Page 8 of Slapshot
“Is it the dog face? Or the red hair? I know they say redheads are great in the sack, but have some dignity, man.”
Normally, I would have ignored Chet until he lost interest, but Blair was due to walk through the double doors behind the loudmouth any second, and she didn’t need to hear him wasting oxygen about this shit.
“I’m not trying to nail her, okay? Just doing my job.”
Doyle’s mouth quirked in a nasty way that told me things were about to get worse.
“Is that because you can’t? Yeah, that’s it. She’s turned you down.”
“No.”
“One hundred bucks says you can’t bang her before playoffs.”
The locker room was oddly quiet, and I wished someone would do something to take the attention off the train wreck I seemed to be in.
“I’m not making a bet to bang someone. It’s juvenile and really fucking disrespectful.”
Chet scoffed. “Fucking doesn’t need to be disrespectful. Hell, her body seems half decent under all the shitty fashion choices. Put a paper bag over her head and put her on her knees.”
“Fuck off, Doyle.”
“Seriously. Maybe getting laid will be good for you. Practice on her and build your game for the bunnies.” He cocked his head in faux sympathy. “Have you forgotten how it all works?”
My grip tightened on the skates I was returning to their spot in my cubby.
I certainly wasn’t considering using them to shut up my teammate. Noooooo. Not at all.
Out in the hall, a feminine laugh echoed far too closely to the locker room doors.
“Leave it. She’s just outside.”
He held his arms wide, turning to take in the rest of the team as they all sat around with varying degrees of dislike on their faces. “Maybe she deserves to know the truth. That she can’t even get laid when there’s money on the table.” The sneer that lifted his lip turned the asshole into something as ugly as his words. As he spoke, he increased his volume until I was sure Blair could hear every word.
“She should know that the great Cian O’Leary would rather abstain from sex and give me money to—”
The door cracked open.
“Fuck, alright fine. Just shut up.”
Satisfied that he’d won this round, Doyle turned toward the doorway.
“Oh, hi Blair,” he said with a smug grin.
“Ahhh, hi, Chet. How’s it going?” she asked, noting how every set of eyes in the room was trained on her.
“Is everything alright, guys?” As though the room had taken a collective inhale, chatter returned in a rush, and I flopped on the bench in front of my locker, surreptitiously watching Blair for any sign she may have heard the previous discussion.
“That was a bad idea, man,” Oscar whispered, whipping a towel around his hips.
“Like I had a choice. I couldn’t let her hear that,” I grumbled.
The look he gave me warned I may still have chosen the worst of the two options.
I hoped he wasn’t right.
Blair
“For the love of God,please just…” I added more water to the front section of my hair, finger curling like my life depended on it. I’d tried every version of curl friendly styling to tame my nest of hair with varying degrees of success, but most of the time I gelled it to my head in a bun when I needed to look put together. Tonight, I wanted to try something different, and I wasn’t about to look too closely at the why of it.
