SIX
Cam
It waswild and stupid how happy I was to see Jari waiting for me in the player parking lot. I smiled and lifted a hand in greeting. That was when I took serious note of how closely he resembled a deer in the headlights of an oncoming tractor-trailer. I wasn’t sure he could hunch into his hoodie even more, but he did. He appeared one breath away from a full-blown panic attack. Something I had plenty of practice with, as Kirby had suffered from them for years, most attacks triggering some dark depressive slides that lasted for weeks.
I had to wonder if his reflexive fear was from his upbringing. I’d looked him up out of a vague curiosity and sadly had to dig through articles about his father. Jari was always buried under Aarni Lankinen’s dastardly deeds. His stats, his skills, his glory entombed beneath his father’s anger. If the man was that rotten on the ice, what had he been like at home? Surely Jari needed someone to?—
No. Ease back. I had to slow my steps to keep from racing to Jari and folding him into a hug. Not that a hug always worked. Sometimes it made things worse, but with Kirby, it had eased some of the crippling fear with trust and calm.
“… your date?”
My attention snapped back to Yanni, thumbing through a series of images of Athena.
“What?” I asked with a snap that brought his brown gaze from tatas to me. “No, not a date. Why would you even say that?”
“Coffee date. That’s Jari, the hockey player, right? You told me you were meeting him for coffee. You asked if I wanted to go. I told you I had something better planned for the night.” He waved the big breasts held within the confines of a teeny-weeny pink bralette in my face, then lowered it as a golf cart with two security officers drove past. Both waved. I waved back. “I didn’t mean he was your date, as in adate,just that you two had a coffee date. Christ. You’re awfully tense.”
“Sorry, no, I just…” I found Jari again. Lost, scared, ready to bolt. “I just don’t want any speculation. We’re just new friends having coffee. Nothing else.”
Yanni chuckled, the strain of the moment gone. I truly needed to settle my ass. I always did this. Fly into protection mode like a mama bear at the first sign of distress in a person. Sometimes, according to the team shrink, Doctor Graham, or Doc G as we called him, I bolted past plain altruism and barreled headfirst into super-helper syndrome, or, as the more professional term goes, pathological altruism. We’d just started delving into the reasons why I was this way, but I sensed a lot of my issues were rooted in the loss of my parents and being raised by Kirby’s dad. Uncle Roy. Nope. Not thinking about Uncle Asshole right now. Jari was waiting.
“Right, yeah, just trying to expand my social network away from the chowderheads on this team,” I joked as my sight lingered on Jari. If he ran, I’d… well, I didn’t know. Probably chase him like a beagle on the trail of a cottontail, which would be stupid bad.
“By hanging out with other jock chowderheads?” Yanni gave me a shoulder bump. “I’m busting your balls. Have coffee with the hockey player. I got a date with a Greek goddess.” He kissed his phone, then trotted to his fancy little sports car.
Yanking my sight from my love-sick—or boob obsessed—catcher, I walked slowly to the very cute hockey player hiding in his clothes as if he were trying to hide from Tommy Lee Jones à laThe Fugitive.
“Hey, you found the player lot,” I said, shoving my hands into the front of my hoodie. It wasn’t all that cold, but Paulie, the pitching coach, insisted his pitchers always keep their arms warm and not use ice. “You look freezing. I think it’s nice, but Paulie, that’s Paul Rankowitz, our pitching coach, and a few trainers, strongly suggest heat to help flush metabolic waste. I find that it helps me heal and recover faster for the next start.”
“Okay, that’s… that’s good to know.”
“Jock to jock,” I teased as heat rushed to my face. “So, right, nice to see you again. Are you cold? I ran to the ballpark, so no car, but this was the easiest place to meet. But if you’re cold, we can grab a cab.”
“No, a walk is nice.” He turned and walked off. I glanced around at the grounds crew cleaning up the debris in the parking lot before jogging to catch up with him. His gait was fast. Like speed-walker fast. With each hurried step, he would pluck at his watch band. Step, pluck, step, pluck, and I knew it was a method of soothing himself. Kirby used to rub his nose up, down, up, down.
“So, how goes the hockey?” I asked, wedging myself to the outside of the sidewalk. “I guess my asking if you were cold was silly since you live on the ice.”
He flashed me a nervous little smile. My right foot slid off the curb, but I righted myself quickly. Lord, that smile was dangerous to a man’s equilibrium.
“Yeah, I’m a bit of a polar bear,” he replied.
“Well, it must be that you’ve become acclimated to the cold since you don’t have an ounce of fat on you.” His brown gaze flew from his watch to me. “Not that I’ve seen you without clothes. I just… I assumed since you’re an athlete that you’d be in top shape.”
Next time, just fall into the street and let a passing CAT bus run you over.
Noted. Good call, me.
“I work out,” he replied, his gaze slightly bewildered, the strum of his watch band increasing.
“Sure, obviously.” I tried not to say anything else. That lasted fourteen seconds. “I work out too. A lot. The older you get, the harder it is to maintain peak performance.”
“Right, yeah, that’s what Cap tells us,” he mumbled, dipping his head and moving to the side to let a group of tourists rush past on their way to catch a tour bus at the state capital. How did I know they were tourists? There were ways to tell. The riverboat tour caps on every head were a sure sign.
“Have you ever taken one of the riverboat tours?” I asked after we rejoined. He shook his head, which was tucked back into his hood like a turtle. The shades hid his pretty eyes, which was a tragedy of biblical proportions. “You should. Every newcomer to the city should ride up and down the Susquehanna.”
“You sound like a tour guide,” he said, which made me chuckle. The tension around his mouth lessened slightly.
“Guess I could get a job doing that when I retire,” I tossed out as we came to a crosswalk packed with people. It didn’t matter that I was in street disguise, a woolly hat low over my forehead, a big non-logo’d hoodie, and a scarf; someone recognized me and shouted my name—a fan leaving the game. I waved at them as we waited for the go-ahead. “I know the city pretty well because I’ve lived and played here for ten thousand years.”
