Dropping Gloves

by Catherine Gayle

  Katie spun around and flew past her mom like a flash, racing away from the ice like a winger on a breakaway. I was pretty sure that picture from her prom had hit her as hard as it had hit me, so it didn’t surprise me that she was running off like that. There was a chunk of me that wished I could do the same. I didn’t have that kind of freedom, though. I had a game to play, so I had to get my head screwed back on straight.

  Not such a simple thing to do with the knowledge that Katie Weber was still somewhere in the building. She was close enough I could still feel her essence lingering around me and only hoped that she wouldn’t stick around too long on this visit. The longer she stayed, the more of me she would take with her when she eventually left again.

  Because she would. Leave. She always left.

  I’d told her years ago that she should go and chase her dreams, so I couldn’t really blame her for doing the very thing I’d suggested. But fuck if it didn’t hurt like a son of a bitch every time she showed up and smiled at me like nothing had changed.

  She wanted us to be friends. There was a part of me that wanted that, too—being her friend would be better than not having her in my life at all, or so I thought—but it was hard to do when I saw the way she let her boyfriends treat her.

  At the moment, she might not be dating one of the shitheads she’d hooked up with in Hollywood, but it didn’t matter. That didn’t mean she was kicking them to the curb and making room for me, for the way I really wanted things to be between us. The fact was, Katie wasn’t going to stay in Portland. She was an It Girl now, a Hollywood starlet with people clamoring for her attention, and that meant she needed to get back to Hollywood so they could keep fawning over her. Her show had been cancelled, but it was only a matter of time before she got cast in something else, and then she would be gone again. Out of my life. Probably dating some new asswipe. Leaving me to be the brooding bastard I’d become.

  Enough years had passed that, as long as she was away from Portland and not on the news too much, I was able to push her from my mind. I hadn’t watched The Cool Kids because that was a wound I didn’t want to open, and sometimes TMZ left her alone for a stretch. As long as she didn’t hit the mainstream news too often, I could almost pretend she had only been a dream. It wasn’t too bad, then. Without having her around, I could be the same guy I’d always been instead of the miserable grump I turned into when she was here but I couldn’t have her.

  Like now.

  I tried not to be that guy, but it was hard to brush things off when it felt like someone was stomping on all the broken pieces of me to be sure they were a puzzle I would never be able to put back together.

  “Hey,” my brother Levi said. He was a couple of years younger than my twenty-four—he and Katie were the same age—a defenseman in his second year with the Storm. He tapped his stick on my shins harder than necessary to get my attention. “Earth to Jamie. Game’s about to start. Stop chasing after her in your fucking head.”

  I gave him a terse nod and took a quick lap around our end of the ice to refocus. We were only a couple of weeks into the new season, my first as the captain of the team, and things had started off badly for us. There wasn’t any good reason for it, either.

  We’d had some turnover in personnel on the ice from last year, but not too much. Zee and Hunter were with the Thunderbirds now. A couple of guys had changed in free agency, and there’d been a trade involving a few of the younger guys who hadn’t fully found their spots on the team. But the core that Jim Sutter, our general manager, was building around was all still intact, the coaches hadn’t changed, the systems were exactly the same… Essentially, there was no good excuse for why we’d taken a slide in play to start the year. Tonight, we needed to get back on track, and as the captain, it was up to me to set the tone for the rest of the team.

  It was time. The carpet had been removed from the ice, and all the photographers were gone. The officials were in place, and my linemates, Riley Jezek and Aaron Ludwiczak, were already skating to center ice for the opening face-off. I headed over to join them, pushing aside all thoughts not relevant to the game at hand.

  The puck dropped, and the Kings won it cleanly back to Matt Greene, one of their defensemen. I was closest to Greene, so I went straight for him and laid a bruising check on him, dislodging the puck so that either RJ or Luddy could grab it and we could get to work.

  The crowd went wild as Greene went down hard. He was a big body. Hitting him like that had been enough to rattle the teeth in my head, so I knew he’d felt it more than he’d been prepared for. Luddy stole the puck and cycled it with RJ. I shook off the impact and skated in to join them. After a hit like that, my head was fully in the game. I couldn’t afford to think about Katie Weber right now.

  I had work to do.

  “That’s a bad fucking call,” Mattias “Bergy” Bergstrom, the Storm’s head coach, shouted as the ref who’d blown his whistle skated by our bench. “You fucking know it, too. Brown was diving.”

  The ref turned his head and shouted a few choice expletives back in Bergy’s direction, neither backing down nor admitting he might have made a mistake. It was a mistake, though. We’d been guilty plenty of times tonight, but in this instance, it wasn’t our fault. Levi just happened to be near Brown when the guy lost an edge and went down. Guilty by proximity.

  The basic gist of the ref’s response was that Bergy needed to stop complaining and get his team to play a clean game, or else. There were a lot of implications at play in the or else part of that equation. The team could be issued a bench minor and we would have to kill off yet another penalty. Bergy could get fined by the league for abuse of officials. They could probably kick Bergy out of the game if it came down to it. There were lots of ways for this to escalate, and none of them would be good.

