Game Breaker (Portland Storm Book 14)

by Catherine Gayle

  “So be it,” I said, looking Dave straight in the eye with as much conviction as I could muster. I needed these guys on my side, because there were enough other people out there hoping to see me crash and burn. “We’re still doing this my way for as long as it is my job.”

  The guys muttered, “Got it,” and other similar words of assent, but they sounded less than enthusiastic. I understood their reluctance. The easy thing to do would be exactly what they were suggesting. I didn’t want to take the easy way out. I had never been one to travel the path of least resistance. If I had been, I’d have a physics degree and would be popping out Indian babies like my mother thought best.

  I shook my head, brushing all the negativity aside. If I allowed myself to dwell on that, I’d be swallowed up in it in no time. “Let’s call it a night, guys. We’ve all got a lot to do tomorrow.” Not the least of which was figuring out how to frame the second episode.

  This job might well be the death of me, but at least I’d go out doing something I could be proud of.

  “ANIKA, YOU SHOULD talk to your mother,” Padma said into the phone. “She’s driving us all up the wall with how her only daughter has banished her from her life, how you’re shaming her with the work you do.”

  “Will you ever start calling me Anne like everyone else does?” I demanded of my cousin, trying to deflect the conversation from the direction she wanted to take things.

  “Everyone? Who is this everyone? The whole family has always called you Anika.”

  Not my whole family, I thought to myself. Only the Indian half of it. The rest of my family called me by my real name, Anne. “Only because Mom calls me Anika.”

  “Because it’s how we know you.”

  “But it’s not my name.”

  “It should be your name.”

  “But it isn’t. If you doubt it, have a look at my birth certificate.” I shoved the phone between my shoulder and my ear so I could keep packing my suitcase. I’d already thrown in my toiletries and my undergarments. Now I needed enough suits to get me through the four days I’d be with the Storm in San Jose. It was definitely warm weather there now, in late April, so lightweight suits would be best. Too bad I’d completely ruined that tan suit. It had been my favorite, but the dry cleaner hadn’t been able to get all the grass stains out of it. Even if they could, I’d ripped it open in a couple of places—not along the seams, either, since that would be too easy to repair—when I’d fallen, so I’d ended up tossing the whole thing in the garbage.

  “Your mother said she wanted you to be named Anika,” Padma insisted.

  “Then she should have named me Anika when I was born. She didn’t.”

  “Because your father wanted you to have an American name even though you’re Indian.”

  “Half-Indian,” I corrected her. “But regardless, that was between the two of them.”

  “And he won. Just like he always wins.”

  He always won where I was concerned because he loved me as the person I was, not the person he wished I was, but that was neither here nor there. Padma wouldn’t want to hear it, anyway. My mother’s family was always on her side in all things, and since I didn’t share those sentiments, I was continually on the outs with half my relatives these days. Black sheep, thy name is Anne.

  Not bothering with my crutches since I was dealing with the phone and needing to fill my hands with clothes, I limped to the closet and grabbed the first three suits I could find that weren’t made from a hot, thick wool. Before going back to the bed, where my suitcase was thrown open, I grabbed one more suit for good measure. Then I loaded a few colorful shells and blouses to wear beneath the jackets, so I wouldn’t have to make another trip to the closet on my aching ankle.

  “You’re not denying it, Anika.”

  “There’s nothing to deny. My name is Anne. And I will talk to my mother when she apologizes to me.”

  “Why on earth would your mother need to apologize to you? She carried you for nine months. She gave birth to you. She raised—”

  “She berates me at every opportunity she gets for not being her version of an ideal Indian daughter. And you know what? She wasn’t the ideal Indian daughter, either, and she was and is as far from being the ideal American mother as possible. She made her choices, so I don’t know why she can’t respect the fact that I need to make my own choices, as well.”

  “But her choices were wrong!” Padma insisted.

  “They were wrong for her. I’m not making the same choices she made, though. She needs to accept the fact that I am not her, and I will never be her, and she can’t turn me into something or someone I’m not. It can’t and won’t happen. So until she can apologize—”

  “For what?” my cousin cut in, and I ground my jaw, tossing the suits into the suitcase without even bothering to fold them.

  I slammed the top closed and seethed silently for a few moments, trying to calm myself through deep breathing before I went off on Padma. It was really my mother who deserved to be on the receiving end of my ire, not my cousin.

  “Don’t you remember that farce of a wedding?” I finally bit off.

  “She was just trying to be proactive.”

  “Proactive?” I nearly shouted into the phone. “How is my mother planning a wedding for me, buying the dress, inviting every member of her family but no one from the other half of my family—including my own father—and even picking out the groom, an Indian doctor who was more than twice my age, no less, all of this without saying a freaking word to me until I showed up after graduation, simply being proactive? How is it not majorly overstepping?”

  “Arranged marriages are common in India,” Padma said feebly, feeding me the same line every member of my mother’s family had been reciting in the two years since that disaster.

