by Avery Flynn
He shrugged. “You told me not to speak for you.”
“You’re an asshole.”
Yeah, he was, and it was best for all involved if she realized it now. “I never claimed otherwise.”
She let out a frustrated groan and started up the stairs, mumbling to herself, “Why did I even bother?”
Short answer? She shouldn’t have. He kept that little tidbit to himself, though, because as she brushed past him there was no missing the countdown-to-detonation vibe emanating from her. She might not be an enforcer with a mean right hook, but Fallon wasn’t to be fucked with, either. He could respect that. Really, he kinda admired it.
“Leaving so soon?” he asked, because again, he was an asshole.
She didn’t slow her pace or look back at him. “Not soon enough.”
He followed her through the house, the sound of their steps echoing in the vast emptiness, staying outside in the hall when she stepped into the room she’d crashed in the previous night and stuffed her belongings into her overnight bag.
Zach watched, waiting for the feeling of satisfaction at shoving someone else out of his life to fill him. Two minutes later, when she was zipping her bag shut, he was still waiting.
“What if I start feeling sick again?” he asked, walking a few steps behind her as she strode through the bedroom door and down the hallway toward the front exit.
“Make sure you get to the bathroom in time.” She made it three more steps after that bit of advice, each one a little slower than the previous one before coming to a full and complete stop. She didn’t turn around, but there was no missing the way her shoulders rose and fell when she took a deep breath. “If your symptoms return, you should go to the closest urgent care to get checked out and make sure it’s not something more serious. And don’t forget to hydrate.”
Seemingly satisfied, she marched forward again, opening the front door, and walking out before jerking to a stop just on the other side.
“Where’s your car?” she asked.
The same place as his furniture, his paycheck after the delinquent debt payments, and his self-respect—nowhere. “I don’t drive.”
Turning to face him, she gave him a once-over, taking his measure in such a non-personal, professional way that it gave him the uncomfortable feeling of being back in juniors with the scouts in the stands. She must have decided he wasn’t about to keel over anymore because the clinical detachment melted away and her stink eye returned.
She held her hand out toward him. “Give me your phone.”
“Why?” he asked even as he pulled it from his pocket, swiped his thumb across the screen to unlock it, and gave it to her.
“If you can’t get a ride to urgent care,” she said as her thumbs sped across his phone screen and then hit the call button. “Call me. I’ll get you there.”
The Ice Knights unofficial theme song sounded from her phone, stuffed in the outside pocket of the overnight bag slung over her shoulder. She ignored the noise, tapped a few more times on his screen, and gave him back his phone. Then, without another word, she turned, got into her car, and drove away, stopping only long enough to press the exit button for his security gate.
It wasn’t until Zach was back in the house that he looked down at his phone screen. In his contacts, she’d added herself under the name: Zach Ate More Tainted Muffins.
His laugh bounced off the unadorned walls in his foyer. Sure, the sound was more than a little rusty, but it slipped out of him anyway as he walked with a lighter step than usual back to the kitchen to watch game tape and prep for tomorrow night’s game.
He didn’t get any farther than his kitchen before his phone started pinging with notifications. He clicked on the first one.
The Most-Hated Man in Harbor City Has a New Honey, But Will She Make Him Any Sweeter?
The headline was accompanied by an image of him looking like he was smiling down at Fallon as she looked back at him, a soft, sweet look on her face. What had actually been going on in that millisecond? Who the fuck knew, but it sure looked like they were totally into each other. How in the hell Marty had managed to click his shutter at just the right moment to show the wrong thing, Zach had no idea. The photographer must have pulled over before getting on the Parkway and uploaded the pics. It was probably a smart plan. Knowing Shelly, it was only a matter of time before she whispered her version of events into some reporter’s ear.
“Fucking A.” Zach shoved his fingers through his hair.
Lucy was going to kill him—if Fallon didn’t get to him first. He was so screwed.
Chapter Four
This Is the Defenseman We Were Looking For
Well, it finally happened, fellow Ice Knights fans. Defenseman Zach Blackburn showed up to work and played better than he has in years. No one was more surprised than those of us at your favorite hockey blog, The Biscuit. To be honest, your humble correspondent with a killer manicure had written him off as an overpaid journeyman with a bad attitude and molasses on his skates. Last night’s game against the Toronto Kodiaks, though, showed just what the front office must have seen in the six-three Minnesota native who started his career with the Detroit Blades, where he had a stellar rookie season before becoming the mayor of Mediocre-ville.
It all started last night with Blackburn’s crushing hit on Crispin Ferris shortly after puck drop and ended with his body-sacrificing dive in front of the home team’s goal to block what would have been an empty net score in the final minutes. That move led to Chris St. John scoring in the final seconds and a squeaker of a win for the Ice Knights.
All of that leaves us with two questions here at The Biscuit HQ:
1. Can Blackburn repeat last night’s performance?
2. How much of the improvement has to do with a certain mystery woman photographed outside of his house the day before the game? Was last night a case of a woman soothing the savage beast, or did our boy just finally remove his head from his very well-paid ass?
