On the Fly (2 page)

Zee gave me a nod, but that was all.
He had work to do, and I still wasn’t allowed to be part of it due
to my status on the injured reserve list.

Hammer slapped me on the shoulder
while I was still fighting to breathe. “Nice work, Soupy. After you
get cleaned up and see the doctor, Jim wants a word in his
office.”

I wasn’t surprised Jim Sutter, the
Storm’s general manager, wanted to see me. All signs pointed to me
being cleared for contact for tomorrow. If all went well, then I
could be back in the lineup for Friday’s game against the
Pittsburgh Penguins.

“
Yeah, will do,
Hammer.”

He skated away from me, over to the
far end of the ice to join the boys for the day’s practice. I made
my way to the showers and then to see Dr. Mitchell, the team’s head
physician.

Doc took a new set of scans to make
sure everything was as it should be. He looked them over, then
poked and prodded my foot, looking at it from every angle. “No pain
after skating today?”

Pain was all relative, and
I couldn’t think of a time in recent memory that I could say I
had
no
pain.
Anyone who’d suffered as many injuries in his career as I had would
be in a similar position. “It’s a little tender,” I said. “Nothing
I can’t fight through, and nothing that won’t be better after more
use.”

“
How close to ready are
you?” Doc put another film up in front of the light, narrowing his
eyes at it. “Seventy percent? Eighty?”

“
One hundred percent ready
to go.” I couldn’t stand sitting around any longer than I had to.
The thought of spending even another week watching from the press
box with my foot in a walking boot made me feel physically ill. “A
little tenderness won’t make me any slower than I already
am.”

“
Hmm.”

What the fuck did
hmm
mean? Doc wouldn’t
even look at me. He just kept studying my films, flipping through
my medical chart.

“
So am I cleared?” I asked,
not even attempting to hide my frustration. It wasn’t his fault,
but I was
this
close to going insane from being forced to watch from the
sidelines. “Can I get back in a game?”

He didn’t answer me. Instead, he
scribbled some notes on a notepad that looked like a prescription
pad, ripped it off, and put it in an envelope. “You’re heading up
to see Jim, right? Give him this.”

Then he handed me the envelope and
left, taking my charts and films with him.

Asswipe
. He could have just answered my question. How hard would that
have been? It would have taken two seconds.

But he hadn’t.

I made my way up to the next level of
the building where all the offices for the team executives were
located.

At the end of the main hall, in front
of a large corner office, Martha Alvarez tucked her silver-gray
hair behind her ear and pushed her bifocals up her nose, never even
glancing over her computer monitor at me. She was Jim’s assistant,
and probably the most efficient person I’d ever met. Nothing ever
slipped past her; nothing got lost in the shuffle. If you needed
anything, Martha could either handle it or direct you to someone
who could.

“
Go on in, Campbell,” she
said. “Jim’s expecting you.” She pushed a plate of homemade cookies
closer to the edge of her desk so I’d see them. Not that I would
have missed them. I’d learned early in my time with the Storm that
Martha always had cookies at her desk, and I had made a habit of
taking full advantage of that fact. It reminded me of my
mom.

Martha was one of the few people in
the world who didn’t call me Soupy. My family called me Brenden,
and Martha called me Campbell. Jim would flip between all of them
indiscriminately. He’d played with my dad for a few years, and Dad
had always been Soupy to his teammates, too. The use of nicknames
is universal in the hockey world, and there is no nickname more
readily at a guy’s tongue than Soupy for someone with the last name
Campbell.

“
Thanks, Martha,” I said.
She didn’t acknowledge me, too absorbed in whatever she was doing.
I grabbed two cookies and knocked on the open door. “You wanted to
see me?” I said when Jim Sutter spun his executive chair
around.

He nodded and pointed to the chair
across from him. “How’d it feel skating? I told Hammer to really
push you, see what you could handle.”

“
Felt good.” As good as an
intense skate could feel after spending more than a month off my
feet, at least. I shoved the envelope across the desk to him. “Doc
asked me to give you this.”

“
No pain? No tenderness?”
Jim pulled Doc’s note out and scanned it, looking through the lower
part of his glasses. “Doc says you were pretty winded still when
you got to him and that you had some tenderness when he prodded
your foot.”

“
I’ll be back in game shape
in no time. One or two games, that’s all it’ll take.” It was easier
to get the kind of conditioning you needed to play hockey by
actually
playing
hockey, more so than skating laps or spending hours on an
exercise bike.

“
Hmm.”

I was beginning to
hate
hmm
.

“
Did he clear me for
contact?” I asked when Jim still didn’t elaborate. “I’m ready, Jim.
I can contribute. Waiting a few more days or another week won’t
change that.”

He set the note down on his desk and
took off his glasses. “Doc cleared you. You’re good to join back in
full practices with contact starting tomorrow.”

It was about time.

He folded in the earpieces of his
glasses and set them on the desk. “But…”

But
was worse than
hmm
. By a fucking mile. I was already grinding my jaw—couldn’t
stop myself—and I didn’t have a clue what was coming.

“
I need you to get back up
to game speed before you jump into a game,” he said. “The boys have
been on a pretty good roll lately, really working together and
picking up points at a nice clip. I don’t want to mess with that
chemistry by bringing someone in who isn’t up to par.”

