Chapter 9
Alex had been expecting the knock on the door, already had the coffee on and a call in to Loki that management had shot their load and traded in Vasiliev. Thankfully, the Dragons had only given up two prospects and a third-round pick in exchange. That wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Still, a team couldn’t grow if the guys coming up from the draft and the minors were taken away from the team. There was an actual freaking point to keeping draft picks, getting in the raw talent to expand the pool of skaters that the team could develop.
Loki wasn’t surprised at what had happened, any more than Alex was.
“At least we didn’t lose anyone who can make an immediate difference,” Loki summarized. “And our wing does need some shoring up.”
“Don’t think for one minute I don’t know that,” Alex said on a sigh.
“What did Gooly say?”
“He’s on his way over.”
“You need me there?”
Loki was the other alternate captain alongside Gooly. For all of Loki’s pranks and idiot jokes, he was a solid team man and a leader in the room. As was Gooly—minus the pranks and jokes, of course, and with less English.
Alex considered the offer. Did he want Loki there, so the three of them could get their heads around what had happened? Would that freak Gooly out, like there was something way too serious going on?
“No, give me this, and we’ll catch up after.”
“You know where I am,” Loki murmured. “Good luck with the…uhm, Russian situation.”
Alex opened the door, and Gooly was standing there looking like the wind had been taken from his sails. The Russian situation had landed on Alex’s doorstep, and he could see it going sideways quick. Gooly didn’t look angry, or any of the other versions of furious and pissed that Alex had been expecting.
“I want to be traded,” Gooly announced, the icy-cold December wind blustering around him. Then he turned to leave.
Alex opened the door wider and stepped to one side. “Get in here.”
Gooly stopped, but he didn’t turn to face Alex.
“Don’t make me drag you in,” Alex warned.
Gooly huffed. “Like see you try.” His voice was thick with his accent, and if Alex didn’t know better, it sounded like Gooly was going to cry. He’d never seen Nikita Gulin cry before.
“C’mon, Gooly, it’s colder than a witch’s tit out there.”
Gooly turned to face Alex, and he looked utterly broken. He glanced back at his Jeep, which was parked at a crazy angle in the wide driveway; seemed caught in indecision.
“Seriously, Gooly, get your ass in here.”
Finally, his friend and teammate was inside, and Alex shut the door on the frosty, snowy season.
“Vodka,” Gooly said.
“I have coffee,” Alex countered. He went straight to the kitchen and poured two large mugs of caffeine. The last thing this situation needed, whatever it was between his friend and Vasiliev, was alcohol. He added the cream and sugar that Gooly loved, and realized with tightness in his chest how well he knew Nikita Gulin; better than half the team. The fiery center had been brought in on the expansion draft to hold the second line steady behind Alex’s line, and they’d been together all that time. From the first shaky moment the newly created Dragons had stepped onto the ice at Sweetings Arena in a home game against the Sabres, it had always been him and Gooly, fist-bumping at successes and hugging out failures.
“Nikita…” Alex began as Gooly sat on the kitchen stool and cradled his hot coffee. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry, I didn’t know what they were planning, I honestly thought we were done with trades until February.”
Gooly muttered something in Russian and sipped his coffee, interspersing each sip with a growl or a grimace, or hell knew what curses.
“Are you serious about asking to be traded?” Alex asked, even though his chest was tight with the emotion of it all. The concept of Gooly leaving the team was one he’d never thought he’d have to consider. A few years older than Alex, he was an unrestricted free agent in a couple of seasons, and they’d always said, mostly when drunk and inhibitions were low, that they’d be Dragons forever, together. Alex realized he’d unconsciously rested a hand against the dragon tattooed right over his heart. Gooly had the same tattoo, but it spread over his entire back, the wings of the stylized black-and-red creature curling up and over his shoulders.
Alex had always thought there was more to the size and placement of the tattoo than Gooly had ever let on; Ryan’s was on his biceps, as was Loki’s.
“On chertovski ublyudok,” Gooly murmured. “Alexey Vasiliev, fucking bastard.”
Alex waited for more, but Gooly subsided into silence.
“You want to talk about it, Nikita?” Somehow, the man sitting opposite him wasn’t Gooly, the man who centered one of the best second lines in the entire NHL. No, he was Nikita, a friend with a wound in him that Alex didn’t understand. “Nikita?” he asked again.
“We both Moscow,” Gooly began. Alex was used to the dropped words, particularly when his teammate was emotional or in a stressful situation, but he was finding it hard to make out the words in the rolling vowels.
Alex nodded. “You’re both from Moscow, I know.” He’d just never assumed Gooly knew Vasiliev, because Moscow was one big city. Then again, professional hockey made the world small, narrowed down to constant practice and games. Maybe they would have known each other through that specific medium at least.
