by R J Scott
I looked over the shoulder of my brand new Railers hoodie at the lean guy hustling down the concrete stairs. He had wild brown hair and big googly eyes. He held his hand out, shook, then glanced at the cell phone in his hand.
“Bob Riggs,” he said. “I run an online site that deals exclusively with ice hockey in the Harrisburg area. From the pros to peewee.”
“Nice. Feel free to tape.”
I leaned against the glass, folded my arms over my chest, and began answering questions. Within five minutes there were probably twenty people gathered around me at ice level. I did my best to answer every question they threw at me. I told them how excited I was to be there, how I hoped I could contribute to the team and the city in a positive way, and how cool it was that professional hockey was expanding. It was an impromptu kind of meet-and-greet, my favorite kind. I related much better to this kind of setting, as opposed to the strictly regulated media day things the teams always set up. Those always felt so staged and stiff. I was about to reply to a question from a burly dude in a tracksuit who had no hair on his head but had massive amounts of it growing out of his ears, when someone pounded on the glass behind me.
I jumped and spun, my gaze locking with and then getting lost in the most beautiful light blue eyes I had ever seen. Familiar eyes, too, now that the shock began to pass. They belonged to Jared Madsen, or “Mads” as he was known in our house. I hadn’t seen him in years. He looked so different, and yet the same, if that made any sense. He was incredibly hot now. Had he always been that way? I’d been probably ten or maybe twelve when I’d last seen him, so I totally hadn’t been aware of men, or how attracted to them I would be a few years later. Had his hair always been that shade of golden wheat, his eyes that piercing, his shoulders that broad…?
Two
Mads
Ten stared right at me with a look of recognition and even a hint of a smile. He was gorgeous—there was no getting away from that. From his chiseled cheekbones to his green eyes, he was a step away from pretty. My reaction to him was visceral. He was exactly the kind of man I liked to spend time looking at.
Tennant Rowe. On one hand, star center and a team player with excellent hockey sense, and on the other, gorgeous, sexy, and fodder for a million fan fantasies.
I need to focus on the hockey. I have nine years on him, and he’s a family friend. I decided to repeat that until I’d settled down the appreciation that had filtered into my thoughts. So, I focused on the hockey.
Even at eleven or twelve, whatever he’d been when we’d last met, it had been obvious that Tennant had the Rowe hockey genes—the potential to be better than his brothers, even. Not that Brady or Jamie had ever let him be better. Brotherly love had not extended to letting Ten get goals on them, or hell, even get the extra potato at dinner. Their competitiveness would have stifled a lesser kid, but not Ten—he’d thrived on it.
“What do you know about Tennant Rowe?” Head Coach Mike Benning had asked me before the trade. “You played with Brady, right?”
I’d almost felt like my opinion mattered right then, as if my having prior knowledge of Ten’s brother Brady meant that when I spoke, Coach would actually listen. Not that he didn’t listen, don’t get me wrong—he was a good guy underneath the stern-faced iciness. He was just really focused on the forwards. It was one of the things the team was fucking up, not that I was saying that out loud just yet. I had camp to get through yet, finding a core of D-men I could shape. Then I’d be saying exactly what I thought to Coach Benning, and he could like it or not.
It would be too late to get rid of me then.
So yeah, he was right. I’d played with Brady in Juniors, part of the D-pair with him, and we’d been good. More than good. He’d ended up first pick to Boston, and made it to captain so damn quick it had taken even me by surprise. Then again, he’d always been a pushy bastard who’d gone after what he wanted. Me? My rise hadn’t been so fast, but I’d stood out at the Buffalo Sabres, done my part in getting us to the Stanley Cup finals. Only my career was over, and Brady’s star was still shining. Go figure.
“You can’t judge Tennant by his brother,” I’d said, and I’d meant it. Brady was a defenseman; big and ugly in the corners, with a spark that made him the best. Yeah, he was captain, yeah, he had some two-way skills, but he was no kind of forward like Ten, who had all the best top six attributes, like speed and puck smarts.
