Chapter 6

Bishop

“Here’s what I don’t get,” Dax says as we sit at our kitchen table. He’s downing a five-egg omelet he cooked up and I’m halfway through a strawberry whey protein shake. Dax likes to eat big first thing the morning, but at least one hour before his workout. I don’t get hungry until midmorning, so I start off with a shake, but by the time I’m done working out, I could eat a moose.

Dax had been my roommate in New York for the last three years, and over that time living and working together, he’s become the closest friend I’ve ever had.

“What’s that?” I prompt him before he can take another bite of his food.

“How did she not know who you were that first night when you met?” he asks, his tone appropriately inflected with sarcasm and a healthy dose of skepticism. He’s past the laughing stage and is now actually kind of worried for me. I’d just finished filling him in on how dinner went with her father.

This was something I’d wondered too, and to be honest, I thought perhaps she set me up. But that thought was fleeting, and for two reasons. The first was that I don’t get any type of vibe off Brooke other than she’s a genuinely nice woman. She uprooted herself and moved to Phoenix because she was concerned about her dad and the obvious depression he’d been suffering since his wife died. Brooke told me a lot more about that last night.

In between the times we were fucking.

Second, I straight-out asked Brooke about it. “You seriously didn’t know who I was when I introduced myself to you?”

“I swear I didn’t,” she said, then dragged the tip of her index finger in an X pattern across her chest. That got my eyes sidetracked on her tits and I had to play around with her nipples a bit. When I finally left her alone, she explained. “I love hockey. I follow my dad’s team, which was the Phantoms and now it’s the Vengeance. I go to a lot of the games. But that’s about as involved as I am with the sport. It’s just not all consuming to me.”

It was plausible. I mean, there’s over five hundred players in the league, and even though I play against them, I don’t know all of them. I watch the leading point scorers and the division rankings, so I know quite a bit, but why would Brooke do that unless she was just really into the sport as a superfan?

“She didn’t know who I was,” I tell Dax with surety. “She’s a big fan of her dad, but not of the sport as a whole.”

He doesn’t seem convinced and just stares at me while he chews another big bite of his omelet. When he swallows, he asks, “So what in the hell are you going to do?”

While I’d told him about the dinner last night and how it went, I did not mention the details of what happened after at Brooke’s, but he knew I stayed there all night. Dax had been cooking an omelet when I walked in this morning feeling very loose and very sated despite the lack of sleep I’d had last night.

“For a few weeks, we’re going to pretend to be together,” I tell him nonchalantly. “Then we’ll sort of institute a break-up. We’ll figure it out as we go along so Coach isn’t too pissed at me. Brooke will probably be the one to dump me so she takes the heat.”

“This is about the dumbest fucking idea I’ve ever heard,” he mutters, then shovels the last forkful into his mouth.

“She was just trying to protect me.” I find myself defending her, for it was her actions alone that got us into this mess. “She didn’t want my relationship with her dad to start off badly.”

“No, it’s just starting off as a lie,” Dax points out after he swallows and pushes up out of his chair to take his plate to the sink.

“That it is, brother.” I lift my glass and throw back the rest of my shake.

“So what’s this chick like?” Dax says as he places his plate in the sink and turns to face me. He leans back against the counter and crosses his arms over his chest.

“Her name’s Brooke,” I mutter as I stand up, my intention to rinse my glass out and put it in the dishwasher.

“Sorry,” Dax says with a snort and moves to the side so I can access the sink. “What is Brooke like? I’m guessing great in the sack if the smile on your face when you walked in this morning is any indication.”

The shrug I give him is supposed to convey a casualness about Brooke that I most definitely don’t feel. “She’s cool.”

“Cool?”

“Yeah…cool,” I tell him before turning to the dishwasher to open it. I pull the top rack out, place my glass in it, and shut the door.

“How many condoms did you use last night?” Dax asks, slyly using a roundabout way of getting what he wants.

