by RJ Scott
“I should go home,” he said, but his eyes told a different story.
“You should come to my home. Frank will want his grapes.”
“And you? What would you want from me?”
“All that you’re willing to give me, zvedya moya.”
He grew bold then, leaning in to steal a kiss.
“About damn time you two came out,” Eli’s voice rang out, startling us apart. My partner on the ice sauntered up to us, his face a smug mask. “We have a pool.”
“We’re not out, we’re not— a pool?” I asked, keeping my pinkie finger linked with Tate’s.
“Oh yeah, it’s been running for a couple of weeks now. A Where-Will-Sugar-and-Ice-be-Caught-Sucking-Face?’ pool. I think I might have just won!”
“There is no winning. We are not out, and as my friend I ask you to keep what you have seen to yourself. Our lives are too complicated for a romance to burst into the limelight.”
“But there must be five hundred bucks in the till. Ryker had you two down to be caught in the showers, which I knew was far too forward for the Iceberg. Alex said you’d be caught in the skate room. Again, too forward. Penn said you’d be caught in the sin bin which I think is some pansexual fantasy of his or something, but yeah, so not Vlad. Henry guessed you’d be seen smooching by the concession stands, also not Vlad. But, I had a parking lot behind a Mexican restaurant after a meal with the Railers.”
“Fuck you. You’re feeding me bullshit,” I snapped.
Tate sniggered, then slid an arm around my waist. My eyes flared. Eli clapped my shoulder.
“Yeah, I’m fucking with you. Be nice to this old shit, okay, Sugar?”
“I’ll be nice to him, I promise,” Tate replied as Eli slipped around us.
“Good, I’d hate to have to kick your ass. Oh, and by the way? There really is a pool and I just won.” Eli shouted, then dashed to catch his ride home with Henry and Apollo.
“If I find out there is a pool…”
Tate pulled me to my car. “Forget about the pool. Let’s go home. Your home. Your bed.”
That I was more than happy to do.
I would find out about the pool though…
Chapter Eleven
Tate
The car ride back to my place the next morning was quiet.
I’d stayed overnight with Vlad, yes, I’d fed Frank grapes, and yes, I’d felt quieter and chilled and protected. But out here on a fresh day heading home I still had the mess in my head that wouldn’t go away.
It had started with a blurry photo tweeted a few hours back that pictured me leaving the station, and another with Vlad there, and I couldn’t even begin to read some of the comments below it, but the Internet was quick to judge. I saw words like millionaires get away with hurting people, and worse, and I wasn’t ready to face any of that.
Vlad had been quiet since the text, withdrawn. He didn’t hug me and tell me it was okay; in fact he was pissed, and I couldn’t help but feel that some of that was directed at me.
Then there was the elephant in the room we both ignored.
There were two elephants in fact, but Lacey was the obvious one, sitting there waiting to be dealt with. Only, I was so done with talking about her and defending myself, and somehow last night I’d managed to stuff her in a teeny tiny box and hide her on a dusty shelf somewhere in the back of my mind, and thankfully Vlad hadn’t mentioned her once.
I hadn’t been arrested, hell there was nothing to charge me with, and the interview had gone well until the moment the cop had slid over the bank statement that showed the million dollar deposit to Lacey’s investment account. I hadn’t even told Vlad about that fuck up yet, and the ramifications for the team as a whole.
The detective had suggested with a sly tone that giving Lacey money made it look as if I was paying her off. My lawyer, or rather, the team lawyer, had told him to go fuck himself. Not in quite those terms, but with lots of legal talk that confused me, but had the detective nodding.
Ten said I needed to talk to some guy called Layton Foxx, the marketing social fixes-everything guy from the Railers, gave me his number, and said that there wasn’t much the man couldn’t fix. Not only to deal with the Lacey issue, but also to help with the star goalie and his damn emu. He can even fix stupid, Tennant had said, We have an Adler, and Layton fixed him.
