Page 43 of On the Power Play

Delia clicked her tongue. “Okay, Mary says she has a car pulling around to the back alley. She’s going to meet us at the studio.” She set her phone in her lap. “I’m sorry about this.”

Jack shook his head. “No, I was going to apologize. The same thing happened to me outside of practice last night.”

“Really?”

Jack grinned. “Don’t look so shocked.”

“I’m not shocked, just relieved. Or grateful?” Her cheeks flushed, and she grabbed her glass, coaxing the last trickle of pink juice from around the ice cubes at the bottom up her straw. “Not that I want anyone else’s life to be disrupted, but it can be a bit lonely.”

“I guess that’s why celebrities are all friends with each other,” Jack said. She gave him a look, and he smirked, knowing exactly what word she took issue with in that sentence.

She crunched the ice with her straw. “Nobody tells you how to start that, though.”

“Start what?”

“Friendships. It’s like, all the people you knew before don’t get that you have to dive headlong into this new career, and you can’t be at the parties or go on that trip to Europe with everyone, and then when you do make time to get together, you find you don’t have anything to talk about because nobody else has any idea what your life looks like on a day-to-day basis and you feel like a narcissist talking too much about it. Especially because some of your friends are musicians, too, and they didn’t get a record deal. And—” Delia’s phone buzzed. “Ooh. Car’s here.” She looked up and blinked. “Sorry, that was a lot.”

Jack grabbed his coat and stood, trying to process the thousand thoughts running through his head after Delia’s monologue. He resonated with it. Every part of it, but for very different reasons than hers.

Delia whispered something to their server who nodded and led them down the hall to the washrooms, then opened an employee-only door. Jack barely registered the stacks of supplies on shelves or the bustling staff as they pushed through to the back of the establishment. His thoughts were still spinning.

When Angie had passed, he’d been immediately isolated. Conversations stopped when he entered the room. Hockey teammates stopped phoning, and when they saw him at practice, they acted like they weren’t sure if he spoke English.

They were afraid, he understood that now. Afraid of saying the wrong thing. Worried he’d need something they couldn’t give. But at the time, he may as well have lived on a different planet. His old life was still rotating on earth, and he’d been plucked up and dropped onto an orb of dark nothingness. Nobody wanted to buy a ticket there, and he couldn’t figure out how to travel back.

Clara had tried to help. So had his parents. But the best fix had been moving to Calgary and meeting new people who didn’t know his history. Most of his teammates on the Snowballs still didn’t know about Ange. Not because he didn’t trust them with the information, but because he wasn’t willing to risk being booted out of normal life again.

Then he’d gotten the contract with the Blizzard and knew that every single one of his Snowball teammates had to harbour a bit of jealousy. He would’ve, had one of them been called up. He liked to think his envy would’ve been outweighed by legitimate happiness for his teammate, but that was a generous theoretical.

All of them had wanted a place in the NHL at one point, and too few of them had gotten a shot. Now he was the one trying to avoid talking about the elephant in the room on the team chat, which was becoming harder to do with his face being plastered over every media outlet in the country.

“Ready?” Delia paused at the back door of the restaurant and looked back. When Jack nodded, she pushed through and hopped into the car idling next to the dumpsters. Every admonition from his mother about not getting into cars with strangers flitted through his head, but he jumped into the backseat. He couldn’t in good conscience let her get kidnapped alone.

The car took off as soon as his door slammed shut. Delia fastened her seatbelt, then turned to stare out the window. She was being oddly quiet considering they’d just made an epic escape from brunch.

That’s when Clara’s words came back to bite him. “Jack, maybe you’d have more luck with women if you didn’t expect them to be mind readers. You have to actually say words out loud for us to know what you’re thinking. Or, you know, not assume you think we’re annoying as hell.”

Jack cleared his throat. “I get it. What you said back there.”

Delia turned. She was chewing on her bottom lip. “Which part?”

“All of it. I played for two different AHL teams, then when I didn’t make the NHL, I joined an Elite League team?—”

“Wait, like Country? That YouTuber?”

Jack couldn’t contain his amusement. “Yeah. Exactly like him. Country’s on my team.” Delia’s eyes went wide. “I’d offer to introduce you, but he already has a girlfriend.”

She shot him a look. “That was a fangirl reaction, not . . . attraction.”

“Uh-huh.”

Delia ignored the comment and motioned for Jack to continue.

“So, I’m playing with guys that feel more like family than anything else, and then I get a miracle. I have to leave them mid-season to follow my dream, which also happens to be their dream, too." Jack held up his phone. "They have it rubbed in their faces on a daily basis."

“That you’re in the NHL?”

He nodded. “And . . . everything else.”

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