“Three,” I admit. I’ve certainly used more over the course of a long night, but I don’t bother to tell Dax that we did plenty of stuff without a condom too. After all, he didn’t ask how many orgasms I’d had.

Dax laughs and claps me on the back. “At least you’re getting something good out of all this.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” I say with a laugh.

“So what’s her deal?” Dax turns from me to put his plate in the dishwasher. One thing I’m glad of is that we’re both sort of neat freaks.

I move back to the table and sit down. We don’t have to be at the arena for practice until 2 P.M., although Dax and I had planned to go work out this morning. Still, we’re not on a tight schedule. “She used to work for a fashion magazine in New York. Has a degree in fashion merchandising. But she lost her mom in February and her dad is really taking it hard, so she moved to Phoenix to be near him. I didn’t ask her, but I suspect that job in team services might have been created for her.”

Dax nods as he turns from putting his plate in the dishwasher. He nabs a bottled water from the fridge and comes to sit back down at the table. “Hard to believe that crusty son of a bitch has a soft side, huh?”

“I don’t know. I imagine part of his coaching demeanor is just put on to set the tone with us. He seemed a lot more laid back at dinner last night. After he got through will all his bluster and threats. I didn’t tell you that part…He sort of demanded I put a ring on Brooke’s finger.”

Dax’s eyebrows shoot up. “Are you?”

“Fuck no,” I tell him, appalled he’d even ask. “Why would I buy a thirty-thousand-dollar piece of jewelry for a sham?”

“Rings cost that fucking much?” he asks, eyebrows completely disappearing…perhaps rolling off the back of his head.

“I don’t know,” I say sarcastically. “Maybe. The point being the only way I’m ever shelling out money for a diamond or putting it on a woman’s hand is if I love her, and I don’t have any plans to be doing that anytime soon.”

Dax’s eyebrows reappear and he nods in understanding. “How are you going to play this with the team? There’s going to be all kinds of get-togethers this week, and she’ll probably be traveling with us.”

Brooke and I had actually talked about this, and we decided to play it the way any other in-love couple would. We’d attend functions together, and when we traveled, she’d be in my bed with me if I rated a room on my own. That was never known until the start of the season, and single rooms came not only by seniority, but by performance. Still, preseason we most likely would all be paired up with roommates.

Well, that’s not exactly the arrangement we came to. In fact, she specifically said she would not be in my room, since she was not about to flaunt that in front of her father. I conceded that she would have her own room, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t be fucking her on road trips. She just doesn’t know that part yet.

“You’re the only one that knows this is a sham,” I tell Dax. “We’ll stick to the same story that we gave the coach. We started dating a few months ago, fell hard and fast, blah-blah-blah. Not much else to tell.”

“Going to be weird seeing you all cozy with a chi—,” Dax starts to say, but my glare redirects him. “I mean…Brooke.”

That’s the truth. In the three years we’ve been friends, neither one of us has had a serious girlfriend. In fact, in my twenty-eight years of life, I never really have. I mean, sure, I’ve dated women exclusively and for lengths of time, but I’ve never been in love.

And I’m thinking dating a woman casually versus dating one you’re supposedly in love with are probably two different things. As a professional hockey player, I think casual dating means maybe being able to hook up once a week for dinner and a movie. Definitely fucking after. Or maybe taking a woman to a charity gala—you know, like arm candy. And then, well…fucking after.

But this thing with Brooke.

Our fake “serious” relationship is probably going to play out in a vastly different way. Especially if her father is to believe us.

“This might be more complicated than I thought,” I admit to Dax.

He chuckles as he twists the cap of his water bottle. He points it at me. “You’ll figure it out, bud. Maybe you should read some romance novels or some shit. My sister reads them all the time and says that if men read them, and acted like the dudes in those books acted, women would be a lot happier about giving blow jobs.”