Maybe I would take up the offer for the Lacey issue, but Vlad struck me as the kind of man who was very much not interested in help, with or without emus. He was control personified.
I had to wonder though, after yesterday and the hand-holding on the plane, and Eli’s stupid joke about the pool, was Vlad feeling like maybe his grip on everything was slipping away?
Is this my fault?
I couldn’t imagine the worries and fears in his head about what would happen back home if everything came out. Dwight had suggested a meeting, a restraining order, a public statement, in his official lawyer-type way. I didn’t want that, especially if it meant Vlad got pulled into the mess. All I wanted to do was play hockey.
Then, there was the other elephant, Tennant Rowe. Last night we’d gone back to Vlad’s, had sex that was less about getting off and more about care, then hugging, and not once had we mentioned Ten’s name. Only this morning, after the text with the blurry photo, Ten had texted me with Layton’s number, and also a message that was all about keeping positive.
It made me smile, but when I’d told Vlad about it, he’d been tight-lipped.
I’d seen the focus in his game when he’d hip-checked Ten and sent him careening into Colorado, and I’d have to have been an idiot not to notice the way he’d looked from Ten to me when we were talking.
“Ten and I cleared the air,” I announced, as we drew closer to my house. There was little traffic and we had maybe five minutes in the car before he dropped me there so I could drive separately to the arena. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned Ten; with hindsight, possibly it was a bad idea? “That was what the text was about, just laughing is all.”
Why am I defending myself?
“Good,” he murmured, but it was too low for me to make out if he was lying.
“We laughed that I had a crush on him.”
Vlad sent me a sharp glare. “Rowe laughed at you?”
“No, we laughed together. He said, if only he’d known, then—”
“What?” Vlad barked. “What would he have done? Would you have chosen him over Lacey? What would you have done?”
I blinked at Vlad as he turned into my drive and entered the code for the gate. There were a few reporters clustered there, but Vlad ignored them, and so did I. Tinted windows were my saving grace, and he stopped the car just inside the gate watching for it to shut, likely checking no paparazzi got in to take photos. It hit me that the fact Vlad taking me home might look bad.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have driven me home, if they realize it’s your car—”
“I am captain bring home teammate,” he snapped, his Russian showing big time. “Tell me about Ten.”
“Huh?”
“Madsen-Rowe. You started, that if only he’d known…”
“Oh, well, he admitted he would have understood the reasons why I couldn’t properly look him in the face,” I finished. “And how he had this perpetual feeling that he’d made me angry about something. He said he always felt like number two at Dallas, and would never be first line, and he thanked me for it, said going to the Railers was the best thing that happened to him. I don’t think he realized that I pushed to be number one just to impress him.”
Vlad muttered something in a low voice, Russian; I couldn’t understand any of it.
He killed the engine, and turned in his seat.
“You are better than Tennant Rainbow Gay Madsen-Rowe.” He was utterly focused on me and I don’t know what he expected me to say.
“Jeez Vlad, given that you and I are… that you… fuck, that was insulting to Ten,” I finally managed to force out.
“Given that you and I ar
e what?” he asked as if the answer didn’t matter at all.
I shriveled a little inside. “Tog—Sleeping together.”
Vlad huffed. “Tennant had his hands on you.”
What the hell was happening here? “He was telling me about this Layton guy who could help you with the emu situation—”
“I do not want help—”
“Maybe you need—”
“I need no one who thinks they can come into my life and tell me what to do. What about you? Do you want to tell me what to do, when you can’t even fix your own life?”
I stared at him and wondered exactly what the hell we were doing.
“Vlad, what are we even arguing about?”
He scowled. “Tennant—”
“That’s not it.”
“Colorado and his fucking emu will drive me insane—”
“That’s not it either. What is going on here? Are you trying to start an argument?”
He softened for a moment. “No.”
