CHAPTER FOUR
ALEXIO
“Why the fuckdid you call me back to your fucking shop?” I tempered my voice as best I could by shoving my hand into my pocket and twisting the old drachma inside between my fingers. There wasn’t a lot of room to move it around since my jeans were impossibly tight, but the motion was soothing. It was a habit I’d developed since finding it on the beach back home, and one that was subtle enough no one noticed or made fun of me for. “I really don’t have fucking time for this, Nikos.”
I preferred to swear at my brother in any other language but English.
I used to speak to my dad in Türkçe when he was alive, and my teammates in either broken French or the drunk Russian and Finnish I’d managed to pick up over the years at the bar after long games and big wins.
In short, my head felt like about seven mixed salads most days.
But not today. Today, I shouted at my brother in my first language: Greek. The one our mum used at home. The one I’d never forget because of how often she yelled at me and Nikos for being little shits.
“What’s the big deal?” Nikos asked. “You help Peter all the time.”
“Yes, but you didn’t tell me his son was one of those hockey players.” And oh. I heard it there. I heard the way I said “those” in that tone that had pissed Jonah off beyond all reason. But I had every fucking right to be indignant and irritated.
When our ice time had been cut by a quarter the first time Boston announced that the blind PPHL team would be using our arena, I was irritated. Then when they announced it made more sense for them to share with us full-time since the sled team needed a different sort of rink, I was indignant.
How the fuck was I going to practice enough? How the fuck were my skills not going to atrophy for a team that no one goddamn watched?
And yeah, okay. I heard it there too. I knew when I was being a dick, and I knew when my irritation was misplaced.
In truth, I would have cared less, but the fuck-face commissioner of the NHL teams had gotten together with the fuck-face commissioner of the PPHL teams and decided there needed to be some sort of fucking ambassadorship outreach or something.
“They thought it would be a good idea,” Bernard Renault said in his weird nasal voice that sounded like he was sniffing the inside of some other dude’s asshole, “if we had a better understanding of…thattype of hockey.”
He was allergic to the word “disabled,” which, on an average day, was kind of hilarious.
Though to be fair, I had no idea if I was allowed to use it. It felt like a slur, though I’d been corrected on that multiple times. But yeah. It felt wrong for it to come from me.
So I avoided it when I could. Just…hopefully not as obviously as Renault was doing it.
Everyone grunted and groaned at having yet one more pile of shit on our plates that went along with sharing ice time and having to restructure games and playoffs—though luckily, since we were older, they had to do most of the time changes. But it sucked.
And I was really hoping that idea would die.
In fact, for two years, it wasn’t brought up again.
Until today, when someone walked into the training room and pointed at me. “Him, right?”
The guy was very tall with broad shoulders and a mop of unruly curls. I had no idea who he was or what he wanted. Or why he was pointing at me.
“Zeki!” my coach yelled from across the room. Noah was wearing a hat with the word COACH across the front like a huge douche.
I walked over and cocked a brow at him. “What?”
“How long you been with the organization?”
I blinked slowly and pulled the drachma out of my pocket, turning it in my palm over and over. The motion was keeping me from cussing him out. “The fact that you don’t know is why you suck at your job.”
It was no secret I hated him, but in my defense, I hated most people.
He ignored me. “Ten years,” he told the guy. And of course, he was wrong.
“Thirteen.” It was automatic at this point. I’d gone ninth in the draft after spending two years in the Q, freezing my literal balls off in Quebec and missing Cyprus sands so much my stomach hurt. But it had all been worth it.
Until now.
