Page 106 of Playing His Game

“What is it?”

“Do I look like someone who reads other people’s mail?”

“Yes.” Especially if he thought the contents of said mail might be emotionally upsetting for Adam.

“Well, I didn’t, so?—”

Adam opened the flap.

For something that felt so important, the envelope had almost no weight to it. Adam closed his fingers around a few thin slips of material and pulled them out.

The first item was a piece of paper that looked like it had been ripped from an old-fashioned receipt book. One corner was smeared with grease.

Please let me explain. – M.

Adam might not have been inclined to honor that request by itself, if not for Jorts’s earlier story, but the rest of the envelope’s contents would’ve tipped the scales.

“Mads helped him find the materials,” Jorts said conversationally. “Turns out there was a sudden run on whatever that iron-on stuff is that they use and Amazon couldn’t get it in stock in time. The two of them and Janey did an arts-and-crafts day, didn’t you, baby?”

Janey babbled something Adam couldn’t decipher, though he caught what might have beencrayons. He didn’t have the processing power to get through it. He was too focused on the four little slips of fabric bearing Mo’s handwriting in Canyons burgundy.

Every postseason, the Canyons’ spouses and partners wrote messages for the players to put inside the cuffs of their gloves, for luck. Some were romantic, some sexual, others just plain silly. No one knew who’d started it. The players all claimed to think it was dumb.

But God forbid anyone suggest the tradition be retired. Such a comment would be met with a roomful of grown men clutching their rank hockey gloves to their chests.

Itwasdumb. The iron-on patches never lasted more than a game. Jorts’s wife once wrote:

I can smell this thing from the nosebleeds.

Jorts scored an OT winner that game and kept the scrap of fabric pinned to his stall for the rest of the run.

The point was… Adam had never had anyone to write messages for him. He didn’t expect Mo to remember that, let alone act on it all these months later.

The first scrap of fabric read:

You deserve more than fake.

He inhaled sharply and put the rest back in the envelope. He’d read them when he didn’t have an audience.

When he looked up again, Jorts was watching him.

Feeling judged, Adam carefully folded the envelope and put it in his pocket. “What?”

Jorts raised his hands. “Nothing! Nothing.” He put them down again. “So are you going to see him?”

Adam blinked. “Sorry?”

“Adam, you’re killing me. Are you giving him a second chance or not?”

“…Since when are you Team Mo?”

“I don’t know, Murph. You’re miserable. He’s miserableandhas to work for a living for the first time in his life. This is our last postseason as the Canyons. Maybe I just think it’d be nice if someone had something to celebrate. Beyond a winning season, obviously.” He shrugged, but the tension in his shoulders didn’t ease. “Plus, I don’t know. Guy knows his way around cars. Has my Firebird purring like a kitten. And Madslikeshim. She’s a better judge of character than me. She sat with him for like two hours while he came up with those. Maybe I misjudged him. Or maybe I judged him right and he changed.”

Maybe.

Adam rubbed his palm over his jeans. Under his hand, the paper crinkled.

“Adam!” Jorts prompted.