Page 83 of Two for Charging

“I introduced him to my tailor,” Luca bragged.

The topic occupied him and Phil for most of the walk through the arena. Phil shared Luca’s preference for classic, elegant suit design, though his definition of classic included plaid and elbow pads. They still had plenty of ammunition to mock both Jax, who sported a baby-blue pinstripe number, and Dmitriyev, who wore a corduroy suit.

“Is fashion,” Dmitriyev said when he caught them at it, and then he went back to staring at the wall with his hands up and his eyeballs moving very, very fast.

Goalies.

As one, Phil and Luca snorted, and then Phil had to leave to do coaching things.

Chris missed him in the locker room. Sure, he’d only ever played one playlist, and Chris had gotten pretty sick of the songs on it by the middle of his second year. But so far, taking turns hadn’t been better. Nieminen got to pick the music today, and he always went for metal. Some of it was epic stuff, with sweeping orchestral soundscapes and a person of indeterminate gender screaming over it in a language Chris couldn’t understand

Most of it made Chris wish his ears had lids, the way his eyes did.

He wouldn’t let the soundtrack deter him from his good mood though. Not today.

“All right everybody!” he called once the whole team was assembled in the room in various states of undress. “We may have had a few stinkers, but this is Chicago. The Firecrackers couldn’t buy a shot on goal last time if they were Jeff fucking Bezos. Let’s do this!”

Mooney clapped and whistled, and Jax got to his feet. He gave Chris a side hug.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “We’ll talk.”

Chris nodded. “On the roadie.”

With a last pat to Chris’s shoulder, Jax released him, turned to the locker room at large, and whooped to get everyone’s attention. “All right!” he called. “They might have one massive forward in Denisov, one great goalie in Petterson, and a so-so one in Henderson—”

Luca booed loudly.

“Number four!” Vanderbilt yelled from the inside of the compression shirt he was pulling on.

“But what have we got?” Jax roared.

Usually, they saved the roll call for the playoffs, but Chris appreciated doing it right now. Morale needed boosting, and no one boosted like Jax and him.

“We’ve got the Crow!” Chris shouted. The room clapped as one. “We’ve got Jax fuckin’ Grant. We’ve got Bilts. We’ve got Mooney. We’ve got Abrahamov. We’ve got Gustafsson.” With each name, the whole room clapped, and the energy pumped higher and higher over the growl of Nieminen’s angry folk metal.

“We’ve got Dmitriyev!” Chris dared look over to the other side of the locker room, where Howie sat in his new seat beside the goalie, buckling his chest protector. “We’ve got our secret weapon—Howie!” A few of the guys cheered while they clapped.

“Take Denny out!” Hayes yelled through cupped hands.

“We got someone who hates this shit so much he’s about to murder me with his eyes,” Chris yelled. “We got Luca!”

Laughter joined the clapping, and Chris called out the last couple guys, the bench warmers who rarely got double digits of ice time.

The room was pumped. Everyone was jiving. And then Tom got to his feet.

For a moment, anxiety filled Chris. What if Tom tried to address Halloween? It could either go wonderfully or terribly, and the game would sink or swim on it.

Instead, Tom said, “As usual, he forgot someone important. The heart and soul of this team. The one guy who gets us through every bad phase with a smile on his face. The one person we can all talk to. Who else have we got?”

As one, the guys chanted, “Breezy!”

Emotion caught Chris’s breath in his throat. “Guys.”

In the corner of his eye, he saw Howie scoff and roll his eyes.

He took a breath.

Howie would come around. They had plenty of time together; the season lasted until April at least. He couldn’t avoid Chris forever.