Ten was still staring, and I guessed that meant I was staring back. I sketched a small wave, and he copied me, then one of the reporters asked him something and he was distracted away from me. That was okay; wasn’t like we had anything to say except that small acknowledgment of familiarity. I’d checked him out on Google when Coach had asked me, seen the standard NHL photos. One, in particular, had caught my eye. Ten in Dallas colors, stick behind his neck, smiling, his lips in a pout, eyes bright. He’d sure grown up all kinds of sexy, but given the number of photos of him and various female models, he was the wrong kind of sexy for me.
Anyway, let’s face it, Brady would kill me if I went anywhere near his brother. After all, he’d walked in on the threesome thing in Montreal and been faced with me, a busty brunette, and this built-like-a-brick-outhouse guy, both of whom had been… Well, yeah, Brady had sworn he needed eye bleach, since then his opinion of me had placed me firmly in the region of whore.
Pretty accurate for the most part, at least until game five of round three, when I’d had an argument with the boards that had taken me out of a playoff game and then out of professional hockey altogether. Nothing like having your body let you down to stop your whoring ways.
I pulled myself out of thinking about Ten and his brothers when Coach Benning skated up to me.
“And?” he asked under his breath.
“And what?”
“The kid look good to you?”
“Who?”
“Tennant Rowe,” he said with a hint of impatience, like I was stupid.
I could wax lyrical about the lithe body in the obviously brand-new Railers hoodie, or the way his green eyes sparkled in the bright rink lights. Hell, I could even talk about how broad his back had seemed pressed up against the glass before he turned. But that wasn’t what Coach was after; he wanted some instant insight into talent.
I had so much I wanted to say at that point. Something along the lines of the Railers being lucky to have someone with his stats, that the kid was a man now, who had the potential to lead the team into a good year. Maybe even playoffs. I was desperate to say that Coach shouldn’t fuck it up. I didn’t say a word. My shrug was the way I’d started talking to the man who couldn’t tell a good player from a bad one.
Benning muttered something that sounded distinctly like it included the words “asshole” and “fuck.” I was used to that now. We had what the team liked to call an interesting relationship. I called it a fucked-up mess, but I knew it wasn’t all him.
A flurry of cursing and laughter, and the ten rookies I had with me that day were out on the ice. I looked at them objectively as they stretched and skated lazy circles to warm up. We had six spots on the team, four of which were already filled by some of the best D-men I’d seen in a long time. Which left spots for two out of the ten who were there for training. I already had my eye on Travis MacAllister. He’d spent last year on the minor team that fed the Railers, shown promise, been called up a couple of times but not dressed for the game. Mac, as he was known, was so close to making the team proper, and he knew it, cocky son of a bitch. I liked that in a defenseman—confidence in his abilities, that he could push anyone into the boards and walk away smiling.
I put him with this new kid—bright eyed, ruling-the-world kind of confidence radiating from every pore. He was a six-five Swede with a goofy, big-toothed smile, and appeared inoffensive at first look, but Arvid “Arvy” Ulfsson was anything but harmless. He had potential behind that smile and spent a lot of time at the net, scrappy and relentless. His weakness was his desperate need to get in on the attack, and he ne
eded to settle his position with his mark before he got all fancy and tried to take shots at the net.
The rest were a mix of guys who shone and some who didn’t. All of them deserved a place on the minor team, but whether they’d stand up well as part of the Railers was another matter.
I partnered Arvy and Mac in the three-on-two, switched them out, concentrated really hard on the edge work, on the checks they followed through, on the ones they didn’t… or as hard as I could when Ten was sitting and watching.
I wonder what Ten thinks? Is he taking mental notes like me? He’d grown up practicing against his brothers, both NHL stars in their own right. Was he watching this scrimmage and thinking that the defense could be better? Was he judging Arvy and Mac? Is he judging me? Why do I care?
