Page 40 of Passing the Red Line
I’m sweating, but no way I stink. For good measure, I check by lifting my arm and smelling my armpits and then my hands. My hand definitely smells from my gloves but that’s normal. Just a quick hand wash and it will be gone. It’s not like I was working out in full gear. Now that smell is bad. I have to get a new hockey bag every year because of it.
“I don’t stink,” I tell her.
“Yeah, you do,” she argues. “You smell like an old hockey bag that was never cleaned out.”
I wonder if this is what Liam was talking about when his girlfriend Chloe told him he smelled like rotten cooked cheese. By the end of last season, he made it his mission to shower before he went home. Pretty sure he will continue doing it for the rest of his career.
“It’s called sweat.”
“It’s called disgusting and you need a shower,” Eliana throws back, gagging a little for effect.
I can either coincide and go home and take a shower, or I can skip the shower all together and just go to lunch and make her suffer with the smell.
Doing the second one can lead to a few things, one of them could possibly be a knee to the balls as payback for making her smell my supposed stench.
I like my balls a little too much to make them go through that.
So coinciding it is.
“Fine,” I say, giving up on the argument. “How about we head to my house so that I can shower and you can order food and have it delivered there? Would that make you happy?”
“I’m always happy being close to the ocean. Not smelling you and your nasty sweat would be an added bonus.”
“Then let’s go, princess.”
…
“How did you end up playing hockey?” Eliana asks hours later as we sit on the back balcony, looking at the sun setting over the ocean.
She’s sprawled out on the patio sofa again with her legs on my lap. The only difference between when we first did this and now is that she’s still in her clothes and not wearing one of my t-shirts like I would have wanted her too. Which is fine, I’ll have her wearing just my shirt in no time.
“Why do you want to know?” I ask, sliding a hand over her covered leg.
She gives me the best shrug she can in her current position. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but hockey is very much a white man dominated sport. It’s not often that you see an individual of color on the ice at the professional level.”
She’s right.
Across the NHL less than ten percent of the players identify as something other than Caucasian. It’s more than it was a few years ago but it could be a lot better.
Me choosing hockey as my sport instead of soccer or baseball was differently surprising to most people in my life. More so when I decided I wanted to go pro and actually did it.
“When I was about five or six, my dad got tickets to a Shark’s game as a gift from his work. We didn’t know much about it other than what we’d see on tv, so my dad was going to give the tickets away.”
No me gusta. ¿Para qué voy a ir?The memory rings clear in my ear.
“My dad didn’t want to go. I still remember him telling my mom that he didn’t even like hockey and he had no reason to go. But my mom told him it would be fun for me and my brother, to keep the tickets and to take us. He finally agreed, so we went. I was small but I still remember what it was like walking into the arena. We were a baseball family and walking into Candlestick Park the few times we went never felt the same way to me as walking into that arena did. It was the second I walked in there, there was electricity running through my veins. And then the game started, and it was so different from anything else. From any other sport. I fell in love with it right away. When we got home that night, as soon as I walked into the door, I told my mom that I wanted to play hockey. At first, she told me no, that it was too dangerous, but I asked every single day until she said yes.”
“Did you annoy your mom? Is that why she said yes?” Eliana asks through a chuckle.
I can’t help but laugh with her. “Probably. I can be very determined when I want to be.”
“I know a thing or two about that,” she tells me, nudging me with her heel.
“What are you talking about?”
“Um, hello. You were determined to throw me in the ocean.”
“That was a different type of determination” I throw a wink at her.