Guess we’ll have to wait until tomorrow night’s game against the hated Cajun Rage to find out if she is Blackburn’s Lady Luck.
Chapter Five
Sundays at the Beacon All Access Clinic were always busy, and today was no exception. Sure, Fallon could have tried to beg off today’s volunteer shift after she’d already put in eight hours at St. Vincent’s, but she hadn’t. The clinic and the clients who visited the one place where they wouldn’t have to worry about making the choice between groceries and healthcare needed her. She wasn’t about to let them down.
And when the funding came through for her to work full time at the clinic and not just as a volunteer? She’d finally be able to do the kind of work she really wanted while also paying off her college loan.
“Make sure to take two of these the first day and one a day after that for four days, even if the symptoms go away first, okay?” Fallon handed the young mom the sample Z-PAK the pharmaceutical rep had provided the clinic. “You should start feeling better quickly.”
Sylvia accepted the antibiotics with a weary smile. “Thank you.”
“Now, was there anything else? Are the kids doing okay?”
“Yeah,” she said, looking over at her twin four-year-olds drawing at a low table in the corner of the family-size exam room. “It seemed to skip right over them and hit me.”
That was the way it worked a lot of the times for the folks who came into the free clinic. Young single moms existing right at the poverty line made sure the family resources went to the kids first. That meant when something came around—like strep throat—their immune systems weren’t up to the task of fighting the infection off.
“You know we’re starting a services center in the warehouse next door. Employment help and skills training. A food pantry. A closet for interview clothes. Eventually, even a preschool.” Fallon busied herself with straightening the wellness and parenting pamphlets in the hanging rack, knowing that the key to getting a lot of her clients to accept help was to make sure they didn’t view i
t as charity. For some reason, a lack of direct eye contact seemed to help with that. “It’s only open as a pilot program right now, but I’d love to have you take a look when you’re feeling better so you can try everything out. We’d really appreciate some feedback on how we have it set up and what improvements we can make.”
“Feedback, huh?” Sylvia asked, sounding as if she knew that wasn’t exactly the whole truth.
“It would be a huge help,” she said as she walked over to the kids and checked out their drawings.
“I’ll think about it,” the other woman said.
Okay, she could totally take that as a win. “Thanks, I really appreciate it.”
After Sylvia and the kids left the clinic, there didn’t seem to be a single break in the action until almost 7 p.m. Fallon was dragging by the time she walked into the break room for the monthly staff meeting.
She sat down at one of the round tables next to Harley, a fellow nurse at St. Vincent’s who also moonlighted as a bartender at Marino’s Bar and Grill, and closed her eyes. What Fallon needed was a do-over of her weekend.
Harley cleared her throat, making Fallon crack her eyes open. Turning her head, she got the full force of Harley’s always-cheery expression. It was a lot to take on a limited amount of sleep.
“Dreaming about your weekend with Harbor City’s most fuckable hockey player?” Harley asked, her voice low enough that it wouldn’t carry beyond the two of them.
Fallon bit back a groan. Yeah, it seemed like everyone and their dog had spotted that stupid photo of her and Zach that had run on the metro area’s most popular hockey site and then been picked up by all the major news outlets. Her mom included. Questions? Oh, she’d only had about a billion hurled at her by her family. Some days she wanted to kill whoever invented group texting.
Fallon rolled her eyes. “I’m fantasizing about how good it would feel to get a full eight hours of sleep three days in a row.”
“Aren’t we all.” Harley leaned in closer. “So does that mean you aren’t going to see him again?”
“Only on TV.” And in that weird dream she kept having that involved him in only basketball shorts and then nothing at all. She really needed to stop eating Spicy Cheetos before bed.
Harley let out a sigh and shot her a sympathetic look as if Fallon ever wanted to see that man again. “Too bad.”
“Not really.” The last thing she needed in her life was one more pain in the ass.
“So he was a disappointment in bed?” Harley wrinkled her nose in sympathy. “Damn. I had hopes for that one.”
Fallon ground her teeth together and counted to ten. “I didn’t sleep with him,” she said for what felt like the thousandth time since Friday morning.
“I’m not judging.”
“It’s the truth.” Not that anyone believed her.
Haley gave her a conspiratorial wink. “I’m with you whatever you want to say.”
Fallon didn’t get a chance to try to set Harley straight because Cameron West, the clinic’s director, started the staff meeting. As usual, it was a lot of bad news wrapped in success stories about the people they’d helped. The short of it? The clinic was helping people who desperately needed it, but their budget couldn’t cover all the work that needed to be done.
“Hey Fallon, can I talk to you for a minute?” Cameron asked after he adjourned the staff meeting.
Her stomach sank. Good news rarely followed that question. “Sure.” She walked over to where he stood by the coffeemaker. “What’s up?”
“There’s no good way to put this. Our grant application for the money to fund a full-time salary for you wasn’t accepted. I’m so sorry.” He patted her on the shoulder. “If it’s any consolation, it wasn’t just you. The grant process has gotten so competitive with federal funding dropping that we got waitlisted for the proposal for our pilot services program, too.” He rubbed his palm against the back of his neck as he grimaced, the strain of the clinic’s budget obviously doing a number on his stress level. “It looks like the food pantry and job training pilot programs will end when the money runs out at the end of the year.”
