Page 43 of Game Changer
“Hey! Shit! You’re that big superstar guy!” she slurred.
“Come on, darlin’,” Zullo said, giving Scott a hard look as he guided the woman past him.
“Video meeting tomorrow morning at nine sharp,” Scott called after him.
Zullo ignored him and got into an elevator.
Scott sighed. This was going to be a pain in the ass for Zullo’s roommate. The team had a policy of placing older players with younger ones in hotel rooms on the road. Scott, as captain, usually roomed with rookies and new additions to the team. It was a system that typically worked well, and kept a lot of the younger players out of trouble. But sometimes the older players were the problems.
Scott took the next elevator up to the team’s floor. He didn’t know what room Zullo was in, so he walked the hall a bit until he heard a door open. Sure enough, Zullo’s young roommate, a French-Canadian kid named Brisebois, wandered into the hall. He looked like he had been asleep.
If Scott knocked on the door and tried to talk to Zullo, it would just turn into a fight that would wake everyone on the floor up. He’d talk to him tomorrow.
“Hey, Breezy,” he said to the sleepy young defenseman. “Come on down to my room. I’ll get a cot sent up.”
* * *
Kip sat across from Elena at a table in a little Mexican restaurant in midtown.
“So...does it look okay?” he asked.
“It’s fine. I made some notes. I emailed them to you before I left to meet you.”
Kip pulled out his phone.
“You can read them later, dummy,” she said. “The cover letter was very good. Your résumé is fine. It’s just a few notes.”
“Okay.”
“So what’s this news you have for me?”
Kip grinned, and then ducked his head to hide it.
“Oh my god. You’re in love,” she said.
“No!” Kip said quickly. “I’m not inlove. I just... I’ve been seeing someone.”
“Oh?Seeing?Not justsleeping with?”
“Well...mostly sleeping with. But it’s becoming more than that. I think. I hope.”
“All right.”
“It’s, uh, you know... Scott.”
“Scott. As in—”
Kip’s eyes darted around them and he leaned in. “Yeah. Exactly who you’re thinking. And I know it’s pretty unbelievable, but...yeah. We’ve been hooking up. And he wants me to...”
He trailed off. He suddenly felt embarrassed. Somehow, when Scott wasn’t actuallythere, the whole thing seemed like a fever dream.
“He wants you to...go steady?” Elena guessed.
Kip rolled his eyes. “Sure. Or, like,date. Like...be boyfriends. Or whatever.”
“Secret boyfriends?”
“For now,” Kip said, with as much dignity as he could muster.
