“No pressure,” Perry muttered.
I patted his shoulder. “None,” I assured him. “We held our own so afar.”
“I can’t see the right line,” Perry whispered, just for me to hear. A thin sheen of sweat coated his upper lip. “What do I do?”
“You breathe,” I told him, moving to stand in front of him.
“I’ve been breathing. Nothing is working. I don’t know what to tell Robbie.”
“Babe. Even I know what to tell Robbie. Hit and peel. They’ll have to answer if he leaves his rock in the rings. As long as they have to answer, there’s a chance they fuck up.”
“I hate winning because they lost.”
“They have the hammer, so we have to keep them on the back foot. It’s all we can do.”
He nodded, because he knew I was right. He might have been doing this a lot longer than I had been, but strategy was my long suit. That, and I could sweep for days.
“What if I give him the wrong angle?”
I leaned in and planted a fast, light kiss on his forehead. “You won’t.”
“But I can’t?—”
“You don’t need magic invisible lines. You have experience.”
He nodded. “Okay.” Heaving out a breath, he nodded again. “Get back down there. This took too long as it is.”
He wasn’t wrong about that. We were getting dangerously close to running out of game clock and forfeiting for a stupid reason, so I hoofed it back to Robbie and told him to do the math.
He knew what I meant. If he thought Perry’s angles were off, double check.
Perry’s angles were not off, and Robbie’s shot was about as perfect as it could get, knocking Renard’s rock out of play and leaving his sitting close enough to the button to shut down the kind of wing shots that might win Channing the game.
It wasn’t very surprising that instead of knocking Robbie’ rock out, Renard threw up a guard. It would make it harder forChanning to curl around to move Robbie’s rock, but that was a shot Channing was innately good at. That guard would also be in Perry’s way.
I saw the panic on Perry’s face the moment he realized what Channing was doing. This had turned from a team game testing the abilities of the team and the leadership of the Skips into a shot-for-shot match between Channing and Perry.
Personally, I thought it was a pretty even match. Sure, Channing was good at the type of shot he’d set for himself, but Perry was an expert at angles, however he did it, to guide the rest of us in our shots, and he also intuitively knew how to read the ice for curl and weight for his own shots.
He wasn’t our Skip just for shits and giggles.
Still, when he met my eye, his own wide and too bright, I hurried over.
“What am I going to do?”
“Shoot your stone,” I replied. knowing it sounded glib, but honestly, it was down to that now. All he had to do was deliver his rocks the best he could. No one else was relying on him to do anything.
“But I can’t see?—”
“Babe, you don’t have to. Trust Robbie. He’s your Vice for a reason, yeah? Guy might be the most awkward, lanky asshole around but he’s got a brain the size of a planet. Let him do the heavy thinking, you do what he tells you to. We got about three minutes left on our game clock, so we don’t have a lot of time.” I leaned in, but instead of kissing his forehead like I normally did, I laid a wet one right on his mouth.
“Ev—” He sputtered and backed up.
“This ain’t the Olympics, babe,” I teased. “This is our house, and you know this ice. Do your worst.” I winked at him and started sliding backwards towards my spot.
It took him another minute to get his head around letting Robbie guide his shot, but finally, he settled in the hack, accepted the guidance, and made the delivery.
His first stone was an absolutely perfect set in the four foot ring that Channing would have to knock out, probably rolling his own stone out too, or sit behind, making it harder to place a second point with his hammer.
