Page 59 of I'm Your Guy
“It’s really loud inside my head. And I can’t say I’m dealing with it very well.”
“Huh. You know what? I used to be like you.”
The hair stands up on my arms. “What? What do you mean?”
“I used to churn on the shit that bothered me. Kept myself up at night.”
“Oh.” I relax a few degrees. “So what did you do about it?”
“Nothing.” He snickers. “I wore a groove around the same bullshit for years. But then I met Gavin. He more or less told me that we couldn’t be together until I figured out how to process some of my own crap. So I did that, and life got better.”
“Oh,” I say again. I’m a brilliant conversationalist today.
“You got a lot going on,” he says. “Coach is pissed off at you. And moving is hard, right?”
“Yeah. Very hard,” I lie.
Last night the only very hard thing in my life had been in my shorts.
Luckily, it’s a short drive to our rink, and we get there without any further issues. It’s game night, so we have a brief skate and a video meeting. Coach Powers spends most of the meeting picking apart Vancouver’s offense in preparation for tonight. But then he touches briefly upon our next few opponents.
When I see Trenton’s red jerseys appear, I get heartburn immediately.
I’m not the only one, either. Robbie Hessler, another defenseman, lets out a groan. Then he elbows me. “You’d better not be injured this time. I need your sharp elbows against those goons.”
“Not a problem,” I mumble.
Except it is. Every time we have to play that team, I have a week’s worth of high anxiety beforehand. For good reason. Marco will spend the game trying to get me to fight him. And I’ll spend the game avoiding it.
Last year, we avoided the typical showdown, because Marco had some kind of injury that kept him off the ice for our first matchup. Then, later in the season, I had a shoulder injury that kept me off for two games, and when Coach Powers somehow extended it to three, I was a scratch for the second Trenton game.
When I’d asked Coach about it, he’d said, “I want you rested.” Although he might have meant, “I want to keep you out of the gossip blogs.”
I guess I’ll never know.
But our first Trenton game is coming up fast. And seeing Marco’s ugly face on the screen at the front of the room isn’t doing anything for my attitude right now.
The video session finally ends, and I push back my chair.
“Five more minutes, guys,” Coach says. “Tate needs a word.”
The PR guy comes strutting up to the podium and sets a shopping bag on it. “Hey, kids. Three things.”
I hold back a sigh.
“First, let’s have those RSVPs for the black-tie events. Second, we’re doing a gift-wrapping party on the eighteenth. This year we broke our own record and purchased four hundred gifts for homeless children in Colorado. But those gifts need wrapping. Five o’clock right here in the building, okay? Wives, girlfriends, and boyfriends are encouraged to help out.”
“What about kids?” someone asks.
“If they can wrap, I want ’em.” Tate reaches into the shopping bag. “Last thing—a quick vote. We’ve got two possible designs for the new Pride jerseys. These will be available to fans beginning immediately after Newgate’s announcement. Here’s the first one.” He shakes out a blue jersey with a printed logo on the front.
And I stare.
It’s… Wow. There’s no getting around it. The jersey is hideous. The cougar has been redone in an anime style that ought to look cool, but Tate must have hired a discount illustrator. Because it’s awful. The cat looks like a baby bunny with a rainbow between its claws.
“What’s, um, the other one?” Newgate asks.
With a white-toothed grin, Tate pulls another jersey out of the bag. Unfortunately, it’s the same bad styling but in a different pose, and this time they’ve splashed the whole logo in pastel rainbows.