He was sending me back down to the
AHL—to the Seattle Storm, the minor league affiliate of the
Portland Storm. He didn’t even have to say the words. I could read
it all over his face. I’d had enough conversations with enough GMs
in my career to know. “This is bullshit, Jim. One game. That’s all
it’ll take.”

He had a placating look in his eye
that made me want to punch him. “I can’t afford to have you chasing
the game for even one night, Brenden. I don’t need the boys trying
to pick up your slack. This won’t be a permanent
reassignment—”

“
No, just until you trade
my ass somewhere else,” I bit off. “Or are you hoping someone will
pick me up on waivers?”

“
Would you calm down for
just a minute? I’m not trading you. I have no plans to trade you.
You’re not going on waivers.”

Not going on waivers? That one tripped
me up. I sat back in my chair and tried to calm down. I usually had
a better grip on my temper, but sitting around with nothing to do
for weeks had been eating at me from the inside. “Sorry,” I
mumbled.

“
I want to send you to
Seattle on a conditioning assignment. The Collective Bargaining
Agreement says you have to consent to the assignment, though, so we
need to talk about it.”

“
I don’t want to go to
Seattle. I want to play here.”

“
I know you do. We want you
to, as well.” Jim leaned forward, his elbows propping him up on his
desk. “Here’s the deal. Scotty and I watched you with Hammer out
there today. We don’t think you’re ready to get back in a game, not
with how the boys have been playing without you. If you go to
Seattle, you’ll play tomorrow. If you stay here, you’ll keep
working with Hammer and watching from the press box until Scotty
thinks you’ve earned your way back into the lineup—or until one of
the guys gets hurt or stops performing as well as he needs to. That
might be a few games. It might be a few weeks. We need you to be as
good as we know you can be from the minute you step out on the ice.
Anything less isn’t enough.”

It might not be as bad as I’d
initially assumed, but I still didn’t want to do it. “But you need
my okay?” I was trying to determine which would be worse—getting
sent back to the minors for a few games or sitting in the press box
for a few more.

“
It would only be for a
week. Seattle has three games on the schedule, all at home. No
travel. You’d get top-line minutes, and then you’d be back with
us.”

“
You swear you’re not going
to put me on waivers as soon as this conditioning assignment is
up?”

“
I didn’t sign you over the
summer for you to get paid that kind of money and play in Seattle,”
Jim said. “I signed you to play here.”

I knew he was telling it to me
straight, but my natural instinct was to be distrustful of GMs. Too
many of them had given up on me. Too many had told me one thing and
done another. It didn’t matter that he was one of Dad’s old
buddies. I had a really hard time trusting Jim Sutter on this, even
though he personally had done nothing to earn my
distrust.

“
Yeah,” I said.
“Right.”

“
They’ll be expecting you
in time for tomorrow morning’s practice. I’ll have Martha arrange a
hotel for you, and we’ll see you back here in a week.”

I started to argue again, even though
I didn’t know what my argument would be when I’d opened my mouth,
but Martha knocked and opened the door, stopping me before anything
came out.

“
Rachel Shaw’s here,
Jim.”

“
Tell her I’ll be right
with her,” he said. Then he turned back to me. “So you’ll do this
conditioning assignment, right? You’re not going to fight me on it?
I believe this is what’s best both for you and for the
Storm.”

I scowled. If I went to
Seattle, at least I would be put in some games. Not the games I
wanted to be in, but it was something. He’d made no bones about
what would happen if I stayed in Portland.
Damn it.
“Yeah, I’ll go.”

He got up and shook my hand, and I
made my way out.

I was fuming so much that I
almost ran headfirst into the most hauntingly beautiful, petite
redhead I’d ever laid eyes on. She took three quick steps backward,
and I put out my hand to help steady her. Her green eyes went wide,
and her lips parted into an
O
. It was like Tinkerbell had
sprinkled fairy dust all over her nose and cheeks and left freckles
behind.

She was totally not my type, or at
least not my usual type. I tend to go for leggy brunettes, girls
who were completely put together in every conceivable way. This
woman couldn’t look more out of place. Her clothes were probably
from a thrift shop and didn’t fit her well, her hair was running
riot out of her ponytail holder, her coat wasn’t nearly heavy
enough for the local weather, and the fabric of her purse was dingy
and covered in what looked to be cat hair.

Despite all of that, I couldn’t stop
staring at her.

Holy
shit
.

“
I’m sorry,” I said when I
pulled myself back together again. “I should have been paying
attention to where I was going.”

“
It’s fine. I’m
fine.”

She didn’t look fine, though. She
looked terrified. I really hoped I wasn’t the reason for her fear,
but I figured I was. She gave a brief shake of her head and
separated herself from me. In a single movement, she tucked a wild
curl behind her ear and settled her purse strap more fully over her
shoulder. Then she made a wide circle around me, going with Martha
into Jim’s office, peeking over her shoulder at me as she
disappeared inside.

So this was Rachel Shaw, then. Whoever
Rachel Shaw was.

“
Yeah. All right,” I said
to her back. I spent too long watching her before heading back down
to the locker room. I figured I should go ahead and sort out what
gear I needed to take with me. I couldn’t get her out of my head,
though. She definitely had a nice ass, this Rachel Shaw. Very nice.
Curvy, over her short legs.

And that was pretty much the last
thing in the world I needed to be thinking about, the curvy ass of
some random, little redhead with fairy-dust freckles.

Not when I had to prove to myself and
everyone else I should be playing in the NHL.