These kids didn’t need to know that I was thinking about making babies with my wife. They were here for me to read to them.
Shit, yeah… I had to read to them.
Then, quick as lightning, an excited buzz gathered strength in the library, spreading from those children closest to us to the other side of the room.
A small girl up front raised her hand, bouncing on her knees with excitement.
The librarian whistled gently and held up her hand with all five fingers raised. Then she slowly lowered one finger at a time until she’d made a fist. With each lowered finger, the talking slowed until it came to a stop. I couldn’t remember ever being so well behaved when I was their age. She nodded with a broad smile, looking from one side of the room to the other to be sure all the kids had quieted and were paying attention.
“Excellent,” she said. “I know it’s hard to contain your excitement when we have a real-life celebrity in the library today, but being on your best behavior is going to pay off. Now, Michaela, it appears you have a question for Mr. and Mrs. Jezek?”
The girl nodded so hard she looked like a bobblehead.
“What’s your question, Michaela?” I asked her. A bit of Q and A might help ease me into the reading part, anyway.
“Can you bwing Authtin Coopuh and Axuwh Johanthon with you next time?” All her front teeth were missing, and she was probably the cutest thing I’d ever seen. Just like that, I wanted a little blond-haired girl with no front teeth and a lisp. I wanted one so badly I could taste it, and the desire had come up on me out of nowhere.
Bam. Done deal. I wanted a baby girl.
Hell.
I glanced over at Mackenzie, but that was a mistake, because now I was picturing a tiny version of my wife, with adorable blond curls and big brown eyes, wearing a too-large number-ninety-one Storm jersey that read Daddy on the nameplate.
Out of nowhere, I wanted to make a baby with Mackenzie. I wanted it more than I could explain. Maybe even more than one. I wouldn’t mind having a son who wanted to grow up to be a hockey player just like me.
Hell, in all honesty, I didn’t care if any of them wanted to follow in my footsteps. I just wanted them, and I wanted them with Mackenzie.
At least half the girls in the library giggled in high-pitched voices that took me straight back to their age and reminded me what I was here to do, even if I’d rather be at home, working on making babies with my wife.
Authtin Coopuh and Axuwh Johanthon, huh? I could easily guess who she meant. Austin Cooper and Axel Johansson, better known as Coop and Jo-Jo to the rest of the guys, were the youngest players currently on our roster. Something told me Babs was no longer the crush material of the day. Now he was one of the old, boring married guys.
I guessed that meant I was one of the old, boring married guys now, too.
I cleared my throat to buy a moment. Mackenzie didn’t jump in to rescue me, either, darn her. I supposed this one was up to me. “Not sure if I can swing that, but I’ll have to see what I can do about bringing some of the other guys along. They’ve all got practices and team meetings to attend.”
“How come you’re not at practice?” a slightly larger boy near the back interjected.
“Remember to raise your hand,” one of the teachers admonished from the outskirts of the group.
He shot his hand up in the air and repeated his question without waiting to be called on.
I pointed down to my ankle. “Not allowed to play right now. I got hurt, and I have to let my ankle heal before they’ll let me back on the ice with the rest of the team.”
“Did you have surgery?” another boy asked, his hand high in the air even though he didn’t wait to be acknowledged, either.
“Not this time,” I answered.
“If you don’t have surgery, you’re not really hurt,” he retorted. “You’re just a pansy. That’s what my older brother says.”
I snort-laughed because he was just as full of shit as I’d been at his age. All piss and vinegar.
“It looks like Mr. and Mrs. Jezek brought prizes!” the librarian interjected before I could get into an argument with a six-year-old. Probably for the best. She swooped in front of the kids and set up a stool front and center, then offered it to me. “So let’s all sit quietly and listen with our ears and our hearts, all right?”
The animated murmurs didn’t fully die off, but they diminished by a huge margin. Besides, I doubted I’d have been able to sit quietly and be still when I was their age, either, if an NHL player had come to my school.
“Thanks for letting us come and read to you today,” Mackenzie said, taking over. And within moments, the kids were quiet and listening, thoroughly enraptured by her. I couldn’t say I blamed them. I hung on her every word most of the time, too. She winked over at me. “If everyone can sit really still and quiet, we’ve got some fun prizes to give out after we read the stories. But you need to pay close attention, because you’ll have to answer questions about the books to win the prizes. Does everyone understand?”
Dozens of tiny heads bobbed as the kids nodded while most of them said, “Yes, Mrs. Jezek,” in unison.
She was born for this.
Yeah, I absolutely needed to make babies with her. Babies, as in plural. Even if I’d end up being a shit dad like my own had been, she was a natural with them. She could more than make up for any deficiencies I might have in the parenting realm.
But I didn’t want to be a shit father. I didn’t want to be anything like my parents. I wanted to be better, the kind of father that every kid deserved to have. The kind of dad that neither Mackenzie nor I had ever had.
How could I be something when I’d never had a good example of it? But that kind of logic didn’t make sense if I believed Mackenzie would be an amazing mother, and she’d never had one of those to speak of. If she could do it, so could I. We could do it together.
