She smiles, warm and bright and I feel it right in the ribs. “Thank you for the vote of confidence,” she says.
She talks more, and I listen. I've always been better at listening than talking, and Jasmine has always been better at talking than almost anyone.
“Enough about me. What about you?” she says. “How was the journey to the NHL?”
I take a drink of beer. “Less interesting than law school.”
“I doubt that.”
The words pour out of me. “I got drafted at eighteen and moved to New York. The first season was brutal. I was young, slow by NHL standards, and the veterans didn't care that I'd been a star in juniors.”
“That must have been a shock.”
“It was a wake-up call. I spent the first year on the fourth defensive pairing, barely getting any ice time. Second year wasn't much better. Third year, I finally earned a regular spot, and it wasn't because I was more talented than the guys ahead of me. I just outworked them. Eventually, the coaches couldn't ignore it.”
“That sounds exactly like you,” Jasmine says in a soft voice.
“Meaning?” I ask.
“You never were the flashiest player on the ice, even in high school. You were the one who ground it out. You just never stopped.”
I also tell Jasmine about the Cup run.
“By the way, congratulations,” she says with a huge smile. “How was that like?”
“Incredible and terrifying. The final series went to seven games. I blocked eleven shots in the last game, and two of them hit me in the exact same spot on my shin. I couldn't walk properly for a month afterward.”
Her eyes go wide, brows nearly up to her hairline. “Eleven? Logan, that's insane.”
I shrug off the rush of pride I feel that I’ve impressed her, and say, “It’s the playoffs. You do what you have to do.”
“And the Cup itself? Did you drink out of it? I've always wanted to know if people actually do that.”
“Warm, flat champagne at three in the morning. Best thing I've ever tasted.”
She laughs. “That sounds disgusting.”
I laugh too. “It was. I didn't care.”
I don't tell her that the first person I wanted to call after we won was her, or how close I came to it. I held my phone in the locker room, drunk and grinning and surrounded by teammates spraying champagne, and typed out a number I'd deleted but always kept memorized and stared at it for a long time before I put the phone away.
“How's your back?” she asks. “I noticed you were stretching between shifts at the Long Island game.”
“Work in progress. It's manageable during the season, but it tightens up if I don't stay on top of it.”
“And the alternate captaincy? How's that going?”
“ I'm still figuring out the non-hockey parts of it.”
“I could tell from the sponsor event.”
“Thanks a lot.”
She laughs harder than she has all night. “I'm sorry. You just looked so miserable shaking hands with those executives.”
“I wasn't miserable. I was focused.”
She gives me a sideways glance, not buying it. “You were counting the minutes until you could leave.”
