“Sorry, ladies,” I said as I got to my feet and tossed my hair from my face. “Irate teammate with a soccer ball of death.”
Both cheerleaders giggled. “I hope you’re not hurt. It would be a pity to have a face like yours bruised up by a stupid soccer ball,” Redhead with Big Jugs cooed.
“Yeah, you have such a pretty face,” Blonde with Big Jugs whispered.
Okay, so yeah, this was a nice development. Two hours until game time, two clearly-into-me cheerleaders, one stall. Yep. Getting a hot piece in a bathroom would scour away the seedy attraction to my manny. Right?
“Maybe we should hide in that stall? Just in case?” I offered with all kinds of chivalrous decorum.
They both nodded. The door flew open and Ryker barreled into the ladies room with a bloody soccer ball and a roar. The cheerleaders screamed and ran out. I ducked into the stall, laughing madly. The ball ricocheted off the ceiling into the stall, splashing down in the toilet.
“Well fuck,” I heard Madsen grumble. I fished it out, threw the door open, and threw it at his face. The impact was quite satisfying if I dared to say so myself.
“You asshole,” Ryker spat, toilet water sprayed over his handsome face. A short battle broke out over possession of the black and white ball until Vlad stormed in, wrested the ball from us, called us immature something cows in Russian, and stalked off to be sullen and stoic with Tate, wherever he was hiding. “He’s in a mood.”
We padded to the sink to wash the toilet water off our hands and his face. When I tried to help with the soap, Ryker swatted my hands away.
“Yeah, Tate’s stressing being back in Dallas or something,” I said as I gathered up a handful of foam and splatted it to my hair. “Thanks for scaring those two cheerleaders off with your maniacal Braveheart slash Wilson the Bloody Ball entrance. Dick.”
“Hashtag sorry not sorry.” Ryker grinned as he toweled off his hands.
“Two hot chicks in a stall would have eased my troubled mind,” I mumbled while working my now soapy hair up into a Mohawk. “Can I ask you something?”
“Yes, the bloody handprint on the ball was real blood. Alex ran into a doorjamb.”
I snorted. “Loser.” Ryker sniggered then lobbed his ball of wet paper towels into the trash. “No, I was going to ask, when you met Jacob did you know right off that he was someone special?”
His gaze moved from the trash to me. “We didn’t get along well at the beginning. But even so there was this intangible thing between us. I always thought he was hot but there were some big issues we had to work out.”
“So say like if he had worked for you in some domestic capacity…” I focused on my soapy hawk.
“C, are you crushing on your manny?” Ryker enquired.
I shrugged. Ryker snorted loudly. “Define ‘crushing.’ If crushing means you jerk off to wondering what his spunk tastes like then yeah, I’m crushing.”
“Dude! No, I just… stop. That is far too much information.” I chuckled then flattened down my hair to start anew. Ryker walked up beside me. We were of similar heights and weights. He was much more of a dreamy young TV star though. I was hard-ass rocker goalie weirdness. “Is Joe into guys?”
“Not a clue.”
“Well, you might want to find out. Could make a difference in how things go.”
Some older woman in a dark tracksuit and a lanyard slammed into the bathroom. “Get out now, you disgusting perverts!” she snarled and pointed at the door. Ah, the cheerleader mom or whatever they were called. The Raptors didn’t have cheerleaders. We should’ve, though. Guys and girls in tight shorts and skimpy tops skipping around the barn would’ve been fun.
We slunk past her like a couple of whipped dogs, smirks well-hidden until we were clear of the bathroom door. Then we hightailed back to our dressing room, Wilson tucked under Ryker’s arm and my mind packed full of Joe thoughts that really needed thinking. But that would have to be later. Right now, I was expected on the ice and I had to be one hundred percent hockey.
Eight
Joseph
When Colorado asked me to stand by the glass, holding his tiny daughter, just for luck, I made a pointed comment about the physics of skating. But, I didn’t embellish the comment by elaborating on the implausible notion of luck. In fact, I was proud of the new me who didn’t even mention that a small baby barely exerted any pull on local objects, let alone through whatever the glass was made of. Apparently, Maddie was Colorado’s good luck charm, and he had to do a complicated fist-bump-spin-splits-bend thing in front of her to make that luck work.
As he finished the good luck thing, I got an up-close look at Colorado the professional goalie. To be honest, the only thing I could see was his head, the rest was covered in pads and uniform, a combination of red and gold, with the bird on the front which I thought was a raptor.
What breed of raptor it was I couldn’t tell, but it was definitely supposed to be some kind of bird, with its talons improbably holding a non-proportionally-sized hockey stick. It looked kind of fierce, and to be honest, so did Colorado. He was fixed and focused and as soon as he blew Maddie a kiss, he was gone, heading around his half of the ice and only moved when she woke up
