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“Figured she might be hungry too. That okay?” I hammer out a text with my thumbs and tuck it away.
“Not what I meant,” he says. “What’s the deal with you and Faye?”
Pasha doesn’t have the patience for small talk and doesn’t beat around the bush. He’s been with the Ptarmigans for four years and he’s about as many years older than me. We struck up an easy friendship when we were the only ones more interested in playing video games at my first training camp than sniffing around some puck bunnies.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. There is nodealwith me and Faye. We’re friends.”
Pasha lets out a sharp laugh.
“Come on, you lost your cool at the Denver game over what Sherbotsky said.”
I let out a low grunt, recalling the Denver enforcer’s jab at Faye. Somebody—probably Caro—yelled something across the ice and it took me out of the game just enough for Sherbotsky to notice. He spent the rest of the game cracking insults about the girls there until he said something particularly nasty about Faye and didn’t let up.
“Enough, man,” Pasha says. “Talk.”
“Nothing to talk about,” I say with a shrug.
“You brought her coffee this morning.”
“She lives close to the coffee shop I like.”
Albina Press is a great shop, and just at the base of where Hawthorne Boulevard runs into Mt. Tabor, only about two blocks away from where Faye lives with her roommates. The barista doesn’t exactly love Faye for some reason nobody can figure out, so when I’m on this side of town, I get her some coffee. It’s what any good friend would do.
“Oh, she lives close? That explains why we had to stop to go inside a coffee shop and then drive it over to her house after you made me get up at the asscrack of dawn on a Saturday morning.” Pasha smirks, flashing a few chipped teeth.
He wears a clip-on for press and TV, but when he’s working out he doesn’t bother. Meanwhile, I wear a custom, one-of-a-kind mouth guard that my sister-in-law made for me. Sarah gave it to me when I graduated high school and told me that girls don’t dick around with toothless assholes. I told Zach to marry her then and there.
“Come on, Coop,” Pasha says, punching me in the arm. “What’s the deal? You fuck her yet?”
“Dude.” I punch him back, a little harder than strictly necessary. “Don’t talk about her like that. We’re just friends.”
“But you said you ‘fed her bird.’” He uses his middle fingers to illustrate his stupid air quotes.
“That wasn’t a euphemism. I topped off the bird feeder on her window.”
He levels me with a glare that could bring down Val Kilmer himself.
“You’re ‘topping off her bird feeder’ and bringing her coffee like a lost kitten and you’re not sleeping with her.Blin.I call moose shit.”
“I amnota lost kitten,” I say, punching him back.
“You are. You are meowing and circling like you’re waiting for her to let you in the back door so you can lick her cream.”
“It’s not happening. And that’s a terrible analogy.”
“But has she seen the Mini Cooper?”
“First, stop calling my dick the Mini Cooper. There’s nothing mini about it. Second, she has not seen the Mini Cooper and—”
“Show her the Mini Cooper. Let her take it for a test drive.”
“Someone needs to really back off on the metaphors.”
“She will not be yourfriendif she rides the Mini Cooper,” Pasha says with a littlevroom. Or at least I think that’s what it is. It sounds more like a deer colliding with a turnstile.
“Trust me. We are just friends. That’s it.”
“But that’s not what you want.” When I don’t respond, he flashes a shit-eating grin.