  “Well, we aren’t in India, are we? This is America. And they’re not common in America. Good grief, I’ve never even been to India,” I added, almost as an afterthought. A very important afterthought, though, if you asked me. Granted, my mother didn’t seem to think that was necessary. She wanted to marry me off to a fifty-two-year-old Indian doctor who could barely speak English, and the only non-English language I could speak was geek. “I can’t even speak the language, other than a couple of phrases.”

  “She was only trying to help.”

  “She didn’t help. At all. And until she can recognize that what she did was wrong and hurtful, and apologize to me for it, there’s nothing else I have to say to that woman. And there’s no amount of pleading and guilt-tripping the rest of you can do to change that. My mother is the one in the wrong here. If you can’t see that—”

  “What, are you going to cut the rest of the family off, too?” Padma cut in.

  “At this point, it feels to me as if it’s all of you cutting me off, because you refuse to accept the truth of the situation.”

  “I’m not going to sit here and listen to this anymore,” she said. Then the line went dead.

  When I heard the dial tone, the only thing I felt was relief.

  WE WERE A team built on skill and speed, which was why I was able to fit in reasonably well despite my obvious lack of size in comparison to almost every guy in the league. The Sharks boasted an intimidating combination of the same skill game we played along with a lineup full of big bodies. As a team, we might be a bit faster and have a few more players who could pull off crazy skill moves than they did, but they were a team designed to bang and bruise.

  And they’d been doing plenty of that.

  After every game so far in this series, almost every guy in our locker room had a bag of ice strapped to at least a few choice body parts. We were taking a serious beating, even though the series was tied at two wins apiece heading back to Portland for the fifth game in this seven-game series.

  As for me, I’d tweaked an old knee injury when I’d been trying to dig the puck out of the boards tonight, with two big Sharks defensemen banging away at it, as well. It wasn’t anything that would keep me ou
t of the next game, but the trainers had me keeping ice on it even during the flight home and elevating it as much as I could. They’d stacked a couple of carry-on suitcases on top of each other and instructed me to put my foot up on it. Good thing my legs were shorter than most of the guys’, because mine were almost too long to make this kind of setup work, even though we had a lot more room on this private jet than we would on any commercial plane.

  Anne and two of her cameramen were on the flight with us, and they were moving around the cabin, filming segments with various guys. For the most part, they’d left me alone during the few days we were in San Jose, which felt like a blessing. Maybe all the bullshit about the banana peel was finally starting to die off. I hoped that would be the case, at least.

  RJ had been sitting next to me, his nose buried in his phone as he messaged back and forth with Amanda, an ice pack strapped to his shoulder. But about halfway through the flight, 501 and Cody “Harry” Williams dragged him to the back of the plane to play poker, leaving the seat beside me empty.

  Anne was in it so fast it seemed like she’d been watching for her opening. She propped her bad ankle up on the suitcases beside my foot and let out an audible sigh. I took a quick glance down. The leg of her slacks hid quite a bit, but not enough.

  “Your ankle is the size of a watermelon,” I pointed out.

  She gave me an annoyed look, then followed my gaze. “More like a cantaloupe.”

  “Why aren’t you using your crutches?”

  “Have you tried using crutches on an airplane?” she shot back.

  “More times than you have.”

  She just rolled her eyes.

  “You should put some ice on that.”

  To that, she didn’t respond at all. My knee was already feeling a lot better, so I reached down and took the ice pack off, then bent over to strap it around her ankle. She shuddered with the chill, but she didn’t do anything more than give me a nasty look in complaint. I kept my leg elevated so the trainers wouldn’t yell at me too much if they strolled back to check on things. Besides, I was in much better shape than she was at the moment, so I figured she needed it more than I did.

  “It’d be nice if everyone would stop trying to tell me what to do,” she grumbled after a moment. But she didn’t seem quite as grouchy as she had when she’d first sat next to me. No doubt the ice was already starting to numb some of the pain.

  “You’d rather be in charge, wouldn’t you? Like with your minions.”

  “Minions?” Anne’s perfect eyebrow arched so high it was almost comical.

  I found one of the camera guys and nodded my head in his directions. “Your crew.”

  “They’re hardly my minions. And they seem to think they know how to do my job better than I do. At least some of the time. They’ve all got more experience, you know. And they’re men. So clearly they know better than I do.”

  I didn’t miss the bitterness in her tone.

  “Having some issues with insubordination?” I asked, trying to keep my tone light.

  She shook her head and shrugged. “They’re just trying to help me keep my job.”

  I sat up straight. “You think you might lose it?” That seemed crazy to me. She’d just gotten started with this new project, and from everything I’d heard from fans, and from the guys who’d checked out the first episode, she was putting together an excellent program.

  “They only gave it to me because it was put together at the last minute, and I was the only person who qualified and who could start right away. They’ll almost definitely replace me with a man before the next season starts, though. I’m only temporary, and everybody knows it even if no one’s actually saying it.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “You haven’t looked at Twitter lately, have you?”

