Delayed Penalty (8 page)

To prove my point, I ended up dropping gloves with one of their left wingmen, Alex Lefler, which couldn't have been a worse match up, but I had to make a point.

I ended up breaking his cheekbone and jaw. I never wanted to hurt him like that, but I wasn't going to let them treat Leo that way either. They took liberties with our best players, and they were held accountable. That was just the type of guy I was.

Leo passed me the puck as soon as I got on the ice after the major for fighting. "Work 'em low!" Remy shouted to my right.

From center ice, I read the goalie. You had to get him to move, and once he got down, you needed to get the puck up, and I could do that when needed, over and over again. If they weren't sliding in or we needed to get creative, I did that. Keading was all over me, so I passed to Leo and then Remy, and I was freed up in position. Moving the puck, I swept around the back of the net, flipped it up, and stuffed in the top side to tie the game.

We were up by one, leading into the third period, when shit went south. It was a good, fast game that night, and it seemed the linesmen decided they would stop looking. That was when they started with the shitty calls. I got called for roughing when I shoved their center for mouthing off. Then, when he kept it up, I nailed him against the boards a little rougher than necessary, and he was out revenge after that.

Remy and I both tried to convince the coach to let us return the gestures, but he knew where they were going with it. The answer was always a distinct, "No! Play the fucking game. They push, you push right back. Defend that blue line, boys!"

But he was playing me, too. He used me to draw a penalty and create a power play. He would skate up to me, chirp, and start shit. I'd drop my gloves, and he'd cover up like a fucking pussy. I'd be slapped with a penalty because he wasn't allowed to fight me.

So I'd sit in the box while they worked up the ice.

I had just come onto the ice, watching Remy set up the play off the blue line, when Keading came out of nowhere and slammed me so hard into the boards the glass shattered. He wasn't gonna fight me, but fuck if he wasn't going to get me when I wasn't looking

A little dazed, I sat on the bench wondering what day it was.

"Fuck, Mase, did you let him come in your mouth, too? Because he fucked you," Leo said, shaking his head as we entered the locker room after losing to the Predators by one point.

Leo was always such a nasty fucker, but I didn't care. I took such a rock on that play, I saw double the next day.

We ended up winning against Nashville again.

The thrill of the victory brought excitement with it, and I was finally feeling like I could breathe and not think of Ami.

Leaving with women was always easy when you were underage and in a bar full of the Chicago Blackhawks. All I had to do was make conversation, smile, and they were leaving with me. I didn't take many back to my place. It was never good if they found out where you lived.

Back at her place, my mind was still on the game, the excitement of the win, and the girl unzipping my pants. We were naked pretty quick, still up against her door, when she unwrapped her legs, stood, and led me to her room.

Hovering over the girl, ready for action, that was when the feeling of dread, anxiety, hopelessness, and anger came back. My vision went gray around the edges. It was everything I could do not to gasp at the memory of my bloody clothes on the floor and then her body in the snow…fuck.

This isn't happening. When did I turn into this guy?

I closed my eyes just to try and breathe, but it was like there was no air in the room. I started hyperventilating because I was thinking of Ami and what she went through. My mind went straight to what Ami must have seen, felt, and heard while she was brutally attacked. Could she see him hovering over her like this? I stared at the girl underneath me, her blonde flowing hair wrapped around my hand, and I thought it could have been like that for Ami. Fuck.

With quick, short breaths, I pulled away from the girl, but my heart wouldn't calm down. "I'm sorry. I can't."

I felt like shit. I felt like an asshole. I wanted to shake myself and say, "Get yourself together," but I couldn't.

She looked up at me with tears in her eyes. She wanted this. Being with me like this was probably something she would remember long after I forgot her name. I knew that; I was used to that.

But now things had changed.

"It's not you, honey," I said, trying to convey that it wasn't her at all. This was my own shit. I swallowed, my hands shaking as another image plagued me, the one of her when I left the hospital the other night. I shook my head and cleared my throat. "I need to get out of here."

Sitting back on my heels, I moved away, reaching for my clothes. When I got to the door, I hesitated. I didn't want this girl thinking it was something she did. Running my hands through my hair, I gave her a smile and wrote my number on a piece of mail she had on the counter. "Maybe some other time."

As soon as I got outside, I felt physically ill again, and the girl I left on the bed hadn't helped. Any other time I knew she would have been exactly what I needed after the win, and maybe even the next morning. But she reminded me too much of Ami. She had blonde hair and a tiny body, and I lost it. I had to leave.

My problem was, I kept thinking about what she went through, what she felt, over and over again. Would she would remember? She was in my zone whether I wanted to admit it or not.

Cherry picking – When a team's player stays near their opponent's defensive zone waiting for an outlet to pass in order to receive a breakaway.

Game 46 –Anaheim Ducks

Sunday, January 10, 2010

(Home Game)

I looked up at Leo, confused by his reaction. "What?"

He stood, setting his stick aside, and then pointed at me. "She's in your zone, and now you're cherry picking," he said. "That's why you're upset. You fell for her, and she's not even awake yet."

He grabbed his stick and headed to the door with Remy, not even bothering to wait for my answer.

