Page 9 of Her Rival

For one more night, that was enough to walk toward.

4

JETT

The Hideout on a Saturday night after a win was the closest thing to church I'd ever loved.

Not that I'd tell anybody. The whole point of The Hideout was that it wasn't church. It was a dive across the street from the arena, far enough off the Strip that no tourist ever wandered in by accident. Low ceilings, old wood, a kitchen that fried everything in the same oil it had been using since before I got to Vegas. Marco still ran it the way he'd run it for twenty years, which was badly, with love. It smelled like spilled beer and grease and home, and on a night like this one, the whole team packed into the back half, a fresh win in our pocket, it roared.

We'd beaten Phoenix four to one. I'd had two of the four. I was feeling expansive.

"Two goals," Moose was saying, holding up three fingers, because Moose couldn't count when he drank. "Two goals and he won't shut up about it. We get it, Sturgill. You're a hero. You want a medal?"

"I have a medal. It's called the championship. You were there."

"That was a team effort."

"Was it, though? Because I distinctly remember scoring the goal."

"Rhett passed you the goal."

I put my hand to my chest like he'd shot me. "Stone. Are you gonna let him take this from me?"

Rhett (Stone, Rhett, same man, you got used to it) was in the corner of the booth with a tonic water and lime, the way he always was now. Watching us all be morons with that flat little half smile that meant he was having the time of his life and would die before admitting it. He didn't drink anymore, hadn't in years, and nobody made it weird, because nobody was dumb enough to make Rhett Calloway's business their business.

"I passed you the goal," Rhett said.

"Betrayal," I said. "Absolute betrayal. From my own captain. I carried this franchise."

"You're insufferable when we win," Langley said.

"I'm insufferable always. The winning just gives me material."

The table lost it. I leaned back in the booth and let the noise wash over me. All that warm dumb brotherhood. Twenty-some guys who'd bled on the ice together and would do it again Tuesday. And I thought, the way I did about once a week and never said out loud, that I'd trade every dollar I had, and there were a lot of them, before I'd trade this.

Tank slid into the booth across from me with a basket of the loaded fries Marco was always threatening to cut him off from. The conversation rolled the way it always did, downhill and dumb and fast. Somebody relitigated a hit from the second period. Somebody else swore Phoenix's goalie had been chirping in Russian, and Moose, not Russian, did not speak Russian, did an impression of what he imagined Russian chirping sounded like, which was just Moose making noises. Langley laughed so hard he had to put his head down on the table. Rhett watched it all from the corner with that flat half smile, refereeing nothing, saying nothing, the still point the whole loud wheel of us turned around.

This was the part nobody back home would've believed. That a kid from a church where laughter on the wrong day got you a look had grown into a man whose whole job, near as I could tell, was making a room full of enormous violent men laugh until they cried into fried potatoes. I was good at it. Maybe the thing I was best at in the world, better even than hockey. And it was a thing my mother would've prayed over me about.

Their loss, I thought, the way I always did. Their loss.

Brynn came around the bar with a tray of waters nobody had ordered and set them down in front of guys who were three beers deep, because that was the thing Brynn did, mothering us sideways while pretending she wasn't.

"Drink the water," she said. "All of you. I'm not scraping anybody off my floor tonight."

"Your floor?" Moose said. "I thought it was Marco's floor."

"Marco's at his sister's in Reno and I'm closing, so tonight it's my floor, and on my floor you hydrate." She cuffed the back of my head on her way past, light, affectionate. "Especially you, two goals. You've got media Monday and I'm not letting you show up hungover and embarrassing my mother."

That landed funny in my chest. I'd been not-thinking about Monday pretty successfully all night.

"It's gonna be a disaster," I said. "You know that, right? Your mom hand-picked some magazine writer to follow me around and ask me about my feelings. Ninety minutes of me lying."

"Be nice." Brynn pointed a finger at me. "Mom believes in this thing. And the writer's not some random vulture. It's somebody good. Somebody who'll do it right." She got a look on her face, soft and pleased, the one she got about people she loved. "Actually you'll probably like her. She's my person. Known her forever."

"Your person."

"My best friend. From college. She's coming into town to do the piece." Brynn started stacking empties onto her tray. "She's a lot, honestly. Talks fast, zero filter, smarter than everybody in the room and a little mean about it. You two will either get along great or kill each other. There's no in-between with her."