Page 52 of Rainbow Kisses

He dropped his stick and got the first shot in, a solid hit against my helmet that made my ears ring. But it didn’t make me second-guess my intentions. I was up for this. After the day I’d had… Hell, I was going to fucking love this.

I went for an uppercut and connected with his jaw, snapping his head back. But by this time, he’d grabbed the shoulder of my sweater, trying to hinder my ability to throw punches. Fuck that bullshit.

Ripping myself away from him, I put up my fists and winked at him. And yeah, that just pissed him off, which was totally the point. And the crowd went wild.

Then we had a fight. I don’t know how long it lasted. We both got a few good ones in, especially one that left me with a bloody lip. But he had a cut above his eye, so we were pretty even when we got done beating the shit out of each other and finally wound down to the point where the linesmen could come in and break us apart safely.

Now, the fans roared, making the entire arena deafening loud and possibly causing the rafters to ring, or that might have been my ears.

When we pulled apart, we nodded and skated to our respective sin bins to serve our penalties. Knowing that in five minutes we had another penance to serve. And this one was the real ball-buster.

FOURTEEN

Rain

“He’s not hurt,is he? He’s bleeding.”

I smiled at Maddy, making sure it was my “everything’s fine” smile, and nodded. “I’ve seen your uncle take on much harder hitters than this guy. Trust me. He’s fine. And after they’ve served their penalty, then comes the fun part.”

“The fun part?”

“Just wait. You’ll be teasing him about it for days. Trust me.”

I smiled and nodded and made sure my face didn’t express the fear I felt. Brian had taken a few hard hits and, yeah, he was bleeding. But it wasn’t the bleeding that was making me worry. It was the couple of hits to the head. He’d been out of the game for months, and I don’t think he was in the habit of punching his coworkers at his previous job.

From the box where I was sitting with the girls, I watched him shake his head a few times, like he was shaking hair out of his eyes. Then I watched him blink a few times and roll his shoulder.

I breathed a sigh of relief. He looked okay. Like he didn’t have a head injury, or a concussion or had broken anything. It’d just been a fight. And our guys fought all the time. It was part of the game. I didn’t really enjoy the fighting aspect of it. It always made me cringe, whether it was my brothers or any of the other players.

But we had our own ways of dealing with fights that I did enjoy. And Maddy would get to see her uncle in a new light. Now I was smiling.

The game had been pretty uneventful up until this point. It was Sunday, the stands were half full because it was the weekend before Christmas and people had shopping to do and meals to prep. The next few months of hockey would be better, attendance-wise. But the crowd would remember this and talk and maybe there’d be a few more people at the next game. Because we hadn’t really had an instigator on this team since a couple seasons ago. That player had been a walking hair trigger. Just touch him, and he went off. The crowd had loved him.

He’d gotten poached by one of the other teams after that season and then had moved back to Canada and gotten picked up by one of the western leagues.

The game continued for another five minutes, the fans’ smiles getting bigger because they knew what was coming. And when the whistle blew for a stoppage, my grin couldn’t be contained.

Maddy looked at me then looked down at the ice.

“What’s—”

The other player’s music began to play as he stepped onto the ice. Each player picked their own song at the beginning of the season and was required to do a fifteen-second “performative apology.” Yes, they were required to literally dance back to the bench.

“For our first apology of the night,” our in-arena announcer’s voice sounded like a late-night DJ on some old ’70s R&B station, smoky and smooth, “Kenny Duncan from the Fitchfeld Feenoms has chosen that tried-and-true classic that we all know and love.”

While our fans booed, Duncan skated to center ice, where a few teammates joined him. The music was perfectly timed for them to begin the arm motions for “YMCA.” A lot of the guys used this one because they claimed to be unable to dance. Which had always seemed funny to me because they could balance on two blades of steel and fly up and down a sheet of ice like they’d been born with the ability. And yet they claimed to have no rhythm.

When our league claimed to be the most fun you’d have at a game, we weren’t kidding. We took our fun seriously. But I wasn’t watching their team. I watched Brian. He didn’t look nervous, just leaned back on the bench and watched the other team perform with a slight smirk on his face. Like he was waiting to show them up. And if I remembered correctly, he would.

“Next up, let’s welcome Mr. Whiskers back to the ice for his rendition of ABBA’s ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!’”

I glanced at Maddy, just to make sure she was watching. Not surprisingly, her mouth dropped open as she watched Brian skate to center ice.

If I hadn’t seen his performance before, my mouth would’ve been hanging open too. Now, I just couldn’t stop smiling. I’d asked him once if he’d had help coming up with his dance, and he’d nodded. “Kinda,” he’d said. “My sister loved this song, and she made me dance with her when we were younger. I already had the moves down. No-brainer.”

It was only fifteen seconds long, but it was the best fifteen seconds of my day, maybe the week.

With his arms in the air, he skated in a circle to the music, making complicated patterns, like he was vogueing. And when he came to a stop, he did the best Magic Mike body roll I’d ever seen.

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