Crazy Thing Called Love (2 page)

“Gary and Ben are coming over,” he said quickly, acting like she was a fool for imagining the worst. A fool for doubting him.

Well, she wasn’t going to be his fool anymore.

Speechless, she shoved him as hard as she could. Punched him. And then again. Both hands. Wanting to
pull his heart out through his chest. Wanting to take out his eyes.

He grabbed her hands, his brown eyes slicing through her skin to the muscle and sinew of her.

Look at what you’ve become
, she thought, horrified by her violence.

“You said you were leaving.” There was an apology in his voice but there was pride there, too. He was the star athlete who didn’t have to explain his shit to anyone. Not even his wife.

“And I am, asshole,” she snapped. “Enjoy your whore.”

“Hey!” the woman cried, but Maddy ignored her, stomping down the hallway. She was sweating under her winter coat and shock and nerves made her sick to her stomach. Her hands shook as she pressed them to her lips.

What was she going to do? Where would she go? She had nothing outside of what Billy had bought for her. She had no money of her own. No car. No home.

How did I get here?

A soundless sob broke out of her throat and she held her fingers to her mouth to push the despair back.

Think, Maddy. Think
.

Billy grabbed her elbow by the elevator and she jerked herself sideways out of his grasp. Barefoot and shirtless, in his black athletic shorts, he was the tide just before a storm—barely contained.

“Don’t touch me!” she cried. “You never get to touch me again.”

“Come on, Maddy. You know these things are nothing.”

“Do you really believe that?” she asked, searching his face for the boy she’d known because this Billy was a stranger to her right now. “Or are you just hoping I’ll believe that?”

“You’re overreacting!”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m a child.”

“Come on, forget about that.” He threw his arms out, as if he were a magician pulling a screen between them, making the woman in the pink dress and his final betrayal disappear. “You came here to make this work. So let’s do it. We’ll make it work. You … you wanted to go see a counselor. We can do that.”

He was months too late. And suddenly her anger deflated, leaving her wounded and bleeding. And tired. So damn tired she couldn’t fight anymore. “There’s no fixing this, Billy.”

“Don’t say that. We—”

“No. No, we’re broken. All the way.”

“We made promises!”

“Promises?” She jabbed her finger down the hallway. “She wasn’t in any promise I made.”

“You know nothing happened.”

“I don’t know that, Billy. And I feel like a fool taking your word for it!”

“You’re not a fool.” He tried to touch her and she smacked away his hand. “You’re my family, Maddy.”

“And what are you to me?”

He flinched at her words, but she couldn’t stop them. Couldn’t help hurting him. This is what they’d come to. Every conversation was a fight, a chance to hurt the other. “I can’t keep giving you everything you need and get nothing in return. Nothing.”

It was unfair, she knew, it’s not like anyone had shown him how to be a family. Without her, he’d probably slide back into the dark hole his sisters lived in.

Not your problem anymore
.

But it was still hard. They would eat him alive, his sisters.

“Once the season’s over—”

“How many times have I heard that? No, Billy.
You … you just absorb me. You need me and you suck me in until there’s nothing left for me. You always have. I don’t believe you anymore. I have no more faith in us. I have nothing.”

“Yeah?” He was getting angry, his default position, all his doors closing. They’d start yelling just like his parents had. It was so ugly, so not the way she’d thought their life would be.

I will never be in this place again
, she promised herself as Billy yelled, “That new house in Ben Avon Heights? The clothes? The car? That’s nothing?”

“I don’t want things. I don’t want money. Why can’t you see that? I want you and I’ve lost you. I’ve lost me. I can’t do this anymore,” she whispered, dry-eyed and hollow. “This sport is turning you into someone I don’t know.”

“Bullshit—”

“No. It’s not. Just because you don’t agree doesn’t mean it’s bullshit. And being married to you is turning me into someone I don’t know. I can’t do it anymore, Billy. I just can’t.”

Maybe because she wasn’t screaming, wasn’t crying and trying to hurt him, he finally got the message.

His face, so handsome, so very dear to her—despite the scar, or maybe because of it—crumpled.

“Please,” he whispered. He
begged
. If her heart weren’t already cracked, she might actually have felt something.

But she looked at the boy she’d loved since she was thirteen and felt nothing.

There was a God—the proof was that when she pushed the button the elevator doors opened immediately, and she stepped in.

Don’t look
, she told herself, staring at the white salt stains on her boots. But as the elevator door started to
close, she looked up and saw her husband, all alone. Nearly naked. Tears in his eyes.

But he wasn’t fighting. And she knew, right then, that it was over.

Really over.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

And the doors closed between them.

Fourteen years later

Billy Wilkins sat
on the bench, bone dry. He might as well have been wearing slippers. A freaking robe. All he could do was sit there and watch as the second-rate team he’d been traded to blew their shot at the play-offs.

If the coaches weren’t going to play him, all of it was totally useless—the skates, the pads, the stick in his hand—worthless. Just like him.

“Pull Leserd!” he shouted over the screaming in the Bendor Arena. “He’s done. That’s the fourth goal he’s let in in five minutes.”

But Coach Hornsby wasn’t listening. He never listened to what Billy yelled during the games. Hornsby wouldn’t even look at him, much less reply.

But that was Coach Hornsby. Stubborn, righteous, and probably deaf.

Billy waved off the water bottle one of the trainers offered him. No need to hydrate. He hadn’t even broken a sweat tonight.

And what was worse, worse than the dry pads, the clear visor, the body he’d recuperated back into prime shape only to have it sit unused on the bench, was that he didn’t care. He didn’t care that the coach didn’t listen to him. Didn’t care that the kid in the net was totally
overwhelmed and the Mavericks’ rally to get into the play-offs was going to die a pitiful death right here. Right now.

