This time I can’t help it and I laugh out loud.
“Something funny?” Connor Kennedy asks me.
I clear my throat. “Nope. Nothing funny at all.” I spin away from Connor, look right at Bouchard, grin, and give him the finger.
“And that brings me to my next announcement,” Coach says. “In an attempt to build team unity, tonight we are cutting out half of your rooms. You’re all getting roommates. And no…” He pauses and looks pointedly at me and Bouchard. “You do not get to room with a member of your own original team. I need you boys to work together. And fast. So find someone new to spend time with.”
A series of groans ring out around the group. At least I’m not the only one who objects to this idea.
Coach blows his whistle. “Now. Let’s shave some ice.”
Connor
Practice is grueling. Even more so than I’m already used to with Coach Chris. I thought coming into this I’d be at an advantage, already knowing his system and the drills he likes to run, but I was wrong. He’s pulling out all sorts of new formations and testing every combination of players he can to form our lines. Then, without much rest, he’ll blow his whistle and round us up for speedruns in the form of suicides. Each of us is a sweaty mess. Even our two goalies are red in the face. Though I can understand why. They’ve both taken at least a hundred shots on goal from us in the last ninety minutes.
Despite all that, I am, surprisingly, having fun. A lot of fun. I’m even smiling as I wait against the boards for Coach to blow his whistle again to signal it’s time for my group to skate as fast as we can from one end of the rink to the other in a mad dash. Because for the first time in my life, no one is here watching me skate outside of my coach and my teammates. I’m sure my father is fuming that Coach Chris made the request for this to be a closed session. But he was right to do so. Like he said in his speech, we don’t have a lot of time to make us a cohesive team before we leave for Milan. An audience would make that already difficult task even harder.
So for right now, I’m going to enjoy this freedom on the ice. I’m also going to enjoy watching Gavin skate like his career depends on it as he blows past everyone in his group for speed drills. It’s like junior hockey camp all over again. Gavin, the mad Alaskan, skating with the fury of a man with something to prove. The quintessential underdog that has all the fight and all the bite.
I seem to be the only person who enjoys watching him. Except for Bouchard, who is always there to slap his teammate a high five when he comes to a stop near the net, sending a plume of snow across the thin red line and onto the boards with a loud, crisp scrape of his blade on the ice. I can tell by the looks of exasperation on everyone else’s faces that he’s frustrating them. I get it. There isn’t a man on this ice who hasn’t been laid out by Gavin coming at them at full speed. Myself included. In fact, the bruise on my hip from the last time we met each other only finally faded this morning. Worth it. We redeemed ourselves against the Blizzards in that game and won.
Coach blows his whistle twice. We’re done and everyone skates towards the bench to grab a sip of water.
“Good job today, boys!” He skates a loop around to catchglimpses of all twenty-four of us. “I know today’s practice wasn’t easy, but I needed to see what you all were made of.”
“Did you figure out who our alternate captain is?” Bouchard asks, with a not-so-subtle gloved-hand clap to Gavin’s shoulder.
“No,” Coach says, giving him a knowing smirk. “But your boy there did impress.”
Bouchard grabs onto both of Gavin’s shoulders and gives him a playful shake. And… oh my God… is that a blush I see creeping across Gavin’s sweaty cheeks? He looks, for lack of a better word, proud. Not smug. Not overly pleased with himself, but humble even.
Huh. I did not expect that. Especially not with how often he mouths off when you’re playing against him.
“Well, speed doesn’t mean shit when you’re spending an entire game in the penalty box,” Bradley Warren, one of our defensemen, says and punctuates it with a spit onto the ice.
Gavin responds by rolling his large deep-brown eyes and doing a slow jerk-off motion with his hand. Now I’m the one blushing as heat rises to my cheeks as I suddenly can’t help but wonder what Gavin looks like doing exactly that.
Nope. Don’t go there, Connor. Go ahead and swallow that idea right back down to where it came from. Fuck. Swallow. Terrible choice of words. Stop thinking sordid things about Gavin. He’s your enemy on the ice.Well, not for the next three weeks, actually, now we’re teammates. But somehow that might be worse.He’s off limits for a myriad of reasons. One, he’s probably straight. Two, my father will kill me if I get outed as gay. And three, he’ll kill me a second time if I get outed because of anything to do with Gavin Marshal, who he hates more than he hates the fact that I’m gay.
“That’s enough!” Coach says and reaches into his pocket, pulling out a stack of room keycards. “Now listen up! I need you all to pair off. Remember, you can’t choose someone you play with at home. So choose wisely. If it turns out your new roommate snores, I don’t care. Work it out on your own. If, for some reason, after this week you cannot get along, we can revisit this when we assignrooms in Milan. But know this right now, if you can’t get along in a five-star resort, it’s only going to get worse in the Olympic Village. There’s been a lot of strides made over the years at the Olympics, but athlete accommodations are not one of them. So enjoy your full-sized beds while you have them.”
Most of the team breaks out into a laugh and there’s smiles throughout as they start to pair off. Except for Gavin. The look he wears is one I’ve seen before from him. I’m suddenly transported back to junior hockey camp again when we all needed to choose our dorm mates for the next six weeks. It wasn’t Gavin’s fault. Everyone already knew each other in some way or another. Of course there were already friendships at play and boys who were eager to pair off quickly to not have to room with the new kid. In the end, there was no one left for him to share a room with, and he ended up in a single. For someone who exudes nothing but contempt for his peers, you’d think he would have preferred it, but at that moment, all I could think was that maybe what he really wanted was a friend.
That look on his face all those years ago has haunted me ever since. But at sixteen I was too young, and my father had already arranged for me to room with one of his ex-teammates’ son.
I look around the rink, checking to make sure my father hasn’t found a way to sneak in. He hasn’t. “Hey,” I say to Gavin as I get near him. “Want to share a room?”
“No.”
“Well, fuck me for asking.” I poke at the blade of his stick with my own. “But it doesn’t really look like you have any other options.” I angle my stick handle towards Bouchard, who’s got his arm wrapped around the team’s backup goalie, a player from the Utah Cougars. “Andhe’smanaging to make nice.”
“Bouchard’s a nice guy.” Gavin leans forward on his stick.
I knock it out from under him with my own. He maintains his balance. “Look,” I say. “I’m trying to be nice. Would it kill you to not be a dick for as long as it takes for us to get a keycard?”
“Yes,” he says and stares directly at me.
“Whatever,” I say and skate away to try to find another option. But it would seem I’m too late as everyone else has already paired off. Sighing, I skate over to Coach Chris and grab the last set of keycards.