  “Fucking dive,” Bergy said under his breath, but at least he stopped there. He wasn’t the sort of coach to lose his cool with the officials, not like our former coach, Scotty Thomas, had always been. Scotty had been more than a little hotheaded. Bergy was the type who tended to calmly let everyone know what he thought, setting the example he wanted us to follow.

  He usually reserved his yelling for specific moments and specific individuals. Zee had been on the receiving end of it a lot, but Bergy didn’t usually yell at me. He got his point across in other ways, like keeping my ass planted on the bench when I fucked up.

  Regardless of all that, right now it didn’t matter if the other guy had dived or fallen or what. The only thing that really mattered was that Levi was on his way to the box for a phantom tripping minor, and we had to kill our seventh penalty of the game—a game that we were trailing by a goal. We were only halfway through the game, but we’d already been penalized more times than we should have been in a full sixty minutes, at least if we wanted to keep Bergy happy. Still, there was a lot of time left on the game clock, which meant there was a lot of time for us to either fuck up some more or get our collective act together.

  “Keep your fucking head in it, 501,” Andrew Jensen shouted across the ice to Levi. “We’ve got this.” Jens clearly thought we were going to be able to straighten up and pull ourselves out of the hole we’d been digging. Or maybe that was just the impression he wanted to give off.

  At times like this, there was a part of me that wondered if Bergy and Jim had made the right choice in naming me the Storm’s next captain. I never knew what to say to help the boys out. Guys like Jens and Keith Burns were a lot more vocal. They always knew the right thing to say, and Burnzie had even been an assistant captain already for a long time. Shouldn’t he have been the new captain? Or maybe Soupy, who had been the other assistant captain for the last few years. Any one of those guys would have made more sense than me, along with at least a half a dozen other players on the team.

  None of them were wearing the C on their chests, though. I was, and I didn’t have the first fucking clue how to lead this team.

  We went to a TV timeout, and I made the mistake of looking
up at the Jumbotron. Through the whole game, every time there had been a break, they’d been making more tributes to cancer survivors and doing things to draw attention to the warning signs someone needed to be aware of when it came to their own health. This time, they had a camera on Katie up in the owner’s box. She was sitting with her mom and several of the guys’ wives, each of them holding up a sign with a symptom of leukemia printed on it. Katie looked like she was a lot more relaxed than she had been when she’d left the ice, but the last thing I needed was to start thinking about her again. Not right now.

  I turned my head away to stare at the ice in front of me.

  “You dated her?” Grant Wheelan asked me. Wheels was a guy Jim had brought in over the summer to mentor me. I wasn’t sure he could teach me how to lead this team any better than Zee had in all the years I’d been watching him, but maybe he would surprise me. Mainly Wheels just talked to me a lot. So far, the biggest thing I’d learned was to do things the way I wanted everyone else to do them. Lead by example. Wheels had drilled those three words into my head every chance he got. He also liked to remind me I was supposed to be having fun, not taking everything so seriously all the time. I wasn’t so good at that one.

  “Fuck,” I muttered under my breath. Then I shrugged. “Kind of. I guess so.” We’d never really technically been a couple, even though I’d taken her to her prom. I’d wanted to, but she’d been so young and had cancer, and then she’d left.

  He made a grunting sound next to me. “Bet Webs would be happier if she was dating you instead of the guys she’s been all over the news with.”

  “Fucking right, I would,” Webs said from behind us before he moved on to talk to Blake Kozlow about something.

  That was definitely a change from all those years ago. I wasn’t sure I would agree with that assessment. I’d changed a lot in that time, and I wasn’t sure it was for the better. “Doesn’t matter what Webs would be happier with,” I grumbled. It pissed me off that Wheels was trying to make me talk about this right now when all I wanted to do was pretend Katie wasn’t even in the state, let alone in the building. “We aren’t together, and that’s not going to change any time soon.”

  “That’s too bad,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t be too sure about that, if I were you,” Soupy put in. His name was really Brenden Campbell, but everyone except his wife and the Storm’s GM called him Soupy—even his two adopted kids. I glared at him, and he shrugged and looked back at the ice. “Just telling you what I see, is all. Up to you to figure out what to do with it.”

  He had always had a bad habit of doing that—telling me things I didn’t want to hear.

  The TV timeout came to an end. It was about time. At Bergy’s signal, Wheels and Cam Johnson headed over the boards to take the face-off.

  “Soupy, Babs,” Bergy said once they were gone, his tone returning to normal. “Be ready to go.”

  I nodded, but I kept my focus on the ice.

  “I’ve got Jonny,” Soupy said to me. At least he was back to talking about the game instead of trying to tell me how to handle my personal life.

  The Kings had a potent power play this year, always dangerous. They moved the puck well, changing up the point of attack in an effort to get a clear shot in on our goaltender.

  Our boys moved as a unit—one guy shifted to block a passing lane, and the other three adjusted their positions accordingly. Jonny dropped down to block a shot from the point, and our D managed to get their sticks in the way and clear bodies out from in front of the net so Nicky could see where the puck was coming from. Finally, after almost a full minute of being hemmed into our zone, Wheels poke-checked the puck and sent it flying down the ice, and those guys were able to get off for a change.