“Are you scared of something?” I asked, and wondered if I was more perceptive than I’d thought when that steely Russian gaze reappeared and his pale eyes were chips of ice.
“I will see you at the arena,” he said.
“Vlad—”
“At the arena,” he repeated, and this time he faced forward.
I was out of the car faster that Usain Bolt out of his blocks, and into my house with just as much speed and I never once glanced back at Vlad in his big-ass SUV, or as the gates opened, or even as they shut. I was inside my house, and fuck the big Russian for wanting to start an argument, because if he wanted to stop what we were doing then he needed to say it, not force me away with his misery and ice.
I showered, cursed a lot, stomped around my place, ignored three calls from the team lawyer, and one from Sam. The only one I answered was from Henry, who was just checking in. When I’d reassured him that everything was fine, and then the cell vibrated with a text from Ryker, I turned the damn thing off. I was done with the well wishes, the concern, and most of all I was done with the frustrating Russian who’d dumped me at my place and tried to make us argue.
Getting to the arena for practice was easy enough, despite the traffic. One thing about having tinted windows was that I could look out but no one would see it was me. People in other cars sang along to music, they were chatting, animated. I bet none of them had a psycho ex leveling accusations that they’d hurt her, or a sort-of-lover who wanted to start a fight with me for god knows what purpose. I had a memory of a moment, a flashback from when I was a kid, when I knew I was heading home to face the consequences of something I’d done. Maybe it had been a school prank, or low marks on my reports, but I would look into windows of houses we passed, and wonder if I could swap places with some other kid. One who wasn’t in trouble.
I pulled up alongside a van, a kid staring out at the passing cars, Raptors stickers in the windows. He was wearing a Raptors hoodie, and it hit me. I wondered how many people in cars here would see me and want to change places with me? Wannabe NHL’ers, kids who were desperate to play? We were at least two stops back from the lights, and in a moment of love and peace and kindness, I lowered my window, and the kid staring out from his car caught the movement, then rubbernecked, and then shouted my name before he lowered his window.
“TATE!” he called, and I saw his mom look over her shoulder and then over at me. She appeared to have control over the back windows and it began to raise, as she mouthed sorry at me. I shook my head, made the universal sign for lowering the window and then reached into the back of my car where I knew for sure I had a stack of jerseys. I held one up, but the light changed and we all had to shuffle forward. I really hoped the kid who’d shouted my name stopped next to me again, and I was so damned pleased when he did. The mom shrugged in a what-can-you-do kind of manner and the kid lowered his window all the way. We were no more than six feet apart.
“Hi,” I called over. “What’s your name?”
“Lucas Bowyer, I play hockey for the mini-slide-Eagles.”
“What position?”
“Center, just like you.” He was so animated it was infectious. This was why I played, this childish excitement was still inside me every time I hit the ice.
“Would you like a jersey?” I called over.
“YES!” he shouted, and then with prompting from his mom he added a belated “Please.” I tossed him a jersey, then another where I’d scribbled my name next to my number, rooted around, found a couple of pucks, and then emptied a Raptors gym bag and tossed all of that to him as well.
“Do you come to the games?”
He wrinkled his nose at that. “Once,” he murmured.
I could fix that. Tickets weren’t cheap, even to see the Raptors, but I got freebies for every game. “Mrs. Bowyer?” I called. “Go to Will-Call and you tell them that Tate sent you, I’ll leave your son’s name, maybe you can get tickets for when we play Ottawa tomorrow?”
She smiled at me, nodded, but then the traffic moved and, after exchanging virtual high fives with Lucas, I headed on to the arena. I needed to get back to my visits to the hospital, I hadn’t been in a couple of weeks, and I hoped to hell I could sneak in and not have the whole Lacey shit causing me issues.
Decision made, I arrived at the arena with a huge grin on my face. I was Tate Collins, I was a hockey player, and no one could take that away from me.
