Page 8 of Game Misconduct
But somehow, he couldn’t stop.
“So Icanskate circles around you,” he said, as he flew by Garcia and with a clever hook of his stick stole the puck from him. The linesman didn’t even see.
He could see Bee watching him from the bench. But he couldn’t spare much of a thought for her. As they fought along the boards, he dug his shoulder into Garcia’s chest, gasped a few muttered curse words before they pulled apart and Elliott drove the puck to the net and snapped in the Cons’ first goal of the game.
Garcia didn’t react much beyond looking at him, even though Mike knew he was a regular trash talker on the ice. He just didn’t want to give Mike the satisfaction. Their eyes met, briefly, as he shoved Mike into the boards and Mike choked out, “Fucking clumsy-ass piece of shit.” Mike couldn’t parse the expression on Garcia’s face. Except his stomach did a flip and he suddenly felt like any fucking six-year-old on the schoolyard, pulling pigtails.
Back on the bench a few minutes later, he watched the action, chewing on his mouthguard and frowning in intense concentration at the back-and-forth. The Cons were playing a strong offensive game today, led by Bee and the first line, but the Hornets’ goalie had gotten lucky and the bounces weren’t going their way. One of Reed’s shots had gone off the post. Mike chewed harder, like if he could bite through the plastic, he’d crack the secret of widening their lead.
Then he looked at the opposing bench and saw Garcia watching him again, staring at the guard hanging crooked out of his mouth. Jesus, he probably looked like a fucking idiot. He shoved it back over his teeth and glared at Garcia, and to his surprise, that asshole smiled. It was a barely there kind of grin, flashing across his face in an instant, replaced by nothing. If Mike hadn’t been staring at him, he never would’ve seen it. His stomach did that flip again, and he resolved that the next time they were on the ice together, it was going to go down.
He had his chance five minutes later. Singer had scored a fucking beauty of a goal, Jakub Cerný took a stupid penalty shortly thereafter, and Mike was out to kill the penalty. Garcia never got power play time, usually, but there he was, out on the ice. So that could only mean one thing. And when Mike saw Garcia heading for Antti Salonen, one of the Cons’ A’s, he mutteredfuck no you don’tunder his breath.
The trick to checking guys who were bigger than him—which was, he hated to admit, a lot of them—was the speed and angle. He used geometry and physics to his advantage to shoulder Garcia out of the way. Even the impact felt heavy. Meaningful. Garcia was big. Like...big. But Mike had caught him unawares and while he didn’t lose his balance, exactly, he staggered sideways, and Sally skated on, unmolested.
Garcia glared at him, and Mike’s dick twitched in his fucking cup. Jesus Christ. He immediately dropped his gloves, like if he fought, maybe the stupid fucking parts of his body with a mind of their own would all shut the fuck up. He stood there glaring back, and Garcia looked him up and down, like at first he wasn’t gonna drop too. For a split second Mike wondered whether this was just business, whether Garcia hated him as much as—
But then he did, and it was on.
Mike squared up to grab Garcia’s jersey, but Garcia had other ideas about how this was going to go. He skated forward, shoulder down, and before Mike could react to the weird-ass start to a fight, Garcia slammed into him, full body, and they were falling to the ice. Mike had to fight to try to pull his weight so that he fell on top. It wasn’t how the fights usually went. It also wasn’t a fight he could easily win. Garcia outweighed him by fifty pounds and was over half a foot taller.
Everything happened fast. Couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. He landed on the ice with Garcia’s body on top of his. The impact hurt, both under him, and Garcia’s pads pressing against his. The sudden jolt of 230 pounds of muscle slamming him into an equally unforgiving surface, Garcia’s elbows digging into his chest. His knee between Mike’s legs. Garcia’s head was very close to his and Mike looked up into his eyes. The long lashes framing them. The sweat dripping from his hair into Mike’s face.
“Is that what you wanted?” Garcia whispered in his ear, and Mike was suddenly, painfully hard.
