Game Breaker (Portland Storm Book 14)

by Catherine Gayle

  Two more EMTs rushed over and, checking out the blood all over me, tried to help.

  “Not my blood,” I said, waving them off. “I’m fine. But my buddy…”

  Pops had been pretty much dragging Luddy along the whole way, too, and I knew they weren’t far behind me. I turned and pointed them out.

  One of the EMTs nodded and they wheeled their gurney back to where I’d indicated. Within minutes, they had Luddy strapped in and were rushing him toward another waiting ambulance.

  “You two coming?” they asked.

  I looked over at Pops, and we both nodded at the same time. “We’re coming,” I said. For one thing, I didn’t want Luddy to be alone right now. And for another, the sooner I could get the fuck off these streets, the better. We knew we’d been moving away from the gunshots, but we could still hear them in the distance. Being out on the streets seemed like a bad idea, especially since we didn’t know who was doing the shooting, how many were involved, or where they were set up.

  They sent Pops up to the passenger seat and I climbed in the back. In no time, the siren was wailing, so loud as to be deafening, and the ambulance was in motion.

  The EMT in the back immediately started assessing Luddy, asking him where it hurt and how many shots he thought he’d taken while she took his vital signs.

  “Think I just got hit once,” he said. “In my left thigh.”

  She cut open his jeans and took a quick look, then tossed me a box of gloves. “Put those on. I need your help, since you’re here.”

  I dug out a pair and slipped them into place, then looked over at her.

  “Put pressure on the wound,” she ordered me. Then she set to work on inserting an IV into his arm.

  “If you wanted to cop a feel, there were easier ways to do it, you know,” Luddy joked.

  I breathed a hell of a lot easier since he felt up to making jokes.

  “Maybe I should’ve been the one in the back,” Pops called out from the front.

  “Wanna trade places?” I asked. “Because he’s not anything to write home about.”

  We kept up a steady stream of jokes the whole way to the hospital, which helped to keep Luddy calm. I figured that was a good thing. The last thing he needed right now was to start panicking.

  Once they wheeled him into the emergency room, Pops and I found seats in the waiting room and took a breath for the first time in what felt like hours.

  A woman who had seen us come in walked out for a moment. When she returned, she had bottled water for each of us. “We’ve been watching on the news. It’s horrible.”

  Horrible was putting it mildly.

  “Thanks,” I said. We took the water. I downed half of mine in a few swallows. Then I turned to Pops. “You still have your phone?” I’d dropped mine when the first shots rang out, and it got lost in the shuffle. But one of us needed to let people know we were all right.

  He blinked a couple of times, the shock of what we’d been through still coursing through him. But then he nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.” He took his phone out and got to work.

  “Let Jim and the coaches know once you’ve talked to your family.”

  “Gimme your parents’ numbers, too. I’ll send them a message. And Anne.”

  “Shit.” Anne’s number. I didn’t know it. I’d saved it in my phone, but I didn’t have the first clue what it was.

  “You don’t know them?”

  “I know my parents’ numbers.” I rattled them off, and he shot them a quick message, his phone going crazy with responses coming in.

  “I’ll see if Jim or one of the coaches can get word to Anne for you,” he said. “Surely someone has her number.”

  I only hoped that she was safe and sound, somewhere well away from what we’d just gone through. And I wished she was with me now, because there was nothing I wanted more than to wrap her up in my arms and tell her how much I loved her, as many times as she could bear to hear it.

  Even then, it wouldn’t be enough.

  IT WAS WELL after midnight by the time Pops and I got back to the team hotel, both of us still covered in the caked-on, dried-up blood of the guys we’d carried.

  Luddy had needed surgery. He’d taken two bullets in the thigh. One had gone straight through; the other had to be removed. He was in the clear now, though. He’d be perfectly fine once everything healed. They were keeping him in the hospital overnight as a precaution, and he wouldn’t be back on the ice for a while, but those were relatively minor concerns.

