“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t.” He waved it off.
A shoulder nudged me. I turned to see it was Pratt. “Good,” he said.
The puck dropped, and for two periods I got to be nothing but a defenseman. No being careful about watching Varga. The work was just the work.
I took a penalty in the first and ate a hit along the wall to chip the puck out. When I came back to the bench and sat beside Varga, he was already mid-sentence.
”—not a hook, it’s a hug. You put your stick down and embraced the man—refs!“ He banged the boards once with his glove. “Refs. That’s a love story you just called a penalty.” He took a breath. “Two minutes. For affection. Only in today’s world.”
Cross scored in the second off a faceoff he won cleanly. Rafe got the insurance midway through the third—top corner, glove side. The entire team poured over the boards to pin him against the glass. Varga was in the middle of it with both hands in the kid’s cage, yelling something I couldn’t hear.
We won by two. I logged twenty-two minutes and didn’t think about the post-game statement once. The horn blew, and I left the ice, heading into a world that had changed.
Mark pushed the statement the second the horn sounded.
We weren’t ten steps down the tunnel before Heath had his phone out, turning it so I could read it without breaking stride. It was the team account, spotlighting three short paragraphs. We were out. It was no longer something that was going to happen.
The media were waiting at the gate. One of the beat writers first, phone still in her hand from reading it, and then a TV guy swung his camera up.
They got us together for once. The Rook and Varga Show was over. Now it was Rook and Varga for real. He set his shoulder against mine, in the open, under the lights, and left it there.
“Is it real?” somebody asked. “The statement—that’s true?”
“It’s real,” I said.
I stepped back and gave Varga room.
“How long?” someone asked him.
“Five years,” he said. “And you want to know the bit we ran on you the whole time? We made you think we couldn’t stand each other. I’d chirp him at the mic, and he’d give you his four words, and one of you’d go home and write ‘no love lost in that pairing.’” Varga paused. “Worst acting in the league’s history, and every single one of you bought it.” A grin filled his face. “So ask me a real question now. I’ve been waiting.”
Someone near the back asked what was next.
I had an answer to that. I’d had it for four months, sitting in a locked drawer behind a folder with an NDA I still hadn’t torn up.
Varga didn’t know it was there.
“We’ll let you know,” I said, and put my hand flat between his shoulder blades to move him toward the locker room, in front of all of them, and the world didn’t end.
Chapter twenty-three
Varga
Iwas already losing an argument with the day as I walked down the stairs.
”—because a free man, a genuinely free, out, unembarrassed man still wants eggs for breakfast, and we don’t have eggs, because somebody made a frittata Thursday that could have fed a family of nine—“
“You made the frittata,” Rook said from the kitchen.
“I made the frittata under duress. We’d just told a locker room our biggest secret. This man stress-cooks.” I came around the corner, straightening Rook’s favorite Ironhawks t-shirt on my shoulders. I stole it so often that I should have kept it in my drawer. My follow-up to the eggs comment was already loaded. It was about coffee beans, but then he gave me that look, and the whole thing died in my mouth.
He was at the table with two mugs of coffee already poured, his hands flat on the wood. His phone sat face-up between them, with the screen glowing.
“Who died?” I asked as I sat down. “Was there a fire in my building. Or did the plant finally—“
“Nobody died.” He reached across the table and took both of my hands in his. He held on, and I was quiet.
