Page 157 of On His Team

That gets her quiet again, and I’m starting to like doing that a little too much.

Her fingers loosen in my shirt, but instead of letting go, she smooths the fabric where she wrinkled it. “You’re making this very difficult for me.”

“What?” I ask, watching her fix my shirt.

“Being normal.”

I laugh and look toward the hall. “Are you coming tomorrow?”

“To Bowling Green?”

“Yeah.”

She shakes her head. “I have class and work. Also, I’m apparently responsible for forty-eight children now, so my glamorous equipment-travel career has been temporarily suspended.”

“Saturday?”

“No.”

“That sucks.”

Gianna looks at me for a second. “You want me there?”

The answer is easy. “Yeah.”

Her face does that soft thing again, then she ruins it herself. “Aw. You’re going to miss me.”

“I’m leaving.” I step back. “Bye, G.”

“Bye, Laurens.”

I get to the doorway.

She says, “Good luck tomorrow.”

I turn. “Thanks.”

“And Saturday,” she adds. “And please win at least one because everyone at Hawthorne is starting to get depressing.”

“We’ll work on it.”

“Great.”

I leave. I’m still smiling when I get halfway down the hall. Then I remember Bowling Green’s forecheck and spend the walk to my truck thinking about hockey again.

Friday is travel. Class in the morning. Forty-minute skate before lunch. Food at the rink. Bus by early afternoon.

Bowling Green isn’t far enough to justify flying, so the trip is all road. Stanley complains about the bus temperature for the first forty minutes, Blue tells him nobody else is cold, and Stanley spends the next ten minutes trying to prove that the vent above his seat is stronger than everyone else’s. Percy puts headphones on. I sleep.

We get to the hotel in time to drop our bags and eat before leaving for the rink.

The building is smaller than most of the Big Ten barns we play in, which somehow makes it louder. Noise gets trapped closer to the ice. Every hit sounds bigger. Every whistle gets followed by somebody leaning over the glass and telling us exactly what they think of Camden University.

We should handle it.

We don’t.

Friday night is one of those games where nothing is catastrophically wrong, and the result is still wrong.