“My sister, Kristina…” He pronounced her name Kreesteena, rolling the vowels, and love dripped from each syllable.
“I didn’t know you had a sister.” Not as a friend, or as someone who’d seen Gooly’s file.
“Simba.” He raised his eyes from where he’d been staring at his coffee, and they were bright with emotion. “She dies.”
“She’s dead? I’m so sorry, Nikita.”
“He kill.” His grasp of English was gone.
“What?” Alex couldn’t help the less than eloquent answer. Taking in Gooly’s broken expression, and adding in the shock of the word “kill”, and he was startled.
Gooly huffed for a moment, obviously searching for words, and then in a smooth movement he pulled out his iPhone and thumbed to Google, typing something in Russian. Then, with the tip of his tongue poking out, he concentrated on scrolling through searches. Finally, he handed over the cell, but all Alex could see was a jumble of Cyrillic; he looked at it blankly, then handed it back to Gooly, who tutted and typed in something else before passing it back.
In the center of the screen was a picture of a car, completely caved in on one side, and a headline: Teenage Tragedy. Or at least that was what it looked like, but Google Translate had done some weird things to the page.
There had been an accident; a young girl aged fifteen dead at the scene, three older boys injured, icy conditions, and some other sentences that didn’t make much sense. The one thing that stood out was the name Vasiliev.
“Told them, too snow,” Gooly said, and his large frame seemed smaller somehow on the stool. “They still going,” he added.
“Why doesn’t the team know this? Why don’t I know this?”
Gooly shook his head, but words seemed to evade him. So Alex realized he needed to make sense of it himself. Either that or get a translator there, but that would mean exposing the story to more people, and there had to be a reason Gooly hadn’t shared it before.
“Okay,” Alex began. “This isn’t public knowledge because…he was a kid. It’s Russia…it was hidden, or he wasn’t at fault. Was he driving the car? Maybe one of the other boys was? Did he have money to pay off the situation?” Alex considered all the plot lines he’d seen on TV. “Is Vasiliev Russian Mafia?”
Gooly snorted at that last part but didn’t confirm or deny.
“Okay, so, this explains why you beat on him every time we play against him? Am I close? Why have you kept this secret?”
Alex had seen this with the Russians he’d played with before; even though they were playing on North American teams, they were almost a subset, more so than the Swedes, or Norwegians, or the multitude of other nationalities in the league. A lot of the Russian skaters came to the US with little or no English, not like the Europeans. Gooly had never been one to try super hard to learn English. Didn’t matter, though—he spoke eloquently through his hockey.
“Ya lyubil svoyu sestru, Simba,” Gooly said sadly. “Love sister.”
“I’m so sorry,” Alex repeated. He put on his captain hat. “Okay. What do you want me to do, Nikita? You’re my friend, and I’d do anything for you. Okay?”
Gooly nodded. “I know.”
“You want me to bring this to the attention of the coach, or management? You want me to send the whole fucking story to Deadspin?”
Gooly looked at him steadily, then shook his head. “Pust’ ona spat’ spokoyno—let her sleep quietly.”
“Nikita…”
“I’m trade.”
Alex couldn’t do that. He couldn’t give his friend this one thing. He had to think that Gooly would regret walking away from the Dragons. So how did he play it?
“Okay,” he said, and raised his hands in defense. “Please, for me, stay until January? Give it until the new year, until after your party.” He thought on his feet. “If you can’t… If it’s impossible, then I’ll go to management, the coach, I’ll tell them you go, I go. They won’t have any choice but to get rid of Vasiliev. You won’t be the one who gets traded, okay?”
He knew how reckless that sounded—it would never fly—but sitting there with one of his best friends, all he wanted to do was make things right.
At that, Gooly looked like he was going to cry, and Alex had never seen the big guy look quite so broken, not even when they’d missed out on the playoffs by two points.
“You want to skate?” Alex asked. That was the answer to everything for him and Gooly—they would skate until their muscles shook and they couldn’t breathe, and that was how they dealt with stress.
Gooly pushed himself away from the counter, stood, and stalked to the door. “No,” he said, and let himself out.
For the longest time, Alex stared at the closed front door and wondered what the hell to do, where to start. The captain was the keeper of everyone’s secrets and even with those inside him he had to make the team work. The Dragons were 5-4-1 in their last ten games; five wins, four losses, and one overtime win. The balance was skewed, and he needed to fix that by concentrating solely on hockey.
“I need to get out of this fucking house,” he said to the empty space around him. He really needed to get a Christmas tree for his place. He pulled on a jacket; and he had the whole day, and maybe that afternoon he’d get over to the practice rink and attempt to skate through his thoughts. In particular, the overwhelming need to see Jo again.
