Page 17 of Date with a Devil
“I don’t even want to know,” Dane muttered as the three of them left together.
“Me neither,” Reavo said. But a second later, he added, “Itiskinda hot, though, isn’t it? Just imagine if there weretwoof you—”
Dane cut him off before it went any further. “Don’t.”
The two veterans weren’t in a rush to get back to the hotel. They stayed at the club long past curfew, nursing their drinks and reminiscing over old times. Each athlete had his arm around a girl.
“Hey, remember when Hawkins bought that Hummer with the tinted windows?” Reavo asked. “And remember how Soupy gave him such a hard time over that car? Hehatedthat thing. Called it ‘The Monstrosity.’ ”
“Yes!” Dane’s face lit up at the memory, even as his date sucked hard at the skin of his neck. For the past thirty minutes, she’d been hinting that it was time to take the night elsewhere—but Dane was still having a blast with his bud. He nudged her mouth off of his neck. “Hey, you mind? You’re gonna give me a hickey. I’m not into that. Too old for that shit.”
Reavo continued his tale. “And then, one day during practice, Soupy paid someone to load the Hummer upcompletelyfull of marbles. Hawkins never even noticed that thing was stuffed to the gills, because of that pitch-black tint—he just opened the door andwhoosh,marbles spilling out everywhere!”
“Bahahahaha!”The boys shared a great drunken laugh, which whinnied down into a melancholy exhale.
“Fuckin’ miss him,” Reavo said.
“Me too, bud.”
The girl who had cozied up to Dane suddenly sighed with frustration. “Okay. You guys sure talk about him a lot. Can we please talk about somethingnotdepressing?”
Dane leaned away from her. “Excuse me? What’d you just say?”
“Isaid, we could be going back to your hotel right now so we could have a lot more fun, you know?” She glided her hand seductively along Dane’s thigh, the tips of her fingers slowly inching closer to his cock. “Rather than all this sad stuff about your friend. I mean … I get it … he’s dead, and believe me, that sucks. I’m just saying, let’s not talk about sad things anymore.”
Dane removed her hand from his crotch and stood so abruptly, the girl nearly fell over.
“I’m out.” He scooped up his overcoat and threw it over his shoulder. “Later, Reavo.”
“Night, D.”
“Wait! Come back!” the girl pleaded in a panic. “I’m sorry! I swear I didn’t mean it to sound fucked up!”
The hockey player made a beeline for the exit. The girl stumbled to her heels to chase after him, but Reavo grabbed her hand and stopped her from pursuing.
“Best to let him go,” Reavo told the girl. “If there’s one thing you shouldn’t have said, it was that.”
Chapter 7
Austen
All week long, Austen was saddled with an ominous sense of dread in the lead-up to her interview with DeHardt. The days seemed to drag on and on forever, and yet the coming date with disaster only hurtled ever closer.Nonetheless, she had an obligation to do her job, no matter how she felt about it.
She spent that week racking her brain and waffling on ideas for where she should take the player.
How about the Dallas Museum of Art? It would be amusing to probe an athlete’s thoughts on abstract expressionism, wouldn’t it? To see Dane DeHardt wilt on camera, struggling to voice any of his outrageous opinions for once?
Too mean-spirited,Austen thought, scolding herself.Come on. You’re supposed to paper over this guy’s shortcomings, not exploit him. You’re better than that.
Often, when she was at a loss for a date location, she found it helpful to take a deep-dive into the player’s history. Often, she found an interesting story or a thread of inspiration that she could try to extract during the interview.
At first glance, DeHardt’s story read like all the others. Born and raised in Rochester, New York, DeHardt left high school at age sixteen to play Junior hockey. His gamble paid off. He was a standout player in Junior, and the Dallas Devils picked him in the first round of the NHL draft.
DeHardt found immediate success as a young Devil. His first year in the league, he won the Rookie of the Year award. He continued to grow as a player, scoring more and more points every year, as the Devils improved as a team.
Austen scoured news articles and interviews with DeHardt from that time of his career and found him to be quite a different person. He wasn’t controversial or adversarial with the media at all. Actually, quite the opposite. He was …boring.For five years, all his quotes were rife with the same tired hockey clichés;stick to the game plan, get pucks in deep, bang bodies, be hard to play against.
Then, the accident happened.