I supposed a good place to start would be with figuring out how to read a book to kids. Practice for bedtime stories, right?
I can do this.
Later, we’d have to talk about starting up a family. But for now, I had a job to do, and I had to figure out how to do it.
HE MIGHT NOT be a natural at reading to kids, but Riley wasn’t too bad at it for a first-timer. He stumbled over a couple of sentences in the beginning, but the kids didn’t notice, and since everything to do with hockey was second nature to him, he soon settled in.
He did better than I would have done, even, because he knew what all the words meant. I was getting better, after watching the games with him or with the other WAGs during home games, but my hockey knowledge was sorely lacking. The books he read them taught me things I didn’t know yet.
The kids laughed in all the right places, and that seemed to put him more at ease than he’d been at first. It didn’t hurt that he knew the right way to pronounce all of the hockey terminology, too, like Zamboni. He even took the time to answer the kids’ questions and explain the parts they didn’t follow on their own.
Most of those questions seemed to come from Bea Castillo’s special ed students, and a few of the other kids started to get impatient, rolling their eyes and loudly sighing. But Riley took all the time necessary to explain things to the kids until everyone understood, never begrudging any of them an answer.
He might not have thought he’d be good at this, but he did a fantastic job of interacting with the children. They brought out a goofy side of him that I hadn’t seen much, to be honest.
After he finished reading the books, they held a brief question-and-answer session that the librarian moderated, and the way he bantered with one cheeky girl made my heart flutter.
“You must not be very fast if they’re not letting you play,” she said after he finished reading the second book.
“They’re not letting me play because I got hurt.”
She raised her brows dubiously. “You look all right to me. No blood. No scars. My dad and I watched a hockey game last year and the guy go
t his neck cut open. He was gushing blood everywhere.”
Riley raised a brow. “You mean Drew Nash? The Thunderbirds player?”
She nodded.
“Well, that one was pretty gnarly. But the truth is, you can’t see all injuries. They don’t all make us bleed. Just because a guy’s not bleeding all over the ice, that doesn’t mean he’s not hurt.”
“Yeah, but he came back to play already,” she shot back.
“And he was injured, what, almost a year ago? Mine was just in January. Not that long ago.”
“Tough guys would play through it,” a boy cut in.
“You saying I’m weak?” Riley responded, but he said it in a joking tone, not confrontationally. “Wanna arm-wrestle?”
“Arm-wrestle who? You?”
“Yeah, me. Who else? Come on. We’ll put a bet on it.”
The boy turned bright pink, but he eagerly nodded.
I wasn’t sure he should be betting in the school, and I was almost positive that he shouldn’t be challenging the kids to an arm-wrestling match, but this was the most engaged any of them had been since we’d arrived. And if the teachers weren’t going to step in to stop it, I had no intention of getting involved.
“Come on, then.” Riley headed over to one of the tables nearby and pulled out a chair for his opponent and another for himself. “How’s this? You beat me, and I’ll autograph a jersey for you. I beat you, and you have to pick the book my wife will read to you the next time she comes to visit.”
“I don’t even like books,” the boy said.
“You don’t like books? Everybody likes books.”
“Not me.”
Riley narrowed his eyes at him as if studying him. “Well, do you like movies?”
“Everybody likes movies,” the boy said, rolling his eyes.
“Everybody, huh? So what’s your name?”
“Josh.”
“What’s your favorite movie?”
“How to Train Your Dragon.”
“Hmm. Any idea if that one was based on a book?” Riley casually asked over his shoulder in the direction of several teachers.
The school’s librarian immediately nodded. “Written by Cressida Cowell. I can check to see if our copy is on the shelves right now. But it might be a bit beyond your reading level at this point, Josh. It’s kind of long.”
The boy narrowed his eyes defiantly. “Then maybe she has to come back again to finish the book or something.”
“I’m sure you can convince her to do that,” Riley said. “If you beat me, at least.”
“Why would I want her to read that book to me if I’ve already seen the movie?”
“Because the book is always better than the movie,” one of the teachers answered from the back of the crowd.
“Exactly,” Riley agreed. “So do we have a deal?”
Josh took a seat at one of the tables, and Riley sat down across from him. They reached for one another’s hands in the middle and grabbed hold.
“All right,” Riley said. “Normally, the rule is that your elbow has to stay on the table. But I’m going to let you use both hands to try to beat me, got it? Both hands are allowed, but keep your elbow on the table.”
Josh nodded, his brows drawn together and a determined set to his mouth.
They reached for one another in the middle of the table. I glanced up and caught Bea Castillo’s eye. I knew there was bound to be a question in my expression, but she just grinned and nodded, as if this were the best thing that could have happened.
Alrighty then. At this point, we might as well run with it.
The librarian stepped in to act as the referee. She put her hand over the tops of theirs and counted them down. “Three, two, one, go!”
Riley was obviously holding back but still trying just enough to force Josh into giving it his all. The other kids all gathered around, some of them cheering for Josh but the large majority of them chanting for Riley.
