The Rest of the Story

by Tal Bauer

Coach’s goodbye to me sounded more like he was saying farewell, I knew thee once upon a fucking time and not hey, see you back in a few months, don’t get fat and come back ready to fucking go.

“You’re going to the Outlaws.” There’s bad, there’s “fuck outta here” awful, and then there’s the Rocky Mountain Outlaws.

The Outlaws were the kiss of death.

One of Brody’s friends was beside him, and my gaze caught on a pair of Liberty Blue eyes and a clenched jaw as he pulled Brody back.

Which left me with Blue Eyes.

“Thanks,” he said. “Shea Darling. My nickname is probably obvious.” He had a little lopsided smile, and he flashed just the right amount of bright white teeth when he grinned. “Darling?”

Shea, though. That was a pretty name. A pretty name for a good-looking guy, if I was allowing myself to be honest.

“You’re a fucking dead man!” Coates bellowed, back on his skates. “You are fucking dead, Elsher!” My heart was slamming. “You lay a hand on any of these guys and it will be the last thing you’ll ever do. I swear to God.”

“Gavin,” I called. He picked his way to my side. I kept my eyes on Shea. “You and the others gather the rookies. Unstick them from the boards, peel their fingers off the walls, get their heart rates back down from the stratosphere. Get them changed, and get everyone in one place. Try and get them to breathe in and out. And for God’s sake, feed them. They’re starving.”

I undid his skates and peeled them off, then knelt between his legs. In another context, in another place, this would be the prelude to something way more interesting, but here? This was about as unsexy a situation as I could dream up. Shea had blood down the front of his practice jersey, and his cheek, chin, and eye were turning bruise-black and swollen-yellow.

Shea’s jerky breaths puffed across the inside of my wrist. My thumb ran upward along the line of his jaw, smoothing over his skin and his uneven patches of stubble. Our eyes found each other. He breathed in, short and sharp. “So, what’s a guy like you doing in a place like this?” I asked. That got a tiny smile out of Shea, followed immediately by a wince.

“Don’t make me smile.” A fresh drip of watery blood slid down his cheek. I wiped it away. “Ah, but you have a good one.” He flushed.

“What do you know about Coates abusing these players?” Steve wilted. “Rumors only,” he said. “Hints of things. I was trying to ask around, and I kept trying to put myself in a position where I could see for myself what was going on, but Coach Wolfe always had me separated. I heard the rumors, but I never saw anything with my own eyes. And no one wanted to talk when I tried to start a conversation.”

“Where are you going?” “To blow the lid off this Popsicle stand.”

That was lame. That was a lame thing to say.

“And you wanted to entice Coach Wolfe to offer a trade to Winnipeg for Morgan Elsher because you felt you could confide in Morgan, and that he would help you navigate this situation?”

“Thank you for confiding in me,” she said. “That took immense bravery, and I want to honor what you’ve done today with a commitment of my own. I promise each of you: I am going to make this right. I’m going to hold everyone who was responsible accountable, starting immediately.” She looked each of them in their eyes. “Please, don’t hesitate to come to me or to Morgan with anything you need. Anything at all. We will take care of you.”

She stared me down across the table. “What they need most is a leader, on and off the ice.” It took me a second before forty watts clicked on over my head. “Oh no. No, no, no.” I threw up my hands. I am not, and have never been, a team leader.

“These guys don’t need me. They need docs, psychs, head shrinkers. Probably bags of weed and vacations to Fiji.” “Yes, they do need all of that. Doctors, big bags of weed, and very, very long vacations. But they also need stability and purpose. Their identities have been shattered. They need to find a sense of themselves, and their self-worth, again. They need to be a part of something meaningful.” “You’re saying all the right things, but you need to be saying them to someone else—”

I groaned and laid my chest on the table, my arms over my head and my palms flat. My hair pooled around my face, curtaining me from Kathy. Maybe I could stay like this, hide from her until I died.

Bruh

“They need a good man. I’ve been around a lot of hockey, same as you. You know good men are not a dime a dozen. You are one of them.” Was I really? Was the guy phoned in for a knuckle sandwich delivery really a good guy?

Knuckle sandwich delivery, I'm stealing that

Kathy was a brilliant woman, and other than this moment in time when her brain was malfunctioning, she had razor-sharp instincts and the kind of hockey brilliance players and coaches around the world had wet dreams over. She’d find a better solution to this mess than me.

I have to admit Morgan is kind of hilarious in a very juvenile way

“Morgan.” I planted my feet and twisted left and right in my chair, petulantly glaring at the ceiling. Pure leadership behavior, right there. “You’re the right guy for this. I know it.” I hummed like I couldn’t hear her.

I was too convinced of my ironclad control over my vulcanized rubber heart. Hard like a hockey puck. Nothing getting through. Certainly not a raggedy team of lost ducklings looking for their new imprint.

“Everything is going to change, and I want you to be here. I want you at my right hand, Moogs.” I gave her a little salute. “I’ll come say goodbye before I head out of town.” “I know you’ll take great care of the team.” A half-assed smile, a spin move, and I was out the door.