  “Never.” I almost shuddered at the thought. Some of the guys stalked Twitter, looking for trade rumors with their names floating around, seeing what people had to say about the way they were playing. Sounded like torture to me. Not my idea of a good time. I had never been one of those guys who read articles written about me, searched out blog posts about myself, or anything else like that. I watched the hockey highlights, but I got up to do something else once the focus was on how I’d played. That kind of thing only served to screw with my head. Hell, 501 had spent most of the season with his head stuck up his ass, all because the so-called fans on Twitter had started up a #DamnIt501 hashtag, and it trended just about every time we’d played for the first half of the season. All the more reason to avoid that shit like the plague, if you asked me.

  “Probably better if you don’t,” Anne said somberly. “I’ve recently sworn off of all social media for a while.”

  “Do I want to know what they’re saying?” I wasn’t sure why I even bothered asking, because I was one hundred percent positive I would rather gouge out my eyes with a rusty spoon.

  “Nothing worth wasting your time reading.” She cracked a grin. “Unless you’re of the mind that women working in sports media should all be drawn, quartered, raped, and left tied to a tree for anyone who comes along to do with as they will. You know, the typical Game of Thrones treatment for women. Oh, or if you wanted to weigh in on any side of the Marcus Jameson event. There’s a lot of that right now.”

  I wasn’t surprised that Marcus Jameson was still dominating social media, but what she said about women in sports media hit a nerve. She had to be exaggerating, didn’t she? No one would go so far as to post about raping a woman, and definitely not just because of the job she did. Right? I had to believe that. “How can you even joke about that?”

  “It’s either make a crack or hate the world. I’d rather laugh it off. Same as you’d rather go on about your life like nothing happened a week ago.”

  Maybe the two of us were more similar than I’d like to think. Not a good thought when I’d spent the better part of the last week being pissed off at Anne because she was determined to do her job even when doing it was like a slap in my face. “So what are your guys trying to tell you? What do they think you need to do to perform your job better?”

  “Nothing to bore you with,” she said, shifting her weight slightly and wincing when it changed the position of her ankle.

  “Bore me anyway.”

  She scowled over at me.

  I raised a brow and settled back in my seat.

  “They want me to keep the focus of the show on you right now. Because you’re the big story that’s all over the news, and you tie in well with the national story line, too.”

  “Because racial tensions are high all across the country.”

  “Exactly. They think if I give the higher-ups exactly what they want, I’ll have a better chance of keeping my job after the end of this first season.”

  “But you’re not?”

  “You still haven’t watched, have you? The second episode went live yesterday. You should see for yourself.” She glanced at me, then chuckled, probably because the look on my face had to be one that said fat chance. “Well, even without watching, you should have noticed that I haven’t been hounding you lately. We haven’t left your story line in the dust, but I refuse to glorify that kind of hatred. Reporting on it when it happens is one thing. Beating it into the ground is something else entirely. I’m not going there. Not when there are so many other important things going on within the team right now.”

  “Not even if it means losing your job?”

  “I’d rather lose my job than my integrity,” Anne said.

  “If you lose either, it’ll truly be a shame,” I said. And I meant it. Sticking to her convictions, even with everyone around her telling her that she was making a mistake, took a hell of a lot of courage. I had to admire her for it.

  She gave me a self-deprecating smile, and before I had a clue what was about to come out of my mouth, I said, “You’re so damn gorgeous.”

  Her grin became flirtatious in a flash. “You’re not too bad to look at yourself. Thanks for bullying
me into putting ice on my ankle. It’s helping, even if I don’t like letting someone else be right.”

  I winked. “I don’t need to be right all the time. Just some of the time.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. How often? Once a week or so?”

  “Maybe twice a week.”

  “You might be pushing your luck with that…”

  The way I saw it, I was pushing my luck enough already by allowing myself to flirt with Anne, when the guys on her crew were probably right, even if I wished they were wrong. If she didn’t play by their rules, she could lose her job. On top of that, our flirtation could lead to other problems for her.

  Maybe there was a double standard in place, but that was the way of this part of the world. Not much I could do about it.

  We were walking a tightrope with this, and I’d never been much of a daredevil. I had to wonder how adventurous she wanted to be. Because if we weren’t careful, this could easily become more than a simple flirtation.

  I didn’t want to be the one responsible for putting her job in jeopardy. But she was an adult, too, perfectly capable of making her own decisions.

  The question now was…what choice would she make if given an option? And did I want her to choose me?

  RJ STOWED HIS skates on the lower shelf in his stall and looked over at me with massive brown puppy-dog eyes. They had always been his primary weapon with girls when we were in our teens, but the guy had never been stupid enough to try using them on me.

  Did he honestly think that would make any difference in whether I’d do what he wanted or not? Hardly likely. I’d never been one to fall for that shit, not even with my sister. Maybe for my niece, but she was only one year old. And she had the ultimate trump card, being my niece. RJ, though? Dumb ass. I rolled my eyes.

  “Please,” he said. “It’s just for an hour.”

  “An hour of your beast dogs trying to drown me,” I shot back, even though I’d already made up my mind to go along with him. There wasn’t much heat in my words. Hell, to be completely honest, I was curious about this whole thing. That didn’t mean I needed to give in too easily, though. Especially not with him trying to guilt me into it. “You know black men can’t swim, right?” I tossed out to egg him on.