Page 41 of Two for Charging

“I do,” Luca interjected.

“Great! So, um…” Chris realized he had no idea how to proceed from here.

Luca bumped their shoulders together. “You should think about what you want. It sounded as if you have had many, ah, encounters in which you did not get what you wanted or you did not want what you got.”

“Okay. But what if I don’t know what I want?”

“Then we will have to experiment.”

“What about you?”

“Hm?”

“What about what you want? You’re doing this as a favor. I don’t want you doing anything you aren’t comfortable with. We can stick to just, like, talking about stuff if you’d rather—”

Luca looked back out at the water, shoulders shaking.

“Luca?” Chris asked. “Are you okay? Did I—”

A loud laugh escaped Luca, and then another, and then he was laughing so hard he had to clutch at the railing to stay upright.

Chris frowned. “I know I’m not on your level or anything, but if the idea of doing things with me is ridiculous—”

Luca turned to him, eyes still bright with mirth. He placed one of his elegant, long-fingered hands on Chris’s cheek. “Breezy.” He hesitated, then corrected himself. “Chris. Trust me. There is nothing we could do together that I would not want.”

The tour picked up again, and they fell silent, listening.

Afterward, the boat docked with barely enough time for them to join the others at the fancy steakhouse where Jax had reserved a room. Because it was their first dinner together of the season, the coaches came with them, so Phil attended as well. He sat with Tom, Jax, and Lindy at one end of the long table while Hayes and Vanderbilt monopolized the other end. The Scandinavians and Russians formed little groups in between. Chris sat between Mooney and Howie, with Luca across from them.

“No hockey talk tonight,” Phil announced from his end, which meant everyone defaulted to speaking to their friends and their friends alone.

They needed to do better. It would never be their year if they couldn’t get over themselves.

After the appetizers, Chris made Mooney switch places with him so he could talk to Dmitriyev about his summer. Dmitriyev rarely spent time in the States between hockey seasons. As soon as the locker rooms were cleared out, he was on a plane home to Moscow. He had a dacha somewhere in the countryside, and Chris made a point of remembering the word this year after forgetting it the three years prior. Dmitriyev and Fedorov both laughed at his pronunciation, but it got them talking. With Dmitriyev as a translator, Fedorov managed to describe his hometown a little. It turned out he came from the Russian countryside, and his parents ran a farm, which in turn, interested Howie. Soon, he and Fedorov began comparing notes about feeding chickens at the crack of dawn followed by hockey practice at seven.

“Wait,” Nieminen asked from the other side of the table. “I thought your father coached hockey?”

“Oh, yeah, my mom runs the farm,” Howie explained. “She got it from her dad. My youngest sister helps her now.”

It was a good segue to talking about everyone’s siblings. Jax would take any opportunity to brag about his baby sisters, something he had in common with Luca. It turned out Fedorov had an older brother who had tried to break into professional hockey with no success, and now he worried about what to say when he called home, hoping not to alienate him.

Most of the Swedes also had siblings either in the league or in professional sports somewhere or other, so Chris left them giving Fedorov advice. He turned to Vanderbilt.

“How’s Lily?”

He’d been dreading this part of the evening. How to bridge the gap that couldn’t be bridged? Discussing family worked with the others, but Hayes was an only child, and Vanderbilt was, well, a Vanderbilt. Chris had no clue how to mention his family without making it weird. The easiest topics of conversation were hockey—which Phil had forbidden—their wives and, in Vanderbilt’s case, his daughter.

Chris wasn’t prepared for the way Vanderbilt’s entire face lit up at the mention of Lily.

“She’s amazing,” he gushed. “They always tell you every baby is a miracle, but I didn’t think it was really true, you know?”

Hayes rolled his eyes, but he couldn’t disguise his fondness when he said, “Now you’ve got him going.”

“It’s so amazing.” Vanderbilt pulled out his phone. “At the end of last season, she had just learned to roll over, and now look at her go!” He showed Chris a video of Lily crawling across the living room floor, intent on a ball rolling away from her, before getting distracted by the coffee table and starting to pull herself up.

“Wow,” Chris said. It took babies nine months to crawl? What did people do with them until then? Did Cheryl carry Lily around from room to room all the time? Chris would go insane. “How is Cheryl holding up?”

Vanderbilt nodded slowly, his smile fading. “It’s been tough on her, you know? We have a nanny part-time and everything, but the nanny can’t breastfeed for her, and it’s hard to let go. I’ve been trying to get her out of the house without the baby sometimes so she doesn’t go nuts, but with the season starting up again…”