The linesmen separated them before he could answer. Garcia gave him another look before he skated off to the penalty box, and Mike thought, for a second, maybe he was punching above his weight class after all. The thought only made him angrier. But then again, so did the inconvenient fucking erection that refused to subside, even as he limped his way to the box himself.
FuckingGarcia.
“Why did you fight the way you fought today?” asked Sophia Dawsey, thePost-Gazettereporter assigned to the Hornets’ beat.
Danny didn’t usually get trapped in the media scrum, particularly after a loss, mostly because no one was interested in what he had to say. They would come looking for him if he had a particularly violent fight—they’d been all over it when Sato broke his tooth; when Danny’d accidentally concussed the Jersey goalie. Otherwise, they focused on the stars, like Henri Jean-Phillipe Lévesque and Semyon Artyomov, or the guys with big personalities who gave good quotes, like Landry or Mitch Sorenson. This fight had not been a flashy one. He hadn’t even thrown a punch, just wrestled Sato to the ice and left him there.
And yet Dawsey had sought him out, trapped him in the hallway before he could make it into the dressing room, and was looking expectantly up at him. Not for the first time, he cursed the weirdly casual scrum that Pittsburgh allowed.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Danny said, though he knew exactly what she meant.
“You didn’t throw a punch. You took Sato right down to the ice.”
Danny dug his teeth into his lower lip and looked right and left for anyone to rescue him, but the other Hornets were either answering questions of their own or had already made their own escapes. Whatever he said was going to be taken the wrong way by almost everyone. Sato especially. Dawsey was still looking at him with that reporter-eye he didn’t like to see. He could have pushed around her, but he didn’t do shit like that. It was bad enough being called a goon on the ice, let alone off it. Danny was always conscious of his size; of the space he took up.
“I’ve fought him before. I don’t need to fight him again,” he said finally, shrugging. “Seemed better for both of us to end it quickly.”
“I note that you’ve actually fought Sato in every game you’ve played against—”
“Excuse me, Ms. Dawsey, I need to go.” Danny sidestepped her.
For a moment she looked as though she was about to try to follow him down the hall. She had that determined face that made him think—but she didn’t, and Danny, shoulders hunched, fast-walked into the dressing room. He breathed a sigh of relief. He was tired; his entire body sore from the aborted fight and from getting stuck out against the Cons’ first line multiple times in the third period and then getting trapped on an almost two-minute shift without a change. There was a hotel room a bus ride or a twenty-minute walk away. Percs and alcohol waiting for him. And after that the possibility of sleep.
He thought about that in the shower. Whether it would be worth it to walk, stretch out his legs farther before he made it back, or try to hurry and catch the bus with the rest of the team. It was always a bad atmosphere after a loss. Lévesque was a perfectionist in all things and took it hard. Sometimes Danny didn’t want to spend the entire ride talking about what they’d done wrong and what they needed to improve. That was what morning skate was for.
After a game all he wanted was to not think.
He was walking out of the arena when his phone buzzed in his pocket. His sister Araceli’s image flashed on his lock screen. He’d recently updated the picture; she was holding Josie and smiling. He declined the call and slid the phone back into his pocket, anticipating an annoyed voice mail he’d listen and not respond to in the morning. He kept them on the phone with their transcriptions, reminders of all the ways he’d disappointed her and his parents.
The stadium where Philadelphia’s basketball and hockey teams played their games was part of a massive complex that housed the Franklin, the football field, the baseball stadium, and a building that was mostly bars and restaurants. It was all hemmed in by what seemed like miles of parking lot, all steadily emptying. Its boundary on one side was Broad Street and I-95 on the other. The streaky headlights of a traffic jam ran up Broad and into the city and the other way as fans tried to get back onto the interstate.
He started the long trudge across the lot, illuminated by floodlights. There was always the chance a fan might recognize him and start something, but Danny didn’t care. It had been such a shitshow of a game that he thought maybe the cool night air might clear his head.