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What the fuck, Matsen?
Finally, she gave him a fine-I’ll-be-nice smile and pulled out the empty chair between the lion and unicorn. “You sit here.”
Since he’d grown up with sisters, this definitely was not about to be his first tea party. Therefore, if this was him being a sacrifice, he could live with it. There was no way it would come close to the misery of dealing with the press. Anyway, kids liked him. Well, the kids who came to the hockey camps he helped with when he was in college. They were twelve. How different could it be to chat with a four-year-old?
Cal sat down, doing what he was told even though his knees were up to his shoulders and he could only get one and a quarter ass cheeks on the chair. The other guys sat down at the table. A half minute later, he couldn’t miss the unmistakable fanning sound of cards being shuffled and the clink-clink of plastic poker chips being stacked. Meanwhile, Freya kept shooting him curious glances as she poured yellow liquid from the teapot into little cups in front of her stuffed animals first and the bright orange one in front of Cal.
“Thanks,” he said.
Freya dipped her chin in an imperious nod. Man. This kid was a tough crowd all by herself. Flop sweat trickled down the back of his neck as he glanced down and tried to think of something to say that didn’t fall into the category of peewee hockey pep talk. His gaze landed on his fingers, and it was like envisioning a shot’s trajectory before it was even hit toward the net.
“Don’t suppose you have any stickers left for my nails?” he asked, holding up his hands and wiggling his fingers.
Freya’s blue-green eyes went wide with joy, and Cal could have sworn the heavens opened to let the sound of a million-angel chorus come through.
“So many.” She picked up a Wonder Woman lunchbox off the floor and put it in the middle of the table, almost knocking over the teapot. “You get Bluey stickers.”
A half hour and what seemed like a million miniature cups of lemonade later, Frankie carried a drowsy Freya down the hall. Cal stood up, and the cracking noise his spine made when he stretched it out after being in a seat made for a stuffed lion for the past half hour paid tribute to every single one of his years. He rolled his neck and then walked over to the poker table where Finn, Ford, and Blackburn had just finished their last game after Frankie folded.
Almost all of the chips were in front of Finn’s spot along with an IOU for a puck signed by Tig Jones written in Blackburn’s chicken scratch. Cal raised an eyebrow in question. Blackburn just shrugged and handed him a beer.
“Nice nails,” Blackburn said.
Cal held out his right arm to show off the blue unicorn stamps that went from his wrist to his elbow. “They go with the tats.”
“And the hair,” Ford said. “You gotta leave it in until you leave and are at least a block away from the property, or else you get this disappointed sigh and she says she has to fix it.”
“If she has to do that,” Finn said as he put the cards back in the box, “you’ll end up with twice as many as you had before.”
The other two men nodded in agreement.
“And unlike me,” Frankie said as he emerged from the hallway without Freya but with a new bright purple butterfly clipped into his red hair, “none of you will be able to carry it off.”
That earned him a chorus of groans and eye rolls. Then they all went out onto the deck even though it looked like it was one of those cold fall days when it seemed like winter—or at least what people not from Minnesota called winter—was about to make an early appearance. Finn got to work on the grill while Frankie started telling him about his son Trey’s first ridealong in the firetruck. Ford stood off to the side making funny faces at his phone for the benefit of his daughter Amalie, who looked to be just a little younger than Freya but probably just as much of a handful.
A cold blast of wind carried the girl’s giggles over to the side of the deck where he and Blackburn were standing. It hit Cal all of a sudden that he’d never really thought about family beyond his parents and sisters. Yeah, maybe being an uncle would be cool, but everything had always been about hockey. Even after that last game, the goal had never been about getting out of the hospital. It was about getting back to hockey. The past five years hadn’t been any different. But hearing his knees pop as he sat down in the biggest Adirondack chairs he’d ever seen, with his nails covered in stickers, he wondered if maybe he’d been a little myopic.
Yeah, he was much more into being an uncle than a dad, but being a partner, having someone in his life to say good night to at the end of each day and then wake up to in the morning? He’d never really considered it before—at least not until Harbor City. All of that seemed to change, though, that night he’d walked into the Flying Sow Pub.
Was that the glitter unicorn stamps talking or thoughts of Astrid that he couldn’t get out of his head?
Fuck.
Maybe it was just the sugar rush from drinking all of that lemonade Freya had all but bullied him into drinking—while she nursed a single cup, because, as she’d explained to him, her mama had told her that was the limit.
“So the Yeti offered the goalie coach job,” Blackburn said out of nowhere.
Cal flinched back in surprise so hard that the mouthful of beer he was drinking went down the wrong pipe, and he spluttered under Blackburn’s amused gaze. The asshole. He’d timed it like that on purpose.
He wiped his mouth and dried his hands on his jeans. “Who told you?”
“You’re taking it?” Blackburn asked, ignoring Cal’s question.
The guy wasn’t going to let it go, just like he hadn’t stopped coming to Cal’s hospital room even after he’d told the defenseman that his injury had been a fluke and he wasn’t holding a grudge. There really wasn’t a point in pussyfooting around it. Still, he could be as much of an asshole as Blackburn, so he took a long drink of beer before answering. “It’s a great opportunity, and I may never get the chance again if I don’t.”
Blackburn snorted. “That’s not an answer.”
“Have you always been this much of a pain in the ass?”
