Page 81 of Hard Hitter
The team frequently stayed at the hundred-year-old Chateau, probably because Nate Kattenberger liked it. On the outside it looked like a stone castle, complete with turrets and towers and a peaked copper roof. The river swept by, a ribbon of gray in the fading twilight.
Inside the lobby, the team gathered beside one of the oak-paneled walls, waiting for rooming assignments. Even in his thousand-dollar suit, O’Doul felt like an imposter. Fusty, old-guard places always made him ill at ease, even in a room full of hockey players who didn’t care which fork he used at the fancy restaurant later.
He just feltofftoday. They needed this win, but the game had him on edge. They were ranked higher than Ottawa, but there were no guarantees. And it was still unclear whether he or Crikey would take tomorrow’s fight.
None of that had him so ruffled, though, as the fact that he’d spilled his guts to Ari last night and then slipped a gift into her bag. O’Doul thought he knew what it meant to be vulnerable. Usually it meant letting a giant on skates swinghis fist into his face. But the toughest fight in the NHL now paled in comparison to laying his heart—and his awful history—at Ari’s feet.
She hadn’t brought up their midnight trip through his horrible childhood this morning. They’d gotten up late because of Ari’s headache. And when they finally did rouse themselves, she was in such pain that conversation—aside from her profuse apologies for getting wasted with her friends in his apartment—didn’t happen.
Now she was only ten yards away, but it might as well have been ten thousand miles. Sitting on a velvet sofa with Georgia, her dark, wavy hair gleaming under the soft light of the chandeliers, the sight of her was like a low-grade ache in his chest. He’d always made fun of his teammates who’d lost their heads over a woman. But he got it now. There’d been a lot of things he’d yearned for in his life. A quiet place to sleep, where nobody would jump him. A fine meal. A good glass of Scotch. And winning—he’d always wanted to win.
Wanting Ari wasn’t like any of those other wants. It was far more terrifying. In the first place, there was too much that was out of his control. He’d always been able to say:if I just work a little harder, I can have this. If I just put in the hours. That wasn’t the case with Ari. Even as he dreamt up the next romantic thing he might do for her, he knew it might never be enough. She could decide that a punk from the wrong end of Minneapolis wasn’t what she needed in her life.
There wouldn’t be a damn thing he could do about it.
Jimbo came over eventually and passed out room keys. “Bayer. Beacon. Trevi...” He handed them over, and one by one the players headed for the elevator banks. “O’Doul.”
He took his key with a glance at the velvet sofa. The women were already gone. He went upstairs, his footsteps hushed by thick carpets beneath his feet. He let himself into a room with a four-poster bed piled high with ornamental pillows. He set his bag on a fussy upholstered bench and walked over to the heavily draped window to peer out at the city lights. The first eighteen years of his life had been livedwithin a thirty mile radius of the hospital where he was born.
The first time he was ever on a plane was when the Long Island team had invited him to participate in a training camp. He’d been busting his butt for an ECHL team, making five hundred dollars a week. In the summer he worked for a landscaping company, mowing lawns and planting hydrangeas.
Then all of a sudden he’s on a jet to LaGuardia.
“Where’s your suit and tie?” Hugh Major had asked him when he’d stepped off the plane. Those were the first words Hugh ever spoke to him.
“I don’t have one,” he’d had to say.
Hugh had gotten one of the office assistants to drive him to a Brooks Brothers. In the store, the salesman had asked him questions about how he wanted to be fitted. All the words were unfamiliar. “Break” and “spread” and “flat front.” He didn’t have any idea what they were asking him. He’d bought the suit, and he’d had to use both of his credit cards to pay for it, all the time praying that he’d make the roster, if only to pay off his suit.
The team put him up in a cheap hotel right under the JFK airport flight path, and his dreams were filled with sonic booms.
Fast forward a decade, and he was wearing a three-hundred-dollar shirt and peering out the window of a five-star hotel. He’d been to each of the thirty NHL cities, and then some. But there were days when it all seemed like some kind of cosmic joke, where he was sure he was the punchline.
There was a tap on the connecting door. “Patrick?” Ari’s voice was muffled from the other side.
He crossed the room in four paces. “Ari?” He opened his side of the door, and there she was. “Hi, sweetheart. You’re my neighbor again.”
“Becca has fun deciding who’s next to whom,” she said, not quite meeting his eyes. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
His stomach dropped a notch. “Of course.” He steppedback and she entered the room carrying the box he’d slipped into her bag, and a worried expression. His stomach dropped all the way to the soles of his expensive dress shoes.
“This is beautiful,” she said, finally lifting her soft gaze to his. “But I can’t take it. When I told you that I couldn’t be in a relationship right now, I wasn’t kidding. My life is messy.”
“I know, baby.” He took a half step forward, meaning to pull her into his arms, but something in her expression stopped him. She reached forward, offering the box. He took it reluctantly. “Sit down a second,” he said.
She hesitated. “Okay.”
He turned, removing his suit coat and tossing it on the bed. Then he sat down at one end of a smallish couch with carved wooden legs. Ari took the other side. He tapped the box. “This isn’t a fancy piece of jewelry. I wasn’t trying to buy your affection. It’s your birthstone, and it was just a gimmicky way to show you that I was paying attention. It doesn’t have to be a big deal.”
Her eyes were a little shiny by the time she spoke again. “It’s the classiest gift I’ve ever gotten. But I already knew you were paying attention. You show me that every day.” She swallowed hard. “The thing is, what I really need in my life right now is not a relationship, but afriend. Can you be that?”
An hour ago he would have thought it would be devastating to be rejected by the only woman he’d ever really wanted. But there she sat, two feet away, needing him to understand. So while he wished her decision were different, it wasn’t hard to agree. Sliding down the sofa a foot or so, he gathered her into a hug against his favorite tie. “I care about you too much to say no.”
“Thank you.” She took a deep breath and wrapped her arms around him. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t you be sorry. I’m a big boy. But can you do me a favor?”
“What?”