The news for her was bad, but thanks to her job at St. Vincent’s she wasn’t going to have to worry about how to pay her bills. The services the outreach programs could offer, though, would make a real difference for people like Sylvia and her family.
They couldn’t give up. Too much was at stake. “There’s got to be something we can do.”
“Hope for a miracle,” Cameron said. “Our donors have given generously, but we just don’t have enough support to cover the clinic’s financial needs and the additional outreach programs. Something has to give.”
“It’s not fair.” And just because there wasn’t anything she could do to change it—not with her bank balance—that didn’t mean she was going to just sit back and accept it.
“But it is life. We just have to learn to accept the things we can’t change,” he said. “And in light of this, we’d completely understand if you want to cut back on your volunteer hours since the full-time position isn’t going to happen.”
She may have started volunteering at the clinic with the understanding that it would turn into a full-time, paid position, but she believed in its mission. “You can’t get rid of me that easily.”
And there had to be a way to raise enough funds for the outreach program before the money ran out. All she had to do was figure out how.
…
Locker rooms on the day before a big game always felt different, more electric with a sense of heaviness in the air. It was like the last few moments before the first bolt of lightning lit up the night sky. There was no way to explain it, but Zach’s body always got tuned up tight, knowing on instinct that something was about to break. It was the best feeling in the world. He had his earbuds in and his favorite playlist blasting but hit pause on his phone and yanked out the buds when Coach stopped in front of him.
“You planning on playing like you did the last game?” Coach Peppers asked, holding his usual mug of three-fourths sugar and milk with one-fourth coffee.
Zach stopped taping the blade of his stick—toe to heel—with white tape. That’s the color he used during the last game rather than his usual black. It seemed to have made a difference.
“Yeah.” Last night was the first time in over a year that he’d gotten on the ice without the weight of what he’d let his parents do to him bearing down on his shoulders. From the first face-off, it had been like the days before hockey had become tainted with all of the bullshit that came with actually getting to play the game he loved.
“Good.” Coach leaned in a little closer. “How’s the other thing?”
Besides the trainer, Peppers was the only one he’d told about the food poisoning. Not that there was anyone else to really tell. It wasn’t like he was going to call up Stuckey, his defensive partner, or Christensen, Petrov, and Phillips, the forward line they most often played with on the ice, to tell them about his puke-a-thon. But his coach? The man who’d known him since he was a teenager and knew the real reason why he’d left his hometown team and signed with the Ice Knights? Yeah, he’d told the old man.
“I’m fine.” Zach sealed the tape at the top of his stick’s toe and got the scissors so he could cut off the extra.
The other man took a drink of his sugar-spiked concoction and looked around the locker room. All the other guys were going through their pre-ice-time rituals. For some guys, like Stuckey, it was the same as before a game—listening to New Age music blasting on the headphones while chewing his way through an entire pack of spearmint gum. The majority of the team, though, just talked smack as they got ready, as opposed to the near dead silence of right before a game.
“Be on the ice in five, boys,” the coach said, then turned his attention back to Zach. “Two tickets will be at the will-call window for your nurse tomorrow night. You did invite her to the game, right?”
Zach tossed the roll of tape back into his locker. Del
ay? Him? Always. “Not yet.”
After that photo had hit all the gossip sites, sending his social media notifications into overdrive, according to his agent, who had an intern monitoring those things, the guilt started to sink in. Yeah, he’d reached out to Lucy and confessed that he’d left her bestie hanging in the wind, but like a chickenshit, he’d left the message in a voicemail and who in the world actually checked voicemail?
He should have realized that Lucy hadn’t heard his message when he didn’t hear back. Of course, even if she had, the picture of Fallon and him were all over Harbor City within twenty-four hours. And his attempts to reach Fallon? Nonexistent because there was something about the woman that made him a little bit nervous—a fact that he’d take a puck to the mouth sans mouth guard before admitting out loud.
“Blackburn,” Coach said, sounding exactly like he had when he’d been coaching Zach in juniors. “Why are you always so difficult?”
He glared up at his coach, putting in all the obstinate screw-you attitude he could muster at the moment. “It’s part of my charm.”
Peppers just rolled his eyes. “The woman did you a solid. Say thank you and give her the tickets.”
Coach was almost as bad as that little bit of guilt gnawing on the back of his brain that he hadn’t been able to squash. Fallon might have been a pain in his ass—the kind who didn’t want to be anywhere near him any more than he wanted her to be there—but she wasn’t used to the media hordes. She hadn’t deserved to get chewed up and spit out by the Harbor City sports media.
“Fine,” he said, not showing anything but annoyance—he did still have a sense of self-preservation. “I’ll text her later.”
“Take out your phone and do it now,” Coach said before draining what was in his sure-to-cause-diabetes drink.
Was this guy kidding? What. The. Fuck. “I’m not sixteen anymore. You don’t get to just tell me what to do.”
Coach snorted in that I’m-pretending-to-be-amused-but-I-can-still-kick-your-ass way that he had. “Just do it.”