By the end of the practice, I’d mentally crossed five of the guys off the list. Telling them that they weren’t being offered contracts was hard, but they had to learn, right? The NHL was the shining target, the Stanley Cup, the original six, a hundred years of history. Not everyone was guaranteed a seat at the table their first year out. One of them, a hulking bulk of a guy, seemed to want to say something, but I stood my ground, like only the best kind of enforcer could, and he subsided with a rueful grin. I couldn’t blame any of the guys for their disappointment—enforcers were pushy and ultra-confident by trade, and you couldn’t expect them to switch it off as soon as practice ended.
By the end of session one, I had five left, and the uneasy feeling that Ten was staring at my every move. I excused it as being because I was familiar to him, a family friend, someone he used to shoot against as a teenager on the odd occasions I would stay at the Rowe house and we’d play pick up hockey. When I casually skated a loop to bring myself up against the goalie coach, I glanced up at the seats where Ten and the rest had been sitting, but there was only empty space. They’d left, and for a second I was disappointed. I’d kind of hoped to have a chat with him afterward. What about, I didn’t know.
The last thing you did was ask Tennant Rowe how his brothers were, or make a comment about the most recent Brady/Jamie success. Not that he wasn’t proud, I was sure—they were a close family, and one I had envied as an only kid with an absent mother, but still… Ten had spent a long time making his own name.
I knew that, because I’d followed him. Not like a stalker, or with a Google alert set up or anything like that. I mean, I’d listened for the scraps of information out of Dallas, the mentions of Ten often as an addendum to what the great Tate Collins, Savior of the NHL, was doing. I’d seen photos of skinny Ten growing up, holding that Dallas second line with a tenacity that had got him an eighty-nine points average over the three years. I’d seen interviews after games where the reporters had wanted to ask Ten questions about his brothers. He always smiled at those, and answered as best he could, but anyone who knew him could see the frustration in his expression.
“You looking at Arvy and Mac?” Alain Gagnon, goalie coach extraordinaire, a twenty-year veteran from the Canucks, interrupted my thought process. Arvy. Mac. Work.
“Yeah.”
Gagnon huffed. “Mac’s a definite. Arvy doesn’t finish his checks and wants to score goals.”
“Nothing wrong with a two-way defenseman,” I said. I was aiming for sarcastic, but actually it was nice to have validation from someone I respected that things weren’t quite right with Arvy.
“He’s good, has potential there. So, you’ll work with him,” Gagnon said, and skated off.
He did that a lot. The skating off thing. Goalies are just weird, if you ask me—funny, talking to their posts kind of weird. But then, if you’re the type of man who’s happy standing still with a puck heading for you at a hundred miles an hour, you’re a long way past weird. The Railers weren’t looking for a new goalie this year—the two we had were what kept us from falling to the bottom of the tables. In fact, they and a few of our more sparky forwards were the ones who’d left us only eight points away from a playoffs place in the first year since expansion.
“My office,” Coach called, and I skated slowly toward the door.
Part of me didn’t want to leave the ice. This was my home. I felt good on the ice. Everything was soft and smooth and cold, not jagged and ruined like my life outside. And yeah, I’m aware that sounds dramatic, but the ice was, and will always be, my refuge. That first jarring step when skate hits the rubber of the walkway, you feel the entire weight of your body on that tiny blade and everything is wrong for the shortest of seconds. I didn’t know if any other skaters felt that way—I’d never asked them, limited as I was mostly to being fierce and chirping the guys I was shadowing. I could just imagine it—up against an elite center, checking them into the boards and then asking them how they felt about the ice.
Not happening.
The meeting was shorter than normal, thank fuck—Benning had a way of talking until he was blue in the face and the rest of the room was losing the will to stay awake. He was all team dynamics, pressure points, forecheck, backcheck, Xs and Os. I was all “Let’s get lunch, because breakfast was a mess and I didn’t manage more than one bite of a cold Pop-Tart.” Apparently, the meeting was short because he had a very important, official meeting with the new forward, Tennant Rowe, shining star, part of the Rowe dynasty, and so on. He was looking at me the whole time he said that, and I think he was probably trying to say without words that even though I knew Ten, he was in charge. Who knows.