He fired a quick text to her. She was never too far from his thoughts, even when he was carrying the weight of the team. He couldn’t shake the need he had to see her, touch her, talk to her, and he’d never felt that way before.
Was he getting stupid in his old age? Maybe that was what every twenty-nine-year-old went through with thirty looming on the horizon. And when was the last time a girl had pushed aside the hockey part of him? He squinted at his cell, waiting for an answer to his text. Never; he’d never let a woman nudge him off course. Hockey. Team. Stanley Cup. The best.
Yesterday at Fly’s place had been an eye-opening, awe-inspiring experience. Jo was refreshingly different, the kind of girl that Alex could be friends with, a person who wanted nothing from him, and the kind of woman he could spend hours in bed with. He just knew it.
Being her friend was the furthest thing from his mind, though. He’d had a hard time getting to sleep last night, had kept reaching for his cell to call her, excited to talk to her. He’d been hard at the thought of her, remembering the taste of her, and the kisses.
He hadn’t actually contacted her, though. When they’d said goodbye yesterday, as he’d dropped her at her place, she’d kissed him, but she hadn’t asked him in or talked more about the ice skating.
He was at a bit of a loss about that, used to women asking him when they would see him next. Since he’d been fifteen, sex had been easy—he hadn’t even had to try—but she was so different, and intriguing and sexy, and he seriously felt like a kid chasing his first ever girlfriend.
Maybe he should get some advice.
He opened a message to Ryan. The D-man was so freaking happy, and he’d managed somehow to have something real. He even typed in a message. I have this girl I like, it began.
“What am I? Fifteen again?”
I am a grown man who is perfectly capable of having a relationship with a woman, I can do this. So he deleted everything he’d written to Ryan and instead thumbed to Jo’s number.
His text—Morning, sexy, you want to help me find Xmas tree?—was open-ended and innocent, right? It didn’t mention how much he wanted to kiss her, or look at her, or taste her, or…
Her reply was quick, and to the point: Sorry, on rota.
There were no kisses, or hearts, or anything flowery, but then his text had been pretty generic. The kind of question you’d ask a friend. So thinking hard about his next step, he typed, You around tonight? x
He added the x as a kiss, and waited with pathetically hopeful bated breath. What is this woman doing to me?
Next free 20th
Hmm, no kiss. Never mind, he wasn’t giving up. He might be heading for his thirtieth birthday, but he could channel his inner teenager. And then another text arrived.
Really enjoyed yesterday. Love your friend Fly, he’s a good guy x
How ridiculous was it that his heart lightened with that stupid little x?
He began typing a response, then connected a call instead.
“Hey,” she said as she answered.
“Hey, gorgeous,” he said back. Eloquent. Not. Flustered, he fell back on the one steady thing in his life. “So, the twentieth we’re playing the Islanders. You should come. See your first game, and we could meet up after for a drink or something?”
“Something?” she teased. And he was immediately hard at the thought of what that something could be. He hadn’t meant to imply anything but a drink, but something else could be good.
Then she sighed, and it wasn’t a happy sigh. “I can only do the twentieth in the day—I’m working otherwise.”
He glanced at his calendar, “I can’t, that’s practice, and I have meetings. And then I’m on a couple of away games.” Alex had to fight the disappointment that curled in his belly.
“Never mind,” she said, lightly. “Where?”
“Where what?”
“The away games.” Her words sounded like she was smiling. He could imagine that soft smile, the one that reached her eyes and made them sparkle.
And now I am completely losing it.
“Florida, Carolina, Columbus two days after Christmas. I’m with my parents for Christmas.” As much as he wanted to see her, he couldn’t submit her to parental questioning that early on. Maybe ten or so years in.
“That’s cool. I’m at home for Christmas when I’m not on duty.”
“How about New Years? There’s a party at Nikita Gulin’s place.” Or at least there was usually; New Year was a big night for the Russian. “Gooly. You met him at the party. Big, angry Russian. It’s just the guys without kids, the others are at the New Year fair by the river, but it could be fun.”
“On duty again. We drew the New Year short straw after having Christmas off.”
Abruptly, Alex felt tired, and a tiny bit resentful that he had games and meetings and training and everything that made the concept of a day off a rarity. All he wanted to do was see Jo again, and none of that was working.
“I could come to you if I got the chance. Just for half an hour, somewhere, if you’re at your place.”
“No, when I say home I mean home-home, back with my mom and sister.”
“Where’s home?” He perched on the side of the nearest chair. He wanted to talk all day. He never wanted to stop talking. Crazy, stupid feelings. He imagined her with her feisty sister in some house in the suburbs, and wondered what her mom was like. She didn’t mention a dad, and he didn’t ask.