  Soupy and I piled over the boards as soon as they came off—me about a second behind him since Wheels moved about as fast as molasses in a Canadian winter—and we headed into position.

  The Kings switched to their second power play unit and got set up in our zone. They moved the puck back to the point on my side. I dropped to a knee, ready to block a shot, but he passed it to the other point. Soupy tried to get into position to block the shooting lane, but his knee buckled under him, and he went down with an agonized shout.

  The shot got past him. Jens got just enough of his stick on it to deflect it away from Nicky’s net. I let myself glance over long enough to see that, no matter how hard he tried, Soupy couldn’t get himself up.

  The Kings cycled the puck back to the point again. I did my best to cover two guys who both had bombs for shots, but there was only so much I could do. One of them pulled his stick back to load up. I went down. A shot blew past my ear and went in the net.

  I skated over to Soupy, pissed at myself even though I couldn’t figure out why. “You going to be all right?”

  “Can’t put any fucking weight on it,” he said.

  “Broken?”

  He shook his head. “Felt something snap, but not bone.”

  That made me think it was something like a ligament. Ken Archer, our head trainer, came over and talked to him for a minute before deciding it was safe to move him, at least. I gave Soupy a hand and helped him up, draping his arm over my shoulder while Archie did the same on the other side so we could assist him off the ice. The whole time, I was thinking I might have just witnessed the injury that would end his career. I hoped I was wrong.

  Wheels clapped a hand on my shoulder as soon as I took a seat next to him on the bench. “You know,” he said. “You never know what’s going to happen. Watching what just went down with Soupy is proof enough of that. If you want something, you should go for it.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” I groused, more agitated than confused.

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  I did. Apparently, I still couldn’t hide what I was feeling. Not only that, but I was just as messed up over Katie Weber as I’d ever been. What the fuck could I do about it, though? If she was going to leave, there wasn’t anything I could do to stop her…and I knew she would leave.

  She always did.

  “I need you to cancel those New York auditions for next week,” I said to Derek on the phone.

  “You mean reschedule,” he replied, not even attempting to hide his sarcastic tone. “I’ve already pushed them back once. If you change it again, you could get yourself blacklisted by Broadway, and that’s really not what you want to do. I promise you that.”

  I couldn’t blame him for his aggravation. I’d already forced his hand in having him rearrange all sorts of auditions and other things so that I could come to Portland to sing the anthem—despite his repeated assertions that it would do nothing to further my career. Granted, he wouldn’t have had to do that if he had listened to me the first time around and penciled my Portland trip in on my calendar instead of brushing my plans off. He’d eventually given in and made the changes—not that he’d been happy about it—and he’d been letting me know just how unhappy he was about the “mistakes” he believed I was making ever since. I’d made plenty of mistakes over the years, and many of them had involved him, but I was one hundred percent positive that this would not be another one to mark down on the list no matter what he thought of it.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose, wishing that would relieve the headache I’d had for the better part of a week. It had to be a stress headache. It was one of those that started with tension in my neck and shoulders and worked its way up. I should probably get a massage soon—that would help it more than anything, most likely.

  I had never been comfortable with disappointing anyone, and I was definitely letting Derek down right now. Heck, I’d been letting him down ever since The Cool Kids had been cancelled, when I hadn’t been able to tell him immediately and in no uncertain terms what I wanted to do with myself. I didn’t have a plan in place, thinking my career would take care of itself because the popularity of my show was off the charts. I had just been winging it, and he thought that made me f
lighty and not career-focused. Now I was about to really upset him, and it was doing a number on me, both physically and emotionally.

  “I mean cancel,” I repeated as firmly as I could. “I’m not going to New York. I’m not going to audition for any Broadway shows. I just can’t do it, Derek. I need a break. I need to spend some time with my family. I need to figure out what I want to do next, but I do know that, whatever it is, it won’t be on the East Coast. I can’t be that far away from them all the time.” Being in LA had been difficult enough. My family might drive me bonkers sometimes, but I wouldn’t trade them for anything.

  “You have to go to New York. You’re still riding a high after The Cool Kids, but if you let yourself drop out of the public eye—”

  “I know. It’ll be harder to get back in. I know, Derek.”

  What I didn’t know was if I wanted to be in the public eye anymore. I wasn’t sure fame and fortune were all they were made out to be, and I had been sincerely doubting that I was cut out for that kind of life for a long time. As long as the show had still been in production, I’d been able to push all those doubts aside and focus on my work. But seeing my parents and Jamie yesterday had only reinforced those reservations. Portland was my home; everything about Hollywood felt foreign, despite the fact that I’d been living that life for the past four years.

  “Well, if you’re not going to take on work right now, you at least need to stay in the news. I could set you up with—”

  “I’m not going out with anyone you think I need to be seen with.” Not ever again. Derek lived by the mantra that any publicity is good publicity, and I’d played by his rules for a while. Too long. I’d let everyone in my life that I cared about down by doing so, not the least of which was myself.