  The cop I’d carried hadn’t fared so well. The bullets had pierced an internal organ or two, so he was still in surgery when the two of us had climbed into the car Jim had taken to the hospital. He wanted us to go back in it and get some rest while he stuck around with Luddy.

  Anne was in the lobby when we walked in, surrounded by RJ and a bunch of the rest of my teammates, looking like she’d been through the wringer. As soon as she saw me, she was on her feet and running. I caught her in mid-leap and wrapped her up in my arms.

  I never wanted to let her go again.

  Another couple of hours later, I’d finally reassured all of the guys that I was fine, that Pops was fine, and that yes, even Luddy would be fine. Sleep wasn’t on any of our minds. Being together was.

  Through it all, Anne hadn’t left my side. For that matter, I couldn’t make myself let go of her hand. I needed the physical reassurance of her presence in a way that I’d never felt before. I wasn’t sure I’d ever feel anything quite so profoundly as that again, no matter how long I lived or what else I experienced.

  But now, she and I were in my room. Just the two of us. Once we came in, I’d collapsed on the small sofa, and she had curled up next to me, and neither of us had moved an inch. I put an arm around her shoulders. She rested her head on mine, the way she had on the plane that night when RJ had snapped the photo of us.

  “I should get in the shower,” I said after a long time.

  She nodded. “You should.”

  But neither of us got up. I didn’t want to let her go for long enough to wash the blood away, but I couldn’t spend the whole night like this, either.

  Finally, I forced myself to straighten away from her and stand. She reached for my hand so I could help her up.

  “You going back to your room?” I asked, dreading her answer. Tonight, of all nights, I wanted her to stay with me. I needed her to keep me grounded.

  She shook her head but didn’t explain. Still holding my hand, she walked toward my bathroom, bringing me along behind her. Once we were in there, she turned on the water in the shower before turning to help me out of my clothes. My pants came off easily enough, but my shirt was stuck to my skin. It wouldn’t come free without potentially ripping out a bunch of chest hair in the process.

  “You’ll have to soak it under the spray,” she said.

  I was too bone-weary to argue. Still in my boxer-briefs and the shirt, I climbed into the shower and let the water do the work. Closing my eyes, I put my head under the spray.

  But then I felt Anne climbing into the shower behind me.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer. Not with words, at least. Soapy cloth in hand, she scrubbed the places on my back where the dried blood was causing the most problems. Her touch soothed my nerves more than I’d imagined possible.

  From the way her body brushed against mine, I could tell she’d taken off all her clothes before joining me. She was behind me, true, but the lights were still on. This was a huge step for her. So huge it felt like I might have her heart in a vise, much like she had mine. One wrong step, and I could derail everything.

  “Turn around,” she said after a few minutes.

  But I hesitated. “I can take care of the front.”

  She rested her forehead against the back of my arm, wrapping one of her arms around my waist. “Let me.”

  “You don’t have to do this, Anne.”

  “I know that.” Then she inched around in front of me si
nce I hadn’t turned. “Let me.”

  I was too deep in shock to resist her gentle ministrations, too touched to do anything but stand beneath the warm spray of water and allow her to tend to me.

  After working silently for a while, she dropped the cloth and attempted to slip her hands beneath my shirt, testing to be sure all the stuck-on places were now loose before dragging it over my head.

  “Thank you,” I said, but it felt so completely inadequate for all that had happened.

  Anne shook her head, on the verge of tears. Then she came into my arms again, burying her face against my chest. Shaking. God, she was shaking so hard. I squeezed her to me, hoping to soothe her nerves and my own at the same time.