I can’t help but snort. Dax’s sister, Willow, is the last person I’d take dating advice from. She goes through boyfriends faster than I go through M&M’s when I have a chocolate craving.

My phone rings and I pick it up from the table where I’d set it earlier. A smile forms on my face when I hear the opening “Ah-ah-aaaaah-ah” of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song.” My mom is a total Led Zeppelin freak and it’s her favorite song, so it’s her ringtone.

“What’s up, hot mama?” I ask as soon as I connect the call.

Dax leans across the able, puts his face near the phone, and yells, “Wa-a-a-z-up, Mama Scott?”

I lean away from Dax with a glare, but my mom’s laughing on the other end. “Tell that sweet boy I said hello.”

“He’s not sweet,” I say, but it would be futile to get her to believe me on that. She adores Dax. “So to what do I owe the pleasure of your lovely voice this morning?”

“Just wanted to say hi,” she says almost wistfully. “I tried to call you yesterday to wish you good luck on the first day of training camp, but got your voicemail instead.”

She had indeed called me. It was during the team meeting and I’d turned my phone to mute. After the meeting, we went straight to the ice. Then after that I’d hit the gym hard, trying to squat, deadlift, and chest press my frustrations away. After that it was dinner, then I was getting lost in Brooke. I hadn’t had a chance to call her back.

“Sorry,” I tell my mom. “Yesterday was just really hectic.”

“So how was it?” she asks me guardedly. My mom more than anyone knows how disappointing it was for me to get traded away from the Vipers when they were stacked to really kick ass this year. “How was the coach? The other players? What about the training staff? Are they cool?”

Chuckling, I settle back into my chair and tell my mom all about it. She’s been such an integral part of my hockey life she deserves my time to indulge all her curiosities.

Marianne Scott raised me solely by herself after my father died of a heart attack when I was seven. He got me started in hockey, but my mom took over as my biggest supporter after he was gone. She’s a financial analyst for an insurance company that has a main office in London, Ontario, where I was born and raised. All through minors and major juniors—which I was fortunate to play for London so I didn’t have to stay with a billet family—my mom was there for almost every single game, even traveling over six and a half hours to watch me play in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.

Needless to say, we’re close.

After I won the gold medal in Sochi in 2014 playing for Team Canada, I gave it to my mother as way to thank her for her support and dedication to me during those formative years and beyond. Of course, she is insisting she’s just “holding” it for me until she dies, but whatever. That gold medal is hers now.

“What’s Coach Perron like?” she asks after I wind down. I’d obviously steered clear of the topic of my coach, not wanting to get drawn into deceiving my mom by mistake.

“It’s hard to tell,” I reply, which is the truth. It’s also the truth when I say, “He’s hard, but those that have played for him before say he’s fair.”

Then, to completely redirect her even further away from the topic of Brooke’s dad, I ask her, “Have you decided what games you want tickets to yet?”

My mom is pretty high up in her company, having worked there for thirty-one years now. They are very flexible in letting her travel to come watch me play, partly because I’m a native son of London and big shit in the NHL, and partly because my mom can pretty much work from anywhere as long as she has her laptop.

“I’ll definitely want to hit the games close to me,” she tells me. “Detroit, Buffalo. Maybe Pittsburgh. And I’ll pull up the schedule and decide on the ones I want to come to for the first half of the year.”

That brings a smile to my face. “Sounds great. Just let me know and I’ll get working on the tickets.”

Of course, it would actually be Brooke’s job to help me secure tickets for the away games, but hey…what are girlfriends/fiancées for, right?

“Let me talk to her,” Dax demands, and rips the phone away from me. I let him have it because he’s become like a son to her. He starts telling her all about his new workout regimen, and because my mom will be sincerely interested, I know they’ll be talking for a bit. I head out of the kitchen to get into my workout gear, not in the slightest bit concerned that Dax will tell my mother about what’s going on with Brooke and Coach Perron.

He’s got my back always.