Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 69919 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69919 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
“I love kids, but no one ever said coaching them was easy.”
He snickered as I skated away.
I rounded up the girls and gave them a little pep talk before letting them practice shooting into the net. Without a goalie, they didn’t have any barriers, but most of them didn’t have good aim anyway.
“Hey, Jolie, you coming out with us after this?” Jana, the only other female coach at the camp right now, called out to me as we changed in the women’s locker room. My feet still hadn’t adjusted to being on skates again and I was so glad to take them off.
“Where are you going?” I asked curiously, massaging the ball of my foot.
“Over to Harley’s for wings and whatever.” She leaned over and lowered her voice. “Michael Boone is going. Is he gorgeous or what?” She had a dreamy look on her face and I nearly rolled my eyes.
“I guess he’s all right. Personally, I’m done with hockey players. He’s all yours.”
“But are you coming?”
“I don’t know. I have to be at my lab in the morning.”
“There’s never a better time to get back on the horse, you know?” She gave me a serious look.
Jeez. Did everyone know about my freakin’ wedding disaster?
Well, I certainly wasn’t going to talk about it to someone I’d only known for three days.
“Who else is going?” I asked instead.
“I think the whole volunteer staff from the camp and some of their significant others. There’s about twelve of us so far.”
“Let me think about it,” was all I said.
I rarely went out, but I was hungry. It couldn’t hurt to have a beer, some chicken wings and hang out with the other volunteers.
“Is my dad going?” I asked suddenly.
“Oh. No, he said he had to go home.”
Thank god.
The last thing I wanted to do was hang out with my dad right now. If I had to listen to him tell me how much Jarvis missed me one more time, I might vomit.
I probably should have gone home too, but the rumbling in my stomach reminded me there wasn’t much in the way of groceries there. And I was starving after all the skating I’d done tonight.
“I guess I can go for one beer,” I said at last.
“Awesome! You can be my wingman.” She paused. “Wing-girl. Wing-person?”
“You’ll probably be sorely disappointed in my wing-person skills,” I said, chuckling.
“Can’t be worse than my flirting skills.”
Yeah, it could.
CHAPTER FIVE
Boone
“You’re looking better every day, man,” I told my teammate Sawyer on our drive to Harley’s. “Saw you smoking those seven-year-olds on skating drills.”
“Fuck you,” he said smoothly. “It’s not easy coming back when you become one with your couch for as long as I did.”
Sawyer was in a bad place following his wife’s death—drinking so much we’d had to hold a minor interventionbut he’d finally pulled himself back up and reentered the land of the living. He was practicing and traveling with the team again but hadn’t returned to games yet.
“We’re gonna put that little guy Teddy in goal at the next youth practice and let you take some shots,” Nash said to Sawyer.
“The five-year-old?” I furrowed my brow. “I don’t know if Sawyer’s ready for that, man.”
Nash shrugged. “Well, it’ll either build Sawyer’s confidence or Teddy’s.”
From the passenger seat, Sawyer held up both middle fingers, making sure Nash saw them from the driver’s seat and I saw them from the back seat. It was damn good to see some life in him again, and I knew he’d be back in fighting form soon. In the meantime, we made fun of him because that was what teammates did.
“Speaking of confidence,” Nash said, meeting my gaze in the rearview mirror, “you’ve got nads of steel talking to Gizzard’s daughter so much.”
“It wasn’t that much,” I said.
Sawyer scoffed. “I’ve never even made eye contact with her, dude. And I never will.”
“It’s not her fault her dad’s an overbearing asshole,” I said. “I’m not going to ignore her.”
“I still can’t believe you picked her up in the church parking lot,” Nash said. “Does Coach know about that yet?”
“I think Jolie told him. She said she didn’t really give me a choice.”
“Is that the truth?” Nash asked, his tone skeptical.
“Yeah, it was either drive away and risk running over her foot or let her in the car.”
“I’m not sure which way I would’ve gone on that,” Nash said.
He pulled his new Escalade into the parking lot of Harley’s and found a spot. We were walking toward the front door when Sawyer gave me a serious look.
“Hey, how’s your brother doing?” he asked.
He asked about Andy regularly. Sawyer had lost his wife Annie to cancer, and I felt like he understood its toll better than my other teammates.
“Hanging in there,” I said. “He’s really sick from the chemo.”
“It’s a bitch.”
“It’s hard for him that his wife has to take care of everything.”