  “I was so scared,” she said. “I sent you messages, but you weren’t responding, and we saw what was happening out there, and I didn’t know where you were, and I was terrified. I didn’t know if you were okay, and all I could think was that I’d never see you again. That it would all be over, and I had been so caught up in my mother’s ridiculous thinking that I hadn’t ever let you see me. I’d barely told you that I loved you, but even that’s not enough. Those are just words, you know? But I’m not going to let her have that kind of power over me. Not anymore. Life’s too short to spend it worrying if the things I do or say or wear would meet with her approval. So I thought I needed to put some action behind the words. If I really love you, then I can’t hide any part of myself from you. Not ever again.”

  I might have been holding myself together well enough up until that point, but her words shattered me.

  THE MEDIA CIRCUS had been bad before, or so I’d thought. The way the press had reacted—or overreacted, in my opinion—to the banana peel incident had been nothing in comparison to the way all the news outlets wanted a piece of me now. They wanted to talk to Pops, too, since he’d been involved, but more of them wanted me. Because I was black, which supposedly made me more qualified to comment on the trauma we’d experienced on Friday night. If Luddy had been made available to the media, I knew he would be getting more attention than he would ever want, since he’d actually been shot. But now he was on the injured reserve, so he didn’t have to deal with the media. Only Pops and I did.

  They surrounded me every chance they could, always wanting to get more out of me than I’d been willing to give before.

  “Surely now, after being involved in one of the protests, you’ve got something to say,” one of them insisted, shoving a microphone in my face after the morning skate before Game Six.

  It turned out I did have something to say, after all. “To start, I wasn’t involved in one of the protests. The guys and I were just trying to walk back to the hotel after having dinner, and we got caught in the mess. But beyond that, yeah, I do have something to say.” I felt Kurt’s tension as he stood next to me, ready to jump in and come to my rescue in case I started to say something I shouldn’t. But I didn’t need him tonight, and I refused to be reined in now. “Black lives matter. Absolutely, and I don’t think there are many people out there who don’t agree with that statement. Maybe a few buffoons who think throwing banana peels at my feet or spewing hateful words somehow makes them better than someone whose skin is a different color than their own, I don’t know. But recklessly going out there and killing cops, who were trying to protect the people who were protesting against them… That isn’t the answer. We’re never going to stop the cycle of violence by adding more violence on top of it. We’ve got to love each other. Period. We need to go back and listen to the words of Dr. King. What was it he said? Hate begets hate, but love begets love? Something like that. He was right then, and he’s still right now. We’re breeding hate. And it has to stop. We have to start loving each other. That’s what I have to say.”

  Before they could ask me anything else, I walked out. Colesy and a few of the other guys winked at me on my way.

  Luddy had been released from the hospital and was in good spirits, even though he was in a decent amount of pain. The bullets had torn through muscle in the outside of his thigh, so it’d take a while to heal enough for him to get back on skates. At least, that was what the doctors were telling us. There was the distinct possibility that the healing process could take longer than expected, but we weren’t going to let ourselves think or talk like that, especially when we were around him. Everyone wanted to keep his spirits up.

  In fact, instead of taking a pregame nap like we usually did, most of the guys got together in Luddy’s room to hang out. Anne brought a couple of her cameramen along to film, but at this point, most of us didn’t even notice the intrusion.

  I, for one, was glad to have Anne with us. I wasn’t keen on letting her out of my sight, now that we’d experienced firsthand the evil that existed in our world. The people who left threats for her online might not ever choose to act on them, but I’d rather have her with me, all the same.

  It didn’t need to be said—we were playing for Luddy now. As a team, we would be using him as our motivation for the rest of the playoffs.

  With Luddy officially out of the lineup, Bergy put me on the top line with RJ and Babs for Game Six—a game we won by a healthy five-to-one margin. We flew home in good spirits, considering all that we’d been through in the last few days, ready to take on the Blackhawks in an all-or-nothing Game Seven situation. But we’d be doing it on our home ice. In our arena, surrounded by our fans.