“Just outside the city, lots of family obligations to get through,” she said vaguely. “So, is it Vancouver you’re heading to for Christmas this year?”
He shook his head, then realized she couldn’t see him. “No, it’s too tight to get back, but they’re coming here, I hope. I sent them tickets.”
“Looks like we just have the phone, then,” she said. Then before he could answer, she kept talking. “I have to go—shift is in fifteen, and I’m sitting here in my jeans still. Take care, Alex.”
Alex smiled as he answered. “Take care, Jo. Stay safe.”
“I always do.”
They ended the call, and Alex stared at his phone for a while before realizing he was grinning like a sappy, lovesick fool when he had important shit to do.
Like get a tree, make an effort for his parents’ visit, and try not to dwell on the great Russian smack-down he had in his future.
Alexey Vasiliev walked into the dressing room, subdued but focused, shaking hands with guys he knew and being introduced to those he didn’t. It soon became very obvious that he and Gooly weren’t going to be interacting much, which was fucking awkward given they’d likely be working the second line together.
There was one small but heated exchange in Russian when their paths crossed near the large dragon logo in the center of the room, but they separated to their own stalls. The conversation looked like it might have been along the lines of I hate you, and Don’t fucking talk to me or come near me. All with added cursing and violent gesticulations. Then silence. But that was okay, as long as they skated well at morning skate.
They skated like it was the last game for the Stanley fucking Cup—angry, focused, absolutely intent on one-upping each other.
They didn’t say a word.
Not one freaking word.
Which was awkward, given that coach had put Vasiliev on Gooly’s right wing. Their play was dramatic; Alex couldn’t think of another word to describe the way they checked each other. Which didn’t bode well for the next game, which was against the Islanders.
Loki cornered him after the skate, and he didn’t have to say anything, he simply looked at Alex, and all Alex could do was shake his head and shrug. Hell if he knew what to do.
“Simba, my office,” Coach Barton called from the door. “Gooly, Vaz, you as well.”
Loki held Alex’s gaze and gave an answering nod. Loki had his back for whatever the hell was going on, but Gooly’s story wasn’t his to tell. Not yet. Not unless there was a really good reason he had to.
Coach gestured for them to close the door, and the three big hockey men ranged themselves in front of the desk, with Alex squarely in the middle.
“Gooly?” Coach said first. “You have anything to say to me?”
“No, Coach,” was all Gooly said.
“Vaz? You want to tell me what the fuck is going on here?”
Vasiliev, or Vaz as he was known in the game, said the same as Gooly, only in much better English. “Nothing to say, Coach.”
Coach sat back in his chair and stared at Alex.
“Fucks sake, Simba?” he asked.
“It’s going to be okay,” Alex assured him. A lot was left unspoken in that small exchange.
Coach threw up his hands. “We have a shit hand. Deal with it. Don’t kill each other on my watch. Get the hell out of my office.”
All three of them left. Alex pressed a hand to Gooly’s chest as Vaz stalked ahead. “Tell me your focus is on the game.”
Gooly nodded. “New Year, I’m promise,” he said.
Alex didn’t know what to say to that. Seemed like Gooly was taking the New Year ultimatum deadly serious but wasn’t going to give it a real chance when it came to it.
“Please,” was all Alex said.
Gooly left without answering, and Alex sought out Vaz. He realized he was looking at the man with jaded eyes. Gooly was his friend. Vaz was some new guy who’d just joined the team, and Alex had no loyalty to him other than that of a captain to his team members. Was he coming over as unwelcoming?
“Vaz?” he began, and there were a hundred questions in that single use of Vaz’s name.
“It won’t affect my play,” Vaz said. “What is happening is my fault. It always was, and it always will be.” He looked defeated, not like the six-four, two-twenty-pound winger Alex knew he was. No, the man in front of him looked like he had a world of fear and regret in his eyes, and Alex wished he knew what the hell to say.
With his captain hat on, he reached out and clapped Vaz on the arm. “We’re a team…” he began.
“I didn’t want to come to the Dragons,” Vaz murmured. “It isn’t fair on Nikita.”
“You’re here now, so let’s make this work.”
The tall, broad Russian nodded, then headed for the showers.
Whatever the issues were, in the game itself Vaz and Gooly pulled together the most impressive showing of the Dragons’ second line of the last few years. They were gold together, spotty at first and then finding a rhythm that the Islanders blue line found hard to beat.
And the win, five to three, was a win the Dragons deserved.
The first message he saw post-game was from Jo, and it made him smile.
We had a call, I couldn’t watch you, but apparently you won. Yay Dragons.
And the best thing about the message?
There was an x on the end.