“I’m not nearly as secretive with my games as Lemon is,” Hansley says, glancing back at me with a teasing smile.
“It was a practice you were spying on,” I mutter, rolling my eyes.
“I’m not sure standing in the open to watch can truly be considered spying.”
I huff, and there are chuckles all around.
It’s late when we step outside, and I shiver. The night air is cold way up here in the north. Hansley releases my hand at the bus door and I climb on while he waits for everyone to load their gear under the bus and file on. As his team passes me, they hold their hands out. Waiting for me to bump their fists like I had Damari’s. Even his assistant coach does with a wide smile.
I’m grinning by the time Hansley climbs on last and takes a seat next to me. He wraps his arms around my shoulders and pulls me close. My nose is cold, but I feel all kinds of warm right now. I’ve always had this kind of community with my team and, to a lesser extent, with my coaches. While the other athletes, and students, seem to like me and always say hi on their way by, it’s never been to quite the same degree as my team.
This is different. This feels… accepting. Like I belong here.
The ride to the hotel isn’t long. Hansley tells me to head up and he’ll meet me once his team is settled. So I climb into the elevator with a few of his players and head up. They’re chatty. Happy. They try to include me in their conversation until it’s clear that I don’t understand what they’re saying. To which they laugh and try to explain it.
By the time I’m in the hall on my floor, I’m smiling broadly. I didn’t know people could be quite so nice. Genuinely. I don’t get the impression at all that this is because of Hansley telling them to be nice. In fact, when I climbed onto the bus at school to head to the airport, they were all surprised to see me. Hansley hadn’t told anyone I was joining them. So I’m inclined to believe that they weren’t warned to be nice. They just are.
Not that I think hockey players aren’t nice. It’s people in general that make me wary.
I let myself into the room we’re sharing and strip off the layers. It doesn’t take me long to freshen up and get ready for bed. I’m sitting on the foot of the bed in my underwear whenHansley finally joins me twenty minutes later. Did I say he’s sexy in his suit, because fuck.
His eyes remain locked on mine as he peels off his suit down to his underwear too. He’s all sorts of muscles that make my skin hot. When he disappears into the bathroom, I climb further up the bed and turn on the light next to it. When he comes back into the bedroom area, Hansley turns off the bigger, brighter one and joins me.
We wrap around each other, our mouths immediately pressing together. For a minute, that’s all we do. Just taste each other.
“Thanks for coming,” he says against my lips.
“I’m not entirely sure what’s going on most of the time, but I swear, more times than not, I can tell because of the crowd’s energy. In this case, it was the opposite of the crowd’s reactions.”
He chuckles. “Michigan is a good team. A fucking hard team to beat. They’re consistently in the top five in the conference. I’m really proud that we only lost by one point.”
“They’re really good kids,” I agree.
Hansley nods. “They are. And they’re doing so damn good this year. I really thought that first loss this season was going to fuck us up because they were mentally beaten. But I’m happy to see that they pulled out of that.”
“Losing is just part of the game,” I say.
“Yes, but we won the first seven games. Almost easily, though that’s not fair because the other teams played hard. They were flying high and I think it felt like someone clipped their wings when they lost. Thankfully, they came back from that.”
“They played well tonight.”
He smiles. “They did.”
“You’re a great coach.”
Hansley chuckles. “I’m totally fucking winging it.” I laugh. “Honestly, I’m just scraping together everything I foundeffective from past coaches, everything I hated from past coaches, and leaning heavily on Denis. It seems to be working.”
“There isn’t really a program in school for coaching, exactly,” I say. “There’s some in coaching administration, but I don’t give a fuck about that. I was a sports management and exercise science major. And quite frankly, they’re for every sport. Like, one degree covers every sport. It’s kind of B.S. because swimming is very different from hockey, though you both have water as a primary component of the sport, even if in different forms. You probably got more valuable, specifically applicable information from being a player with a bunch of coaches than I did in my programs.”
“I didn’t think of it that way.”
“Now I think I should have taken courses in fundraising,” I admit, thinking of all the shit that Zarek told me. Hansley laughs. “OH! I didn’t tell you! I received an anonymous donation. A really big one.”
He leans back to look at me with a big smile. “Yeah? I really want to ask from whom, but you just said it’s anonymous.”
I shrug. “Really, I don’t know. I keep trying to think of who I might know with an extra 20k lying around and one day thought, ‘oh, Coach Frost is short exactly that much this year so I might as well let him spend it.’”
“They took 20,000 from your budget?” he asks, incredulous.