Leo saw me this past month. He knew by the way I was reacting at the hospital on Christmas that there was something keeping me there. I didn't deny it either. I had kind of fallen for a girl in a coma, as weird as that sounded.

It had been a few weeks since I found Ami in the alley. And every day that I could, I was with her, sitting in her hospital room, just being with her. It made me feel like I was doing something right. I was waiting for her to wake up.

She turned eighteen two days ago and didn't even get to celebrate. All her surgeries had been completed, and everything the doctors could do for her had been done. We were just waiting.

It wasn't easy on me, and I tried not to return to that hospital, but every time I did. Hockey players didn't live their lives by the calendar year. For hockey players, our lives were dictated by a schedule, a very long schedule from October to March, and longer if you were lucky. Our lives consisted of fragments and were turned upside down nine months of the year. Awake half the night, sleeping half the day, the morning no different that the afternoon or evening, it was life on the road. Full of high energy, it wasn't a life everyone could lead. It was exhausting, to say the least.

And then add being attached to a girl you never met before. Talk about mental stupidity.

The police had no leads on her case and were just about to close it. The only lead they had with Blake was quickly put to rest when he got a good fucking lawyer. I was sure he took a mortgage out on his dance studio to pay for it. The bottom line was his DNA wasn't a match, and he had an alibi that placed him at home after they went to dinner. It didn't matter if he had an alibi to me. Something about our conversation, and the way his dark, shifty eyes assessed me that day in the parking lot, told me he knew a critical detail about that night that he wasn't sharing. That could have just been my mind trying to hold someone accountable.

The rape kit was positive, and the police had the information they needed should the right lead come along, but they basically had nothing. None of the witnesses panned out.

I must have called that fucking hospital twenty times that day, checking for updates, once I knew they were taking her off the medication that was keeping her in the induced coma. I wanted so badly to be there when she woke up, but what the fuck would I say? She didn't know me. I would be lucky if she wanted anything to do with me.

Would she want to know me?

Every passing day, each minute that came and went and she didn't wake up, added to the churning in my stomach. I worried about her. I found myself sitting there talking about nothing, telling her about me and my life, and then I'd just sleep in a chair beside her bed. I couldn't leave.

Nineteen days after I saved her, I got the call that I had been waiting on. The morning of game forty-six, Ami woke up.

"She's awake," were the words I'd been waiting on since I found her, and then I wanted to hear, "He's been caught." I was smart enough to understand the criminal justice system and knew that I would be hearing one before the other.

I wasn't sure what would feel better, but when I heard that she was awake, the relief that came with it was greater than I expected.

Wendy called around four in the morning when I was getting ready to head to our morning skate. I was fucking tired from the game last night against St. Louis, but when my phone rang and I saw it was the hospital, I answered.

"Are you serious?" I asked, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

"Yeah, she came out of it last night, but we wanted to give her some time. Then when she started to come around she wanted to know how she got to the hospital."

"And you said?" I pressed for more information as I walked toward my bathroom.

"I said Superman brought her in."

I laughed, throwing my towel on the tile floor in my bathroom. My eyes caught the city below Trump Towers, quiet and still asleep. My lips curved, knowing the one person I wanted to wake up was finally awake.

"Seriously, what did you say?"

"I told her a man brought her in and then she asked to meet him," Wendy said, amusement in her voice. I wasn't sure if she was fucking with me.

"Oh."

"What's with you?"

"Nothing." I tried to play it off, but I was freaking out a little, and Wendy didn't miss a beat.

"Well, are you going to come see her or what? She's awake now."

I really wanted to ask Wendy what color Ami's eyes were and if she had said anything else, but I didn't. "Oh, uh yeah, we play Anaheim tonight. I'll come by after the game."

"Okay, I'll let her know. Good luck tonight."

"Thanks." I hung up before I said anything else that would give me away. I was kind of glad there was a game tonight because it'd give me more time to think of what to say to her.

All through the morning skate, and after what Leo had said to me, I couldn't stop thinking about Ami. I should have been preparing for the game and thinking of nothing but the Anaheim Ducks and how we could beat them. We hadn't seen them since game twenty four and they had beaten us 0-3. That wasn't happening again if I could help it.

During practice, Leo and Remy were talking about their night while slapping pucks at Cage, and before he could recover, they'd slap another one at him.

Skating near them, I leaned on my stick, watching, waiting for Cage to react to them. He'd let them do this as sort of a warm up, but right when they weren't expecting it, he would slap one back at them.

"You know that feeling when you're on acid and the world stops just to fuck with you? That's what it was like."

Remy gave Leo a concerned look and then slapped another shot toward the net. "Never did acid," he said in his rough voice this early in the morning. "I really worry that with the hard hits you've taken, and your drug use as a kid, you might not have any brain cells left."

Leo yawned. "I've got some left." He took cover behind me when Cage took one off the face mask. He knew what was coming.

Sure enough, Cage took a puck and fired it back at us, nailing Remy in the back of the head.

Leo skated over to me after warm-ups and asked if she was awake. He knew they'd taken her off the medicine.

I said yes, and he knew then I'd be no help in that game.

As it turned out, I was more than on my game that night with two goals, three assists, and ten minutes in the penalty box.