Only the team lawyer, Dwight not-so-perky Perkins, was waiting for me, standing with one of the team owners, Mark, and I wished there was another way into the arena because the last thing I wanted to do was harsh the buzz I had going. But neither of them appeared to be pissed, or as if they had something to say to me that was going to change the direction of my life.
“A word?” Mark said, and opened the door to what looked like a janitor’s room, and then closing it behind the three of us. I can honestly say I’ve never had a meeting in a room that smelled of bleach and contained at least six mops.
“What’s happened?” I asked, because this was so unreal.
“We wanted to cross the Ts,” Dwight began.
“There are no charges,” Mark continued. “You ex has released this.” He thrust a phone at me, and I scrolled down the Twitter thread. “She admits that you’re a good guy, and that comments were taken out of context. She’s also mentioned that she’s seeking help for her mental health.” The post had seven thousand likes already, and it had only been posted two hours ago, right when I was arguing with Vlad. She’d played it to perfection, hundreds of thousands of likes of her losing her shit over me, and there would be just as many of her saying her pointed comments were taken out of context, with sympathy for her admission she looking for help. She was working this angle hard and I was caught in the crossfire.
“The million dollars,” Mark said, in that quiet tone of his.
“I shouldn’t have done that, but it wasn’t for the reason you think.”
“What was the reason?”
The last thing I wanted to do was go into details. “Do I have to say?”
Mark shook his head “Probably best not to. Dwight has non-disclosure paperwork for her to sign. The Raptors want this done.”
“I want this done,” I agreed.
“Okay.” Mark held out his hand to shake. “Meeting adjourned.” He opened the door and the three of us stepped out, just as Colorado passed. He frowned, looked at me, then Mark, and then at poor Dwight.
“Dwight, dude, did you just come out of the closet?”
“No, I—”
Colorado ignored him. “Welcome to the rainbow, my man!” he said and enthusiastically pumped Dwight’s hand, before leaving and cackling.
Hell, at least there was no emu trailing him, or a single sign of a groupie. That was one thing I suppose. I stopped off at Will-Call, because I wanted to keep a promise I’d made, added the name Lucas Bowyer to the list, plus three others, and said it was good for any game, then I jogged to the locker room, now just under fiv
e minutes from practice time.
Vlad was already in the locker room, suited up, head bent, tying his laces, murmuring to himself in Russian as he always did when he was lacing. Probably blessing the skates, or something. Henry was also here, but he was pacing, and only stopped when he caught sight of me. The tension in him eased in an instant.
“Thought you might not be here,” he said, and a couple of the other guys glanced up and nodded at me. Last they’d heard I was taken in for questioning, and this was the point where the team either believed me without reservation or I explained the situation.
“It’s all bullshit,” Ryker began.
“Total fucking bullshit,” Colorado elaborated.
I heard a few more guys say the same thing, agreeing, supporting me.
“She’s fully retracted the statement,” I said during a lull in the conversation, and got a succession of high fives, and a bro-hug from Henry.
“What are we? Fisherwomen?” Vlad snapped. “Gossiping like children. Ice, now.”
I wasn’t even kitted up. Hell, I hadn’t even opened my bag, and he glared at me. “Collins, get your ass changed and out on the ice.”
I exchanged glances with Coach Carmichael, who sent me a look of confusion, but as the guys left, and Vlad was last, I said in my loudest clearest voice to Coach.
“Our captain must have got out of the wrong side of bed.”
Coach raised an eyebrow, I concentrated on getting into my gear, taping, and lacing, and Coach thrust a gray jersey at me. I’d be playing with my line, against the JAR line, and when I spotted Vlad’s white jersey, I thought that today, the shit was going to hit the fan.
The first time he locked me in the corner, his body weight pinning mine, I used my ass, and the muscles in my legs to heave him off, shuffled the puck between his legs, hefted it to Sam who shot on Andre, and the gray team had the first goal of the practice session.