In the Zone (Portland Storm 5) (15 page)

“Thanks. I think.” I dragged a hand through my hair, debating whether I should talk to Tanya about what was on my mind. But to my knowledge, there was no one in Portland who knew Brie better than Tanya, so if I didn’t ask her, I had no clue who I could ask. Plus, Tanya was kind of curvy, too. Not as curvy as Brie, but curvier than a lot of women. Maybe she’d have some ideas about where we could go shopping. I might as well go for it. What would it hurt? “So I was wondering…”

“Yeah?” she asked when I didn’t go on. She’d taken up her seat behind the computer again and was typing away.

“Do you know where Brie should go to buy clothes?” Fuck, that came out wrong.

“You want to buy her clothes?” Tanya said, but she gave me a scowl over her shoulder, as though she was admonishing me for being a tactless ass. She wouldn’t get any argument from me about that. “I have some ideas.”

“She said she can’t find clothes that flatter her or something like that. Surely there are places that make things that’ll suit her, though. Aren’t there?” I barely knew how to find clothes that fit me, so finding something for her went way over my head. I had to have a tailor custom-fit my pants and jeans because all the skating I did had made my thighs and ass huge. Off-the-rack pants weren’t an option for most hockey players.

“There are a few places I could recommend,” Tanya said cautiously. “I don’t know if Brie is ready to accept that she’s a knockout and start dressing like the hottie she is, though, you know?”

Yeah, I knew.

“You have any other ideas how we can help her out with that? I mean, maybe if she had something that fit her properly, it’d start to click.”

She narrowed her eyes on me, as though assessing the intent behind my words.

“I want to help her see herself the way I see her. I want her to be confident.”

“Well,” Tanya said, tapping a finger on her lower lip, “you could take her to Lane Bryant and Avenue. They make good-quality clothes in bigger sizes—things that should flatter her. And you could order some things from a few places, but you’d need her measurements—which I have, since we’re getting an outfit made for a job she just booked—but I don’t think I should give them to you. She’ll have to do that herself, but you could broach the idea. She might be embarrassed if she knew I had anything to do with it, though. I don’t want to hurt her feelings. I don’t want her to think I find her frumpy or anything like that.”

“I don’t want that, either,” I assured her. “It’ll be our secret.”

She had a mischievous gleam in her eye when she said, “Then I’m on board.” She rattled off a few more places I could try to talk Brie into exploring.

“And you’ll be sure she has her measurements so we can figure out what size she needs?” I asked as I made some notes in my phone.

“Yeah. I can find a way.”

“Thanks, Tanya.” I edged my way toward the door because I really did have to get home for a pre-game nap. “This means a lot to me.”

“I’m liking you more by the moment,” Tanya called out as I left. “You may be sneaky, but you’re sneaky with good intentions.”

T
HE BIGGEST PROBLEM
with having a new defensive partner, no matter how adept he may or may not be, was communication. After you’d been working alongside a guy for a while, you learned to read what he was going to do well before he did it, just because of his positioning or the direction he moved or the way he was holding his stick. That sort of recognition—or maybe knowledge was more appropriate—only came with time, though. Repetition was key. Until you’d spent enough time together on the ice, you had to rely on your ability to talk to each other out there.

So far tonight, in our game against the Florida Panthers, Colesy and I weren’t doing so well with the whole communicating thing. He’d try to bank the puck around behind the net to come out for me, expecting me to be waiting there for it, but I’d already be halfway up the ice with the forwards with the expectation that he was going to send it up to one of them. I’d see a Panthers forward trying to pull off some dipsy doodle dangling move and head after him to ram his ass into the boards, expecting that Colesy would take up position in front of our goaltender, Hunter Fielding, but Colesy would be chasing the same asshole I was, trying to poke the puck away with his stick, and Hunter would be all alone. Those were only a couple of examples of the dozens of miscues our pairing had experienced through the first two periods tonight, and we were two lucky sons of bitches that the worst that had come of it—so far—were a few really good scoring chances in tight on our goaltender. Hunter had saved our bacon so far, but we couldn’t keep leaving him out to dry like that.

I wiped the sweat off my face and neck with a towel again, not that it would do any good, and took a big swig of Gatorade. When I looked across the locker room at him, Hunter had his eyes closed, but he couldn’t hide the rapid movement behind them, or the small, sudden tapping of his fingers as he sat in his stall. He was sweating even more than I was, no thanks to me and Colesy, but he wasn’t letting that stop him from whatever weird visualization ritual he was always doing. Before the puck dropped and between periods, if he was the guy in the net that game, there was no doubt that this was exactly how you’d find him—oblivious to the rest of us while he chased pucks in his dreams.

Bergy came in the room. He’d left his suit jacket somewhere else, and he tugged on the thin strip of his tie almost absentmindedly as he paced up near the whiteboard we were all facing. “Way to hang in there, Hunter,” he said after a long minute. Then his gaze fell on me. “Your
D
has been leaving you out to dry, but you’ve kept us in the game.”

His stare made me feel like maggots were eating holes in my eyeballs and leaving me with nothing but the empty sockets, and all I wanted to do was look away, but that was what he was waiting for. He’d pounce if I did, and I wasn’t going to give him that satisfaction. I knew good and fucking well how much Colesy and I needed to improve, and fast, and there was nothing Bergy could do or say to make it sink in any more than it already had. We just needed more time to learn each other.

He could sure as shit unnerve me with that damn stare, though.

It wasn’t just me, either. Zee and a lot of the other forwards who’d been in the league for a while—long enough to have played against him—had been on the receiving end of that stare plenty of times on the ice. Bergy had been one mean motherfucker out there, and a lot of it came down to the way he would stare at you before the puck would drop.

