Page 55 of Over the Line

One of them, yeah. There’s some issues with the bottom six forwards and one of the D pairs, and Coach wants me to unfuck them.

Sounds like fun.

(skull emoji)

He went quiet after that, so he was probably getting ready for the meeting in question.

Chris pinged me on FaceTime a few minutes later, so he apparently didn’t need to attend the meeting. Made sense, since he was a top six forward. Either way, I didn’t ask, because I didn’t need him to know that I even knew about the meeting.

Why do I feel so guilty? Liam and I are just texting.

I couldn’t even come up with a rational reason why I needed to hide that from Chris. Maybe because I couldn’t explain why we were communicating at all? Because I was afraid he’d dig enough and find out that Liam and I had brushed up against doing more than communicating?

Well, whatever. I kept it under my hat, and Chris didn’t give me any reason to believe he suspected I was hiding something. We talked about the upcoming game, and he told me about a bar down the street from the hotel where the guys would be hanging out later.

“I guess it’s just your average sports bar,” he said, “but they’re really good about not letting fans mob players or whatever. Even the baseball and basketball teams sometimes hang out there and don’t get bothered.”

“Nice. I guess getting mobbed is one of those things that sounds great on paper—like hey, you’ve got fans—but then when it happens in reality…” I made a face.

“Yeah, Saints and Barns have told me some stories.” He shook his head slowly. “I’ll pass, thanks.”

“I bet.”

“Barns used to play with Gunnar Seversen, back before he retired. I guess he had to have security everywhere he went, especially in Canada and Sweden, because the fans just went nuts over him.” Chris shook his head again, more emphatically this time. “I love having fans, and signing stuff is cool as hell, but that? No, thank you.”

“Yeah, that doesn’t sound fun.”

We chatted a bit longer, and then he let me go so he could meet up with some of the guys for dinner.

I was just starting to make my own dinner when my text tone went off. It wasn’t Chris this time, though.

Liam

Okay, done with THAT noise for the day.

How did it go?

Well, they’ll get their shit together if they know what’s good for them.

I’m here for a while. Want to FT?

My heart sped up. Yes, I absolutely wanted to FaceTime with him. Like, always. I just couldn’t believe that was mutual.

It apparently was, and a moment later, I was situated on my couch with Liam on my screen. “So the meeting went well?”

He nodded. “They usually do. It’s just never fun hearing someone rattle off everything you need to do better. No one enjoys criticism, you know?”

“Yeah, that’s fair. I didn’t even think they were playing badly.”

“They’re…” He quirked his lips and his eyes lost focus. “It’s not so much playing badly. It was mostly that as soon as the other teams did something that caught them off guard, they’d fall apart. Like they’d be fine in our offensive zone, but then the other team would get a breakaway, and suddenly everyone is scrambling and flailing. So I was mostly reminding them that we have to react but not lose our heads.”

“And they have you do that instead of the coaches?”

“The coaches talk about it, too, but sometimes it feels less…” He seemed to think about it. “Sometimes the guys are more receptive when it’s peer-to-peer. When it’s more ‘we need to fix this’ than ‘you need to fix it.’”

“Oh, I can see that. Like the team unfucking the situation rather than the coaches telling them it’s their fault.”

“Kind of. At this level, you take criticism from wherever it comes and don’t complain, but psychology is what it is.”