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“So what’s with the bingo caller?” Fallon asked as she laid out her paper bingo cards at their table.
Cal looked over at Andy The Shithead, who was shooting nervous glances toward their table. Good. Served the little fucker right.
“We had a little conversation after he called the bartender a bitch,” Cal said.
Fallon glanced over at the older blonde behind the bar. “The one working now?”
“No.” Cal shook his head as he set his cards up in three rows of two. “Astrid O’Malley.”
“As in Coach O’Malley’s daughter?” Blackburn’s hand smacked down in the middle of Cal’s cards, messing up the symmetry. “As in the one everyone in the hockey world knows after what happened with Jonesy? The one who was on every hockey gossip site and even the mainstream ones after what happened?”
Cal’s gut clenched. Way to go, numbnuts. You couldn’t have just kept your mouth shut? There was no way he wasn’t about to get a metric ton of shit.
He shoved the other man’s hand off his bingo cards and began to straighten them. “Yeah.”
Blackburn turned to his wife, a wide grin on his face. “You’re gonna love this. Astrid is Jonesie’s former fiancé,” he paused for dramatic effect, “who he ditched on their wedding day over a FaceTime call.”
Fallon’s eyes went round with surprise, and she let out a gasp. “That’s very Riverdale. What else?”
Warming up to his topic, Blackburn leaned in. “According to my sources—”
“That would be your former teammates?” Cal interrupted, glaring at the man who used to be known for hardly ever talking. Now he was as bad as the old men talking shit about everyone in town as they destroyed a dozen bear claws in the bakery across from his family’s autoshop back home.
“I’ll never reveal their identities,” Blackburn said before taking a long draw on his beer and then turning back to his wife. “Anyway, they say Cali here and Astrid are working together to get Jonesy to remove his head from being so far up his ass that he can’t stop a puck.” Blackburn leaned in close to Fallon as if he was going to whisper the next part, but his voice didn’t go down a single decibel. “And the rumor is they can’t keep their eyes off each other. There’s a pool for the date when they finally have sex in a supply closet at the rink. Those asshats won’t let me in on it since I’m retired.”
“Christensen needs to mind his own damn business, and so do you,” Cal grumbled. “When did you become such a gossip?”
“It’s my family’s fault,” Fallon said with an apologetic grimace. “They’re a little overwhelming with their need to know everything about everyone they care about—and yes, the Ice Knights are part of the family. Zach gets to pick his slices of Hawaiian ham first when he shares little tidbits.”
“That part drives her brothers up the wall.” Blackburn let out a roar of a laugh. “I fucking love it.”
Cal shook his head and tried to play it off like he didn’t care that the guys on the team had noticed he couldn’t stop watching Astrid. “Retirement has made you weird.”
Blackburn shrugged, obviously not giving a shit as he glanced around the packed pub. Cal knew the moment that the other man spotted Astrid. Blackburn’s scan of the room jerked to a stop, slid back over to one specific table, and then moved over to Cal. The smile the other man gave him had Cal downing his beer.
“Oh, Cali,” Blackburn said, smug as hell. “Look who’s here.”
Cal stared at his bingo cards like his life depended on memorizing them. “I know.”
Fallon half stood up as she looked in the same direction as her husband. “Is it…?”
Blackburn nodded. “Yep.”
“Which one?”
“The one with the long, dark hair.”
Fallon was out of her seat and headed straight to Astrid’s table before Cal realized what was going on. By the looks of it, Fallon only needed fifteen seconds to get the two women Astrid was with to agree to join them at their table. For her part, Astrid just glared at him as if he’d made this happen. Yeah, she’d made herself clear that she had no interest by treating him like the plague for the past two weeks.
Fine.
He didn’t care.
It wasn’t like he was going to be here after the season was over.
Still, he couldn’t help but tease her with a grin as if he had gotten Fallon to go over there. There was just something about seeing Astrid go all pink-cheeked with annoyance as her usual nothing-bothers-me outer shell cracked that rubbed him the right way.
“You’re fucked now, Cali,” Blackburn said with a chuckle as the four women made their way over carrying bingo cards, markers, bulging totes, and in Astrid’s case, a six-pack of Diet Coke.