Well, it seemed he was finding ways to make use of that same skill set in a new way.

I kept my eyes on his, not blinking.

“So here’s what I want the
D
to do in the third period: I want you boys to fucking talk to each other, and to Hunter, and to your forwards. I want you talking the whole time you’re out on the ice. And I’d fucking better hear you doing it from the bench, loud and clear enough that I know what you’re planning on doing. Got it?”

Kids that are first learning to play hockey always balk at the idea of talking to each other on the ice. They think it defeats the purpose because then the other team will know what you’re planning to do. What kids don’t realize, though, is that the other team is talking to each other, too, and so it all balances out.

That was just one of those old habits that most players tended to forget about every now and then, though—a lesson we needed to relearn.

All the guys in the room made grunting noises of acknowledgment, including me. If he wanted me to talk, I could damn well talk. Before long, the boys might start calling me Chatty Cathy instead of Burnzie, if that was what he wanted.

Bergy kept staring at me until I gave him a nod.

“Right,” he said. “That’s settled, then. So we’ve got them right where we want them, as long as we can stay ahead by at least a goal. I’m not happy with a one-goal lead, though, so Zee…” He moved over to the whiteboard as he spoke and picked up a dry-erase marker to illustrate his points as he outlined what he wanted the forwards to do.

All season long, Bergy had shown himself as a coach that was willing to make mid-game adjustments based on hunches, stats, or whatever the hell he noticed happening out on the ice, and tonight would be no different.

I made note of the tweaks he wanted the
D
to make on our breakouts based on how the Panthers’ forwards were circling like vultures, waiting to pounce on a mistake. I made sure I understood what he wanted from our forwards, too, because that would affect everything I did on the ice. I even listened in when he told Hunter not to leave his crease to gather in the puck unless everyone else on the ice was on the opposite end of the rink. All of those things were going to play into how I went about doing my job the rest of the night.

But none of it was as important as his demand for us to talk to each other out there, at least more than we had been so far.

When we headed back out to the tunnel for the third period, Bergy was waiting by the locker room door. He slapped me on the back. “You especially, Burnzie. I want to hear every fucking word out there.”

I knew why, too. I was an assistant captain. I had to set the tone for the rest of the boys.

Colesy and I headed out to center ice along with our third line, since Florida had sent out their skill guys. The pair of us, plus Soupy, Henrik “Hank” Markusson, and a twenty-year-old Russian rookie named Vladimir Berezin, had been matched up against these clowns the whole night to shut them down. So far, we’d kept them off the score-sheet. I had no intention of letting that change, even if Colesy and I were still getting to know each other’s tendencies.

I honestly thought Bergy was asking a lot of Vladdie, putting a kid who only knew about five words of English out on his top checking line, but so far so good. Granted, he wasn’t just some kid. The guy was as big as Cam “Jonny” Johnson—who was a big motherfucker in his own right—and still growing, for fuck’s sake, and had all sorts of skill. He’d be a top-line player in a couple of years, but he was already skating like a bull in a china shop out there. If you didn’t get out of his way, he’d bowl you over or prance around you, and the next thing you knew he was right up in your goaltender’s grill. He hadn’t figured out how to elevate his shot yet, though. But once he had that down? Everyone had better watch the fuck out, because the kid was coming.

When everyone was in position, the official dropped the puck. Hank drew it back straight to me, hitting me square on the tape, and the game was back on.

I started up ice with it, but the Panthers’ forwards were buzzing. They needed to get back into the game, and they were willing to take risks to do so. We didn’t need to take risks. All we had to do was stay calm and collected, keep doing what we’d been doing—only with more talking.

Jonathan Huberdeau, one of their hotshot young wings, was all over me. Every time I’d try to find a lane, his stick would be there. I tried to force a pass over to Colesy, but Huberdeau was ready for it and Colesy wasn’t, and the next thing I knew I had to turn on my jets to get the damn puck back.

I managed to poke-check it away from him before he got a shot off, but that forced our entire team to move back into our zone to defend. Now we had to break out again.

“Burnzie!” Bergy shouted. He was standing up on the bench, both hands cupped around his mouth. “I can’t fucking hear you.”

Because I hadn’t fucking said anything. Damn it.

“All right,” I shouted to the boys, loud enough that I knew they’d be able to hear me halfway up the lower bowl in the arena. “Let’s do this.” The Panthers were forechecking like crazy, trying to get the puck away from me, and it was all I could do to play keep-away.

No matter how hard my guys tried to create a seam for me to slip the puck through, though, there wasn’t one to be found.

“Wheels!” Colesy shouted at me, and I knew exactly what he wanted me to do. There wasn’t going to be a pretty passing play to get the puck to the other end of the zone. He wanted me to skate the thing out of danger, keeping it safely on my stick.

I didn’t see any other option at the moment. Hell, I was half out of breath from trying to skirt around Huberdeau and company.

Soupy and Hank headed up ice. Vladdie didn’t know what
wheels
meant yet, but he caught on pretty quick when he saw his linemates heading the other direction and me coming toward him with the puck. He made his way out toward center ice, too, accidentally-on-purpose bumping into one of the Panthers’ forwards on his way. The kid needed to be careful about shit like that or he would get called for interference. He got away with it this time, though.

Even though Huberdeau was stuck to me like glue, I managed to keep the puck on my stick until I got across center ice. Vladdie looked anxious to get it, so I shouted his name so he’d know it was coming and sent it his way. He bulldozed into the zone as soon as it hit his tape, and I took up my position by the blue line.

When I came off the ice at the end of my shift, I glanced at Bergy. All I got was a wink in return. At least a wink was better than a glare.