“If you stopped being an asshole, he might listen to you,” said Jan Fforde, their injured starting goalie, his consonants blunted by his Swedish accent.

“Not much chance of that.” Whether Billy was talking about being an asshole or their coach listening to him, he wasn’t sure. Being an asshole was his way of life: it was why hockey teams had been paying his way for over sixteen years. The sport needed assholes and Billy was the best. Used to be anyway.

Until he landed in Dallas, with a coach who preached respect and integrity.

Someone should tell Hornsby that respect and integrity didn’t win games. Didn’t turn momentum. A good fight did that. Let Billy get out there and drop gloves with that big Renegade center, Churov, and then the game would turn around. The crowd that was booing them would cheer.

The Renegades, who were beating the Mavericks on their own ice, would have blood on their faces and they’d know their opponents had gone down swinging.

The Mavericks’ first line, O’Neill, Blake, and Grotosky, surged back into Renegade ice, skating their hearts out. Blake wound up and hammered a slap shot that ricocheted off the post. A mob in front of the goal scrambled for the puck and everyone on the bench stood up screaming. A goal right now would tie the game and they’d have a shot in overtime.

“Come on!” Billy whispered, willing his fight into those young guys out there with the fast legs and the strong arms and barely managed talent. “Come—”

The buzzer silenced the crowd for a moment and then the few Boston Renegades fans in the arena roared.

The Mavericks were out.

Disheartened, silent, the team skated back toward the bench, knocking fists, defeat riding their young shoulders. This team had fought longer and harder than anyone had expected, keeping the play-off dream alive for a community that barely cared. Despite losing tonight, they’d fought like demons.

Hornsby was silent and Billy could think of a thousand better coaches. His grandma for one. And she was dead.

“Good effort, guys,” Billy said, slapping shoulders. His teammates grunted, unsmiling.

Blake, their captain, finally led the team onto center ice to shake hands. Billy stood at the end, the only guy besides Fforde who hadn’t seen ice time. Who hadn’t felt the sweat and blood and heaving lungs of play. For a second the grief nearly took out his knees. It was a sucker punch that his career was going to end this way.

As he shook hands with the Renegades, who were about to go into the first round of the play-offs and get slaughtered by the defending champions, not a single one of them looked him in the face. It was salt in the wound.

Billy Wilkins, second-round draft pick sixteen years ago, was a non-fucking-issue.

Might as well be dead.

Bullshit
, he thought, and his temper roared through him in a brush fire, burning lesser emotions into dust. Everything about this was bullshit.

Churov, the freakish Russian giant, was the last guy in line. As he skated past, barely touching Billy’s outstretched hand, Billy—a good foot shorter and thirty pounds lighter, but blessed with a temper that leveled every playing field—coldcocked him. Snapped the big man’s head back so hard Billy could see his third-world dental work.

For a moment, Churov wobbled in his skates, and
Billy braced himself to be crushed, but then the big man went down on the ice with a thud.

The arena roared.

Victory was sweet but short-lived. Grisolm, the hardworking Renegade captain, landed a right hook across Billy’s face. Billy swung back, feeling the satisfying pop of nose cartilage under his fist. Someone wrapped him up, using his kidney as a punching bag. But out of the corner of his eye he saw that the Mavericks were skating back from the dressing rooms, dropping gloves and sticks, throwing off helmets, all their defeat melting into raw bloodlust.

Billy smiled before someone punched the back of his head and bells started to ring in his skull.

What he’d done to Churov was dirty. A cheap shot after the game was over, just the sort of thing that made the sports journalists go crazy. No doubt Billy would get suspended. That pussy Hornsby would probably send him to counseling or some shit.

But he didn’t care about what was going to happen when this fight was over. Because for guys like Billy Wilkins, there would always be another fight.

An hour later, after the mob scene with the press in the locker room, he sat in front of Hornsby’s desk, showered and changed, with Kleenex shoved up his nose to stop the blood from dripping on the collar of his shirt.

Billy arranged the ice packs on his knuckles while the coach paced the hardwood floor behind him.

Coming up in the rep leagues, Junior A’s, and then the minors, half of Billy’s coaches had been not just old-school hockey, but old-school
Eastern Bloc
hockey. Giant men with forests of hair in their ears, who kept bottles of vodka in their desks and would have bought
Billy a steak dinner after the fight he’d just caused. And a hooker.

His first coach in the NHL, Georges St. Bleu, a French-Canadian force of nature, would have told the press that he was embarrassed and that steps would be taken to reprimand Billy. But behind the locker room door, he would have shaken Billy’s hand, applauded him for knowing how to return pride to his defeated team.

But over the last fifteen years the league had changed. The last five especially. Concussions had changed the game. All this talk of taking the fighting out of the sport? These were not friendly times for guys like Billy.

Outside the big window to his left he could see the departing crowd. The few hundred stalwart hockey fans left in Dallas stood on the sidewalk, hailing cabs, storing away their play-off excitement until next year.

Suckers
, he thought. This team wouldn’t get any closer to the cup next year, or the year after. Front office called it “rebuilding.” Billy called it “being a shitty team.”

“What were you thinking?” Hornsby asked. Billy would have rolled his eyes if they didn’t hurt so bad. “You’re suspended. You know that, right? You’ll be out at least the first four games of next season. Maybe more. Barry wants to trade you.”

“How is that any different from the end of this season?” Billy asked past his fat, cracked lip. Barry, the GM, had wanted to trade him practically since the moment he’d arrived. Billy had no idea why the hell they had brought him here in the first place.

Hornsby stopped pacing and the silence changed, got all loaded, like Billy had fallen into Hornsby’s trap. Billy pressed one of his ice packs up to his lip, wishing he’d kept his mouth shut.