Page 17 of Delay of Game
“Dude, that’s astrategyyou do on purpose? You did that to me, like, all the time my first season.”
“Well, um. It worked, right?”
Zach shook his head, expression rueful. “I mean, I guess.”
“You did a lot of it on your own,” Nate blurted out, before he could stop it.
“Yeah, I know.” Zach’s brown eyes were dancing, like they always did when Nate was embarrassing himself. With anyone else it would have made it worse, but Nate didn’t mind when Zach laughed at him, because it was nevermean. It was like a secret joke that just the two of them were in on. “But thanks.”
Their arms were close together on the armrest; Zach had never really cared much about personal space the way most players did. Even through the suit jacket sleeve, Nate could feel the hair on his wrist stand on end. He looked away.
Below them, the Beacons scored shorthanded. He could see Bee on the bench, grimacing. Even though it was only a preseason game, shehatedwhen the other team scored. Nate couldn’t blame her; he hated it just as much, even if he was too even-keeled to let the rest of the team know. He could also see Antti Salonen, his other alternate captain, shaking his head at her. He was playing tonight, the veteran leadership the kids needed.
Even with the shitty goal, the Cons did manage to win the game by four. Nate spent a lot of time afterward talking to the rookies who hadn’t had spectacular showings about not letting it get them down too much. About keeping their eyes on the prize. About the preseason being about showing the brass what they had and knowing where their development would be best spent in the future.
From the dejected frowns and sighs, Nate wasn’t sure how much he was getting through to them. At least he had Zach there to make jokes and lighten the mood.
There weren’t a lot of surprises this season: the roster spots were mostly secure. Gags made the team out of camp, which Nate felt had been earned despite the dumb fight. Tarasov made it, of course, a definite upgrade on Parsons. Owen Lee had been a bit of a revelation and made a serious push at consideration, but the Cons still had Ruslan Sokolov, their backup goalie, signed for another season and couldn’t afford to lose him on waivers. The goalie depth wasn’t that great, and if Lee ended up struggling, and Socks was gone...it would’ve been bad news. While he might have been gone at the trade deadline, it didn’t make sense to disrupt Lee’s development. Goalies were always tricky, and easier to ruin than skaters. So Lee would be going back to his junior team in Winnipeg.
There weren’t any real surprises. That didn’t mean he wasn’t nervous anyway.
Heading into the regular season, Nate took stock of the roster. It was a good group, but he hadn’t really allowed himself to have good feelings about the season in years. He’d been optimistic once, a hometown kid drafted in the fifth round, finally getting a chance to play for his childhood team. Years of crushing losses and last-place-in-the-division finishes had shown him the folly of his ways. He had always been told that you had to believe you could win it in order to win it, but that was easier said than done. Even though things were different now, there was a part of him that just always expected the worst, no matter what life actually had to show him, no matter the fact that you truly had to go into the seasonexpectingto win if you wanted to have any actual, real hope of winning.
The first regular season game was also the home opener. Some teams made a big deal out of it, but the Cons never bothered. It was just nice to play at the Franklin, to hear the fans yellingshoooootand the familiar boom of the announcer calling the PECO power play. It was nice to look up at the stands and see the seas of red and white and blue, thousands of individual people smudged into a faceless sea of jerseys. From this distance he couldn’t make out any of the guys dressed up as Ben Franklin, drunk and waving their prop Constitutions, but he knew they were there anyway.
Nate could lose himself in the play, didn’t have to say anything exceptgot timeorchange!or if things were really going tits up,I got it I got it I got it. Didn’t have to do anything except predict where Zach or Bee were going to be, didn’t have to feel out of place or awkward or weird. Didn’t have any responsibilities except talking to the refs, breathing hard, when Mike got called for cross-checking.
“Come on,” Nate said to Harris Sheldon, a ref who’d become something of a cult figure online for his colorful phrasing and memeable facial expressions, “that was just a little tap.”
“Singer,” Sheldon said, rolling his eyes. “I was born at night, not last night.”
They were playing the New Jersey Scouts. Before the game, Nate had asked Mike if he was going to be okay playing them with Daniel Garcia, his boyfriend, on the opposing bench. The whole thing still kind of boggled his mind: the two defensemen had fought almost every game they’d played together and somehow managed to fall in love in the middle of it. Even though neither of them was out publicly, both teams knew about the relationship. In addition to telling the players, it had to be disclosed to management, and the fact that everyone had been mostly chill about it was probably a sign that the league was changing, even at that glacial pace.
Mike had shrugged and said, “Easier than fighting him,” and Nate shook his head, watching Mike playing now, sprinting up the ice to join the shorthanded rush.
In the locker room after the win, Netty’s awful win song playlist blaring on the speakers, the team stripped down for the showers. Netty was already teasing Mike. “You gonna let Garcia forget it, Misha?”
“Not a chance,” Mike said, a shark’s grin on his face, his tattooed body already covered in darker splotches beneath the ink, bruises that would show up in full force and color tomorrow.
“Michael,” Bee said severely in her thick Quebecois accent. She changed in the locker rooms with the rest of them, efficient and unselfconscious. By this point, even though she had been a novelty when she’d been drafted, she was just one of the guys, and no one looked at her twice. “This is not the way to build a healthy relationship.”
“You’re one to talk, Ms. Ticket to Finland to Get My Ex-Boyfriend Back,” Mike shot right back.
Behind them, Mäkelä rolled his ice-chip-blue eyes up at the ceiling—he was the boyfriend in question—and said, “I am staying out of this one.”
At one point, Mike had been worried about telling the team that he was gay, but he had done it. Nate was proud of the guys, the group he had built: everyone had been cool about it. And now they were chirping Mike about his boyfriend the same way they would’ve chirped anyone about a wife or girlfriend, the same way they chirped Bee about Mack, teasing and needling, but with affection and camaraderie.
Hockeywasfucking weird, and he loved it.
The worst part about hockey, Zach had always thought, was the constant traveling. If he could play eighty-two home games, he would. He usually tried to pass out on the planes if he could because he was so shit at cards. He had enough money at this point in his life to afford losing a few hands, but he’d grown up with a family that had to pinch every penny to afford his fees and equipment and some of that had just stuck with him.
It was part of the reason he and Nate had gotten along so well to start—they’d both been raised the same way, blue collar. They had a lot in common even if there were a lot of other differences, like the fact that Nate was Jewish and pretty serious about it and Zach had been raised lackadaisically Catholic and wasn’t serious about it at all.
Nate couldn’t miss games even if they fell on the important holidays, but he didn’t eat pork or shellfish, and he had a number tattooed on the inside of his left forearm. Zach had asked him about it once, and Nate had explained about how his grandfather had survived Auschwitz and had been tattooed there against his will. Nate’s parents had beenpissedat him for getting it. Tattoos were apparently a big no-no with really traditional Jewish families, andthatkind of tattoo even more so.
“So why’d you do it?” Zach had asked.
Nate had shrugged and said that his Zayde had never gotten the original removed because it was a reminder that he was still alive and the people who’d done it to him were dead. Zach could still remember the icy look in Nate’s eyes when he’d said, “When he died, it felt like the right thing to do to keep him in the world, somehow. To keep remembering him. Because no one’s rememberingthosebastards.”