  We’d waited to fly home until Monday morning. Usually when we got back from a road trip, the guys’ families were waiting for them at home. This time, almost all of them had come to the airport. Emotions were running high, as was to be expected in the fallout of the shooting. As soon as a guy made his way off the plane, his family raced into his arms. Since my parents were still at home in Toronto and I’d been able to wrap Anne up in my love while they hadn’t had the same opportunity with their loved ones, I took it upon myself to help Luddy off the plane. Besides, Anne and her guys were filming the homecoming, so she was otherwise occupied.

  Harry joined me, which seemed odd, considering the circumstances.

  “Isn’t Jasinda here to meet you?” I asked.

  “Jasinda?” he repeated, giving me a blank look. “Why would— She’s at work,” he finished suddenly.

  I didn’t have a chance to think much of it, as Luddy’s fiancée and parents rushed over with a wheelchair for him, and Dani Weber stalked up to Harry and shoved him hard in the chest with a look of utter fury in her eyes.

  He backed away from the rest of us, until they were well out of hearing distance, Dani advancing on him with every step of his retreat. I watched them for a moment, fascinated beyond belief. I had no clue what was going on between those two or how Jasinda fit into the picture, other than the bit Anne had included in Eye of the Storm, but I would love to be a fly on the wall. In fact, there was a part of me that wished Anne would send one of her guys over to capture whatever was going down between those two at the moment, but they were all otherwise occupied with filming the more tender reunions taking place.

  That did seem to fit the type of story line Anne had been telling, I supposed, but there was no point in denying my disappointment.

  IN SHAPING THE narrative of the next webisode, I decided I wanted to follow the same path I’d been following all along. I chose to veer away from the horrors we’d all experienced in Chicago, instead keeping the focus on the Storm family as a whole.

  During Game Seven, I had a couple of my cameramen filming game footage, but I set up Dave and Ben—my two guys who’d done the most work with the more intimate pieces—in the owner’s box with the players’ families, and in the press box with the injured players, respectively. I split my time between the two areas, keeping one eye on the action of the game while I alternated between observing and interviewing the various subjects of focus.

  In the owner’s box, everyone was on edge because of what was at stake in the game, but also relieved because their men had come home relatively unscathed following a harrowing experienc
e.

  Dani Weber had finished her semester at fashion school and was home for the summer. She wasn’t the only new addition to their ranks, either. Luke had also returned to Portland now that the school year was at an end. I did my best not to pry into the discussions going on between those two and Katie Babcock, but I couldn’t help but hope Dave managed to capture a bit of it.

  There was a sense of quiet focus in the press box when I joined Brenden Campbell, Aaron Ludwiczak, Dominic “Bear” Medved, and Andrew Jensen, particularly since the game was still scoreless. It was starting to take on a feeling of first team to score wins. Usually, when I was around a group of the players, they spent most of their time ribbing each other. Not these four. Their focus was fully on the action down below. Every now and then, one of them would make an observation, like “Hjalmarsson is trying to pinch down the wing earlier than normal, don’t you think?” or “Everyone but Coop is cheating on face-offs and getting away with it, so he needs to start cheating, too,” and someone would send a text message to one of the coaches, relaying their information.

  During intermission, most of the injured guys went down to the locker room to talk to the rest of the team. Jensen stayed put, though, so I took the opportunity to talk to him, catching Ben’s eye to be sure he was filming.

  “We haven’t seen you around much lately,” I said, leaving my comment open-ended.

  He shook his head slowly. “Concussion symptoms haven’t made it easy. Still can’t handle being in a big crowd. That’s why I’m not down there with the boys now.”

  “You seeing any improvements yet?”

  He gave a mirthless laugh. “Maybe? Some days, I think I’m finally getting better. Other days, it’s worse than ever before. The blinding headaches. The inability to focus. Nausea, dizziness… Some days, all I can do is sit in a dark room.” He shrugged. “I’m just in a waiting game now. But I try to hang out around the boys when I can. It’s tough to do, though, other than maybe the other guys who’re injured.”