Page 84 of Over the Line

“No. They weren’t.”

He turned to me again, his expression a mix of begging me to make him believe that, and a barely restrained impulse to tell me I didn’t know what I was talking about.

I sighed and took a swig from my beer. Setting my glass down beside his, I said, “I watched the replays half a dozen times. On the first, your pass would’ve been fine if I’d read you right and been in the right place. You thought I was going one way, I thought you were passing the other way…” I shook my head. “It happens.”

Pursing his lips, he lowered his gaze again. “I should’ve known you were going⁠—”

“You’re not psychic, Chris,” I said quietly. “None of us are. And like, even as good as our line is together—as good as any of us are together—we’re not always going to sync up. Honestly, the whole team’s timing was off. It wasn’t just you.”

He kept his eyes down.

“It was a rough night for everyone,” I insisted. “You didn’t fuck up the game—we all lost this one. It was a joint effort.”

He didn’t budge.

I chewed the inside of my cheek. Then I turned to the other guys. “Hey, Barns. How was your game last night?”

He’d been laughing at something, but he instantly sobered and glared at me. I was pretty sure he was about to bite my head off and demand to know why I was killing his buzz. Then his eyes flicked to Chris and understanding seemed to dawn.

With a heavy sigh, he leaned over his forearms on the table. “Hopefully my worst night for the rest of the season.”

“Yeah? What about you, Temo?”

Temo groaned, shoulders dropping, and he took a long pull from his beer. He muttered something in one of his native languages, shook his head, and then growled, “This was one of those games that keeps us from getting too cocky.”

Chris sat up beside me. “What do you mean?”

“Come on, kid.” Temo offered a lopsided smile. “You know how it goes—we get on a winning streak or have a huge blowout win, and suddenly we think we’re immortal. We slack off a bit.” He raised his bottle. “Then we fuck up on a night when another team is killing it, and they bring us back down to earth.”

That prompted nods and murmurs of agreement around the table.

Lips parted, Chris looked from one teammate to the next.

“See?” I elbowed him. “It’s rough, but we have games like this every season.”

“Yeah, we do.” Craws huffed a laugh. To Chris, he said, “Didn’t you hear about that game against Minneapolis right before you got called up last year?”

Chris shifted in his chair. “That was… a pretty bad loss, wasn’t it?”

All the guys at the table who’d played that game, myself included, laughed.

“A pretty bad loss?” Barns snorted. “Man, that one was for the record books.”

“Really?” Chris turned to me, eyebrows up. “It was really that bad?”

“Oh, God, yeah. A 7-1 loss is bad enough. But they were down like four of their biggest players, their offense had been trash for weeks, and their goalie was…” I waved a hand.

“Their goalie was out to fucking lunch,” Barns grumbled. “He made less saves than I did, but he only let in one goal.”

Temo huffed a humorless laugh. “He would’ve had to work a lot harder if we’d gotten the puck on their net once in a while.”

Chris swallowed. “What… what happened that night?”

“Same thing that happened last night,” Craws said. “We’d been doing good for a while, and we’d just had a couple of huge back-to-back wins. So we took our foot off the gas.” He gestured at the whole table. “All of us.”

“Coach was pissed, too,” Barns said.

Nodding, Temo murmured, “I haven’t bag skated that much since juniors.”