On the Fly by Catherine Gayle Read Free Book Online

didn’t have the wherewithal
to keep my trap shut when it needed to be.
    I kept my head down,
staring at the tape around my wrist. “Those fuckers are winning
right now because we’re leaving the D out to dry,” I said. My voice was
quiet, but all the talk in the room dropped off instantly. “They
aren’t a better team than us, but we’re letting them look like it
because none of our forwards are thinking about anything but
scoring. Everyone knows we can fucking score. That’s not the
problem. The problem is keeping the damn puck out of our own
net.”
    I finally looked up and saw Harry
staring at me with a look of pure relief. His name wasn’t really
Harry. It was Cody Williams, but everyone called him Harry because
he looked like Prince Harry—bright-red hair that made me think of
Rachel Shaw and her kids, who were the last people I needed to be
thinking about right now. I needed to be thinking about what else
had to be said to these guys since I’d taken it upon myself to
speak up.
    Harry should be the one talking, but
he was sitting there and looking at me like I’d just saved the
day.
    “ This isn’t my team
anymore, boys,” I finally said. I made sure I was staring right
back at Harry, just as hard as he was staring at me. “It’s your
fucking team. I’m heading back to Portland tomorrow, and the lot of
you are stuck with each other. You can either keep playing for
yourselves, focusing only on your own game and how best to make
yourself stand out to management and scouts, or you can start
playing like a fucking team, like Glen wants you to play. And I can
tell you one more thing,” I said. I couldn’t seem to make myself
stop. “The best way to get their attention is by playing within the
system and making that work for your game, not by trying to be a
showboat. That means the forwards need to fucking help the D . We need to score
another goal, yeah, but we also have to keep the damn puck out of
our own net.”
    After that, I finally shut up. My
silence was overdue. Way overdue.
    The horn sounded, signaling that we
had two more minutes before the third period would begin. That
meant we had to get back out to the ice.
    “ Let’s get back out there
and take it to them!” Glen Garner said. He was the head coach here
in Seattle. He’d been the coach here last year, too, when I was the team captain up
until Jim Sutter put in the call for me to join the big
club.
    Glen was all about motivation and
teaching. He was never the sort of coach who’d yell at you or
berate you for all the things you were doing wrong—like I’d just
done. He was more the guy who’d tell you the things you were doing
right, and then point out a few things you could do better. In a
way, they were the same thing. But it was always nicer to hear
criticism worded in a way that didn’t feel like an
attack.
    I liked him. He was a great
guy to have coaching the young prospects. When you’re first
learning how to be a professional athlete, it’s important to have
someone in your corner. If you were on Glen’s team, he would do
anything and everything he could to help you, even if what was best
for you wasn’t
necessarily ideal for the rest of the team . He wanted every player to
perform to the top of his abilities, whatever that meant, while at
the same time finding a way to use those abilities to help the club
as a whole.
    He’d done some of that with me last
season, suggesting the NHL club take me instead of one of the
younger guys when all the injuries started piling up. I probably
wouldn’t have been offered the contract I had been without that
nudge from Glen.
    During this conditioning assignment,
he had been giving me all the top-line minutes Jim had promised I’d
get, but I couldn’t wait to get back to Portland. I hadn’t been
able to get Rachel Shaw out of my mind, especially with the way
she’d blushed right before I left and the knowledge that she was
going to be living right across the hall from me.
    Yeah,