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“If it’s about Sport U Apparel—”
“No, no. It’s not work-related. I wanted to ask . . .” Eli looked around. Hughes and CC sat in front of them, and behind them were Matty Coates and Gaff. Eli lowered his voice. “How do you tell a boy you like him?”
Zanetti looked up from his breakfast to spare him a quick glance but otherwise didn’t react. “Depends.”
“On?”
“How subtle you want to be.”
“Oh. I honestly hadn’t thought about it.” Eli put his back to the window and brought a leg onto the seat as he faced his teammate. “Not so subtle that he doesn’t understand that I’m into him. But I also don’t want to embarrass myself.”
“You? Embarrass yourself?” Zanetti cracked a smile. “Who showed up drunk on my doorstep after midnight last year, bemoaning the fact that Nolan had a girlfriend?”
“See, this is why I come to you for support.”
Zanetti laughed, and Eli couldn’t help but join in despite himself. He shoved Zanetti’s shoulder. “Come on. Help a guy out. I don’t want to confess my feelings, get rejected, and immediately have to fake my own death to avoid him.”
“Ask him on a date,” Zanetti suggested. “Something casual that tells him you’re interested but doesn’t confess I’ve been in love with you for ten years.”
“Shhhhhh.” Eli peered over the seats in front of him, then behind him, but no one seemed to be paying attention. “I wasn’t in love with him ten years ago,” he whisper-shouted. “I’m not in love with him now. I just . . . I don’t know. I’ve always felt a pull toward him, and I want to see where it goes. But I don’t know if he does too. Hence the not-embarrassing-myself thing.”
“A date,” Zanetti repeated. “Lunch. Coffee. A stroll through the Church Street Marketplace. A sunset walk along Waterfront Park. Games at The Boardroom. Something that keeps it low-key but leaves room for conversation.”
“Those are really good ideas.”
Zanetti smirked. “It’s why you come to me for support, right?”
Snorting a laugh, Eli levered himself up to hop over him again, but Zanetti scowled at him. “Stop that. What are you, a drunk raccoon?” He rose into the aisle, giving Eli space to exit. “See how easy that was?” Zanetti said when Eli slid out of their row of seats, the sarcasm heavy in his voice.
Eli flipped him off.
An idea occurred to him, maybe a terrible one, maybe a good one, maybe one that would lead to the embarrassment he was trying to avoid. He rolled with it anyway. He headed for the front of the plane, where the coaches and equipment managers sat, and said, “Coach, do you have a pen and paper?”
Coach Madolora looked from him to his tablet and back. “No?”
“Check with Prinnie,” Assistant Coach Friedle said. “He’s got a notebook for that class he’s taking.”
“Thanks,” Eli said.
Prinnie sat in the very last row, and where normally Eli would want to know everything about the class he was in, right now he was on a mission. Nolan sat next to him, which made Eli pause for a moment before soldiering onward. “Hey, Prin? Can I have a page out of your notebook?”
Prinnie opened one eye. Lifted the left side of his headphones off his ear. “Huh?”
“Can I have a page out of your notebook?”
“Sure.” Prinnie jerked one thumb upward. “My bag’s overhead. Help yourself.”
“Everything okay?” Nolan asked.
“Yup.” Eli grabbed Prinnie’s bag out of the overhead bin and dropped it on Prinnie’s lap to riffle through. “Everything’s great. Prin, I’m stealing a pen since you’re not using it.”
Prinnie grunted and let the headphones drop back over his ear, so Eli figured he had no objection. A minute later, he’d ripped a page of lined paper out of Prinnie’s notebook, dug a Trailblazers-branded pen out of a side pocket, and stored Prinnie’s bag back into the overhead compartment. Then he went to find his seat next to DeShawn, directly across the aisle from Zanetti and Cotton. The plane was taxiing, so instead of flipping down the tray from the seat in front of him, he dug his tablet from his bag at his feet to use as a makeshift clipboard and got to work.
Team dynamics were fascinating.
An hour and a half after the plane landed at Newark, Nolan sat in the stands in New Jersey’s arena. He’d only played hockey as a kid for a year before his parents had realized that he preferred solo activities, so while he could understand—in theory—the novelty of watching an NHL team’s open practice, as someone who was currently watching the Trailblazers practice, he had to question people’s tastes.
Jesus, this was boring.