Josh’s forehead broke out in a sweat. He tugged and pulled and jerked, but Riley’s arm barely budged.
“Can another kid help me?” he squealed in between panting for breath.
“No kids,” Riley replied.
No kids, huh? Well, that didn’t rule out adults. Before I could second-guess myself, I headed over to the table and added both my hands to the equation, pushing against Riley and bearing down from above with all my weight.
He looked up at me in surprise.
I shrugged. “You said no kids. I’m not a kid.”
The roar of approval from our audience was deafening. I doubted there’d been this much noise in the school library all year.
He shook his head with a wry grin, but he didn’t contradict me. Besides, there wasn’t a chance that Josh and I could truly beat him. Not if he intended to really give it his all.
Something told me he’d never intended for this to be a fair fight. He was absolutely going to let Josh win. But now Josh might feel as if he had a better shot.
The two of us pushed hard, and Josh’s elbow came up off the table multiple times even though he struggled to keep it down. He even added his other hand to the mix, and I topped them all with my free hand. Josh’s arm shook, but slowly, ever so slowly, Riley’s arm started giving way. And then…we…had him.
The entire library full of kids and teachers broke out into cheers and applause, and Riley gave Josh a high five. “Nice one, buddy. Good job.” He reached into the pile of swag that the team had sent with us and pulled out a jersey and a Sharpie marker, then signed his name over the number stitched onto the back.
Josh pulled it on over his clothes, grinning from ear to ear. Something told me he might end up sleeping in it tonight. Heck, he might refuse to take that jersey off again for weeks. And why should he? He’d just beaten one of his idols in an arm-wrestling contest. He ought to be proud of himself.
Reading might not be Riley’s calling, but working with kids like this? He was a natural. It was as if he’d been training his entire life just for this moment.
I watched him move through the sea of children, passing out the swag we’d brought with us, shaking hands as if they were grownups, giving out high-fives and hugs indiscriminately. Seeing him like this made me feel all warm and ooey-gooey inside, like a chocolate-chip cookie straight out of the oven, before it had time to set up.
That was when I realized I might have made a mistake.
A huge one, no less. The biggest mistake I could have possibly made.
Because I was falling in love with my husband. And if I loved him, it would hurt me that much more when he decided I no longer fit in his life.
BY LATE FEBRUARY, I was starting to feel some significant improvements with my ankle. The pain was almost nonexistent, only making itself known when I attempted to use the joint in a few specific ways. The bad news was that those specific ways were kind of necessary for playing hockey, such as when I wanted to start, stop, or change directions on the ice. But the progress I’d been making had me hopeful that I was still on track for returning to game action before the end of the regular season, and all my doctors and trainers seemed to agree with my self-assessment.
In even better news, Jens was finally free of concussion symptoms. One morning near the end of the month, he woke up and said he felt great. The next day was more of the same.
He told everyone he didn’t want to get his hopes up, because he’d seen improvements before only to suffer a series of devastating setbacks, but there was a definite look in his eyes that none of us had seen there in quite a long time.
“You’re going to be back in a game before I will,” I told him one afternoon when he was finally being allowed to work out alongside me.
“Don’t even joke about that,” he replied. “I don’t want to tempt fate.”
I wouldn’t call it tempting fate so much as stating the obvious. After months of gut-wrenching uncertainty about his future, he was finally able to see a clear path ahead of him, a series of steps he needed to take in or
der to be cleared to play.
And anyway, I was right about this one.
Just before the end of the month, Doc and the trainers all got together and cleared both Thor and Jens to return to game action, which meant I was the only one still on the injured reserve.
The boys were so ecstatic for them both, and especially for Jens, that Burnzie put together an impromptu party at his house the night after we got the news. And at least the party was something I could participate in and be around the rest of the boys.
But now, with both of those guys back on the ice, I would be all alone in rehabbing my ankle until I was allowed back into games, unless someone else got hurt. Lonely or not, I couldn’t wish an injury on anyone, and particularly not when it would mean Jim Sutter and the coaches would have to fill another hole in our roster for whatever length of time.
The party was a brilliant idea, though, and I was as glad for it as anyone. Maybe even more than some of them because I missed hanging out with the rest of the team so much.
Mackenzie and I took Max and Lola with us so they could play with Burnzie’s dogs. A couple of the other guys brought their dogs along, too.
Sure enough, every last canine at the party ended up jumping into the river for a swim despite the chilly weather, which came as a surprise to exactly no one.
Lola led the charge, and the rest of them thundered along behind her, barking up an excited storm before diving in and splashing all the older kids who’d been trying to fashion fishing poles out of sticks and some fishing line one of them had brought along. The dogs had better luck fishing than the kids did, which meant that they came out smelling like fish guts. At least Burnzie had plenty of dog shampoo on hand, so we were able to clean them all off in the backyard before they were allowed back in the house or anyone’s vehicle. Good times.
Mackenzie spent most of her day playing with the smaller children, and I could hardly take my eyes off her. I’d never seen her smile so much or heard her laugh so often. I could get used to this. Her laughter was infectious and addictive.
Power Play (Portland Storm Book 16) Page 16