I share an office with Gagnon, but that’s okay, because he’s never in there. Probably off doing goalie-type weird stuff. That meant I got a chance to eat in peace, get a coffee, and scroll through my inbox. The email from Brady was expected. Not that we email a lot—hardly at all since the accident that ended my career with brutal finality. I placed my hand on my chest, a habit I had when I was thinking about my heart. One hit into the boards, one normal concussion protocol, and then I’d collapsed in the medical bay.
The beginning of the end.
Brady had been one of the first people I’d pushed away. The fucker had tried contacting me for the longest time out of all my friends, but finally even he’d given up.
Like I’d wanted friends still playing hockey when my heart condition wouldn’t even allow me to play in a beer league.
Hey, Mads, the email began, and I must admit I liked that it wasn’t formal. I’d been Mads since I’d started hockey at age four. Turned out having the surname Madsen and being described as a mad enforcer meant my nickname was a good one.
The email asked after me, hoped I was okay and liking my new role with the Railers, and said how pissed he was that Boston hadn’t taken me on as a coach. Where he’d got the idea that I’d ever want to coach at Boston, I didn’t know. The two of us together would just have been too much of a reminder of everything that had gone to shit.
Yep. That’s me being dramatic again.
I read the rest. Some news about his twins, and the fact that he was about to be an uncle. For a moment my chest tightened. Ten was way too young to be a dad, and I should know—I’d been only just fifteen when I’d helped create a kid. Why I immediately assumed it was Ten who’d done the deed I don’t know, given that there was Jamie, the middle brother.
And then the email cut to the chase. So you know you’re getting Ten—keep an eye on him for me? The team isn’t what I wanted for him, but he’s set on this.
Then there was the usual “we must keep in touch” crap. But I felt in the space of a sentence, the Railers had been dismissed as worthless. I’d been told that Ten was better than us, and I’d been demoted to the role of caretaker. Somehow all that gelled together to make me feel like shit.
I typed out a response that was flowery with adjectives, cast aspersions on Brady’s parentage, and told him in no uncertain terms to shove his platitudes where the sun didn’t shine.
I then deleted it all and just sent a simple, He’s all grown up—he can look after himself. I hesitated over what to sign it. Mads was the right way to go, but somehow it i
mplied a personal connection that I didn’t feel happy with. But Brady had never called me Jared, so in the end I wrote Mads and pressed send.
The whole thing left me as unsettled as I felt with my skates on rubber, and I shut my email down, deciding later would be a good time to tackle the emails from Ryker’s school, the bank, and the amendments to the myriad schedules that ruled a hockey team.
Coffee in hand and restless, I left my office, bypassing the changing rooms, the kitchen, the weight rooms, and in fact any place where I might meet someone and have to talk. Which was how I ended up in the back corridor by the heap of storage boxes we used when playing away games. Unfortunately, someone else was already there, seated on a box, cross-legged, staring at the wall. Tennant. I stopped and backed away, but he’d heard me, or seen me, or really did have that freaky second sight that some of the pundits talked about.
“Mads,” he said, and leaned forward out of the shadows so I was able to get a good look at him. The dark blue hoodie with the Railers logo front and center suited him. That was all I could think.
“Ten,” I said, on autopilot.
“That guy, twenty-nine. Ulffson or something? He’s not finishing his checks. Wants to get the puck and score. That’s not good.”
I looked at Ten to see if he was teasing, but there was nothing on his face or in his beautiful green eyes that spoke of the declaration being anything other than a statement of fact.
“Noted,” I said.
“You knew that already,” Ten said, and untangled his legs, stretching them out in front of him one at a time.
“I did.”
Great, this was either the deepest conversation I’d ever had with another person, or just plain fucking stupid.
“Brady says hi,” Ten offered, and this time the stretching extended to him lifting his arms above his head, and yep, there it was, that strip of skin, of toned stomach, and yep, I looked. Sue me, Ten had a classic skater’s body, all muscles and planes and strength. A man could look.