On the Fly by Catherine Gayle Read Free Book Online Page A

she was far from the type of
girl I’d usually date, but maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. And
there was the definite complication of her kids and all that having
them around would entail. But I wanted to see her again. I wanted
to find out why she didn’t date. I wanted to convince her to date
me. I wanted to make her blush again, because she looked even more
beautiful when she was blushing.
    I probably wanted that last one a
little too much. She had this porcelain, china-doll skin, and with
those freckles, it turned the most amazing red when she blushed—so
deep the freckles almost disappeared.
    It didn’t help that Babs had texted me
a few days ago to tell me how he and Razor had helped her move in a
bunch of boxes and set up her furniture, and that she’d fed the two
of them. Hot dogs and mac and cheese—exactly the sort of meal kids
like, and exactly the sort of food young guys like Babs and Razor
still crave, even though it wasn’t what they should be fueling
their bodies with.
    At least it meant that Babs got to
eat, though.
    And at least she got some help with
things a woman didn’t need to do by herself. Moving furniture and
boxes was hard work even for big, fit guys.
    I needed to stop thinking about her so
much, especially right now. I had the last period of this game to
worry about—twenty minutes of hockey where I needed to play to the
absolute best of my ability, especially after telling these guys
how they hadn’t been, laying it all out there.
    The boys all got up and started
heading through the tunnel to the ice. One goal wasn’t too much to
make up, not with the bunch of highly skilled offensive prospects
the Storm had playing.
    Glen held me back for just a second
before I could skate out with the rest of the guys. “You said
exactly what they needed to hear, you know?”
    “ Yeah,” I mumbled. I knew
they needed to hear it. But they needed to hear it from one of
their own, not from me.
    “ Just keep playing like
this when you get back to Portland, okay? Don’t change anything
about your game.”
    I nodded and started to push past him,
but he held me back again.
    “ Don’t brush me off on
this,” he said. “Hockey is just hockey, no matter what level you’re
playing at. You were trying too hard earlier in the season. Last
season, too. That’s why you got hurt.”
    He was right, and I knew
it, and it pissed me off. I didn’t know how to not try too hard, though. Not when I
needed to show the world that I belonged, needed to prove to Jim
Sutter that he hadn’t made a mistake in taking a chance on me,
needed to prove to myself that I wasn’t destined to be a career
minor leaguer, nothing more than a journeyman going from team to
team and league to league in a desperate attempt to prove my
value.
    “ Yeah. All right,” I
said.
    Glen slapped a hand on my shoulder
pad. “At this level, you’ve got all the confidence in the world.
Just take that back to Portland with you. Slow the game down. Let
it come to you. You’ve been trying to force it, and that never
works.”
    I kicked the toe of my skate against
the locker room wall, not looking at him. “It’s easy to say those
things, but it’s fucking hell to actually do them.”
    “ Yeah.” He headed down the
tunnel. “But that’s why you’re making the big bucks this year.
You’ve got to figure out how. So do it.”
    If only I had a clue how to let
go.

 

     
     

    I got on the road early Sunday morning, well before dawn, not even
sticking around for breakfast with the boys I’d been hanging out
with for the last week. I didn’t see any reason to stay in Seattle
any longer than I had to, even though I didn’t have to be back in
Portland to join the NHL club until Monday. Besides, I still felt
weird about having been the one to speak up last night when it
should have been one of them.
    By the time I got back to the condo, I
was ravenous. Once I’d parked, I grabbed my suitcase and made my
way to the elevator. It was only