says something while she’s blending it for him, something that isn’t funny but makes her laugh anyway, smiling at him wide and unfeigned. David wouldn’t be surprised if Jake ended up with her number on his cup. If he didn’t already have it.

  David buys an overpriced bottle of water just so he won’t have empty hands. Jake glances at it, but doesn’t say anything, not even to tease him like he did sometimes in Toronto when David got something Jake considered boring or overly healthy, which was all the time.

  David clutches it self-consciously, the bottle sweating in his hand as he follows Jake to two arm chairs in the back, the place mostly empty around them. It closes in less than thirty minutes — David saw the hours when they walked in — and David isn’t really sure what that means.

  Jake sinks into the far seat, leaving David to sit across from him, elbows on his knees, twisting the cap off the bottle of water for something to do instead of stare at him.

  “How’ve you been?” Jake asks, and David raises one shoulder in a shrug before realising that’s a poor answer.