Shea had the glazed shine of the well-drugged, and whatever pain he had been feeling earlier was nothing but a memory. He wore a ball cap turned backward, and he hit me with a big smile, his eyes lighting up like he’d been waiting for me to walk through the door. He leaned into Brody and said, “I told you he’d be back.”

The look on Brody’s face shifted, moving from dejection and despair to naked shock, and then the very edge of a tender, fragile hope. Everyone else turned and stared when Shea spoke. Fuck.

Man, whoever was going to try and take the lead here was going to be shoveling upward into a mountain of shit.

I wonder who that will be...

They’d been roommates.

Oh my god, they were roommates

Was it the way they’d started smiling more and more each hour? Like they were finally unclenching muscles and unwinding tendons, straightening out terror-stricken kinks that had become permanently embedded in their minds and bodies? How they’d spent the day in one long exhale, as if they didn’t believe it was really over? The sticky way they needed to stay together instead of repel apart, flee each other and the nightmare?

My dad was in sales, and he was a real sweet talker. He was everybody’s pal, everyone’s best friend on the golf course and in the bar. It was when he came home that he unscrewed his big ol’ smile, let loose all of his varied and deeply felt frustrations and aggravations.

My broken ribs, which I’d hidden from everyone, had only just healed when Dad came back to break them again. When he pulled into the driveway, I had my baseball bat ready and no more sentimentality. We never saw him again.

I’d asked for a hammer and a crowbar, and with those and a decent amount of sweat, I got every framed photo, every lithograph, every Lucite award, every special whatever-the-fuck that had Coates’ stink on it off the walls.

They shouldn’t have sold to me. I looked unhinged: beard going scruffy, deep hollows beneath my eyes, my long hair escaping the knot at the back of my neck, fury and purpose in all of my movements. No one buys a chainsaw before dawn with good intentions.

It only took ten minutes to carve up Coates’ stall. I cut it all out, all the way to the cinder blocks, obliterating every scrap of wood, everything he’d ever touched. The bench, the leather cushion, the hooks on the wall. He needed to be gone, every trace of him, and when the guys looked at where he used to be, they needed to see nothing.

We stood shoulder to shoulder and leaned on our sticks, watching our teammates. I didn’t say anything about how he was pressed into my side, and he didn’t say anything about how I was leaning right back.

So call-ups from no-name minor teams and washed-up nobodies these guys might be, but too many people had thrown away what they thought were dull rocks without realizing they were diamonds that only needed some spit and polish.

And then there was Shea. He was the best player we had, hands down. It was fucking criminal no team had wanted to sign him after four years at Harvard.

He was living in his parents’ basement and part-time coaching youth hockey at the local rink, with his Harvard degree and his hockey stick and holding on to his fading dream, when he got the call from the Outlaws.

I was the captain in all but name, and Shea was the unacknowledged A to my unacknowledged C.

We did everything together: diagramed plays and designed drills, prepped for practice, ran practice, evaluated practice, then watched hours of tape and tweaked and retweaked those same plays and drills for tomorrow’s practice. Together...

Maybe we didn’t have to work so closely together. Maybe our hands didn’t have to brush that much. Maybe I didn’t have to stand behind him and help wrestle one into position.

“I’ll make you proud, Morgan.” “I know you will, Darlin’.”

I wanted Brody to feel invincible because, out of all the rookies, Coates had worked the hardest to make him feel small.

Jesus, I could make or break this team. I could make or break these guys, individually and as players. If I steered them wrong, if I fucked this up, if I led them into a fucking abyss—

If I wanted to, I could slide my fingers under the brim of Shea’s backward cap, tickle the delicate skin at his hairline. If he wanted to, he could wrap his fingers around my ankle, out of sight of everyone else. But he didn’t, and I didn’t, and we ended the night the same way we’d started: as teammates, nothing more.

We sat at the front of the plane and put our heads together over my iPad. Literally, heads together, sharing a single pair of headphones, one earbud each. I lifted the armrest so it wouldn’t be in the way. Shea scooted two inches closer. His thigh pressed against mine.

I pretended to stretch my legs, but, honestly, I had to put inches between me and Shea before I buried my face in his neck. God, I wanted him.

I had a moment’s daydream, a flash of imagining so vivid and scorching it burned me. Shea with his head thrown back, throat arched, gasping my name. His hands tangled in my sheets, thighs quaking— Focus. Game. Team. The guys are going to need you, especially today. So not that. Not him. Not ever.

“The most important day in hockey is tomorrow. Tomorrow, you tackle what went wrong today. Tomorrow, you improve. Every day, every tomorrow, you get better.”

He resettled himself, getting comfortable, and then laid his cheek on my shoulder. His eyes slipped shut as I frowned. Was he… Yeah, he was. He was really going to do it, was going to use me as a pillow. Within minutes, before we were taxiing to the runway, he was asleep.