Page 5 of Slew Foot
“It’s not my fault you’re fucking stupid enough to believe what I say,” Tanner argued, his face turning red as he tried to squirm away.
Mickey hid a smile as he followed their awkward, stumbling gait down the hall toward the locker room. He dropped back a little, so as not to get accidentally punched in the face, and heard Finn and Connor in a similar friendly argument behind him.
“Seriously. I thought I’d gotten rid of you,” Connor grumbled.
“You’ve missed me and you know it!” Finn protested. “Just think of all of the brotherly bonding we can do now.”
Mickey’s smile was impossible to hide as he thought about the O’Shea siblings’ interactions. He’d never seen a family argue so much—or as loudly—as the O’Sheas did, and yet they seemed unshakably close. There was a certain fierceness to the way they interacted, whether it was arguing or loving one another.
Very different than the relationship Mickey had with his own half-siblings. He’d been an only child when his parents divorced. His father had remarried, then gone on to have two girls.
Clara and Lena were in their early teens now, bright and vivacious and funny, but Mickey wasn’t particularly close to either of them. He liked them, liked his stepmother, but the girls were more than a decade younger than him, so they hadn’tgrown up together. Especially because he’d moved from Cologne to Munich for hockey.
He’d lived with a host family there and only seen his sisters sporadically.
Now that they had cell phones, he did text them though. Which reminded him it had been a while since they’d talked, so he pulled out his phone as he did the mental calculations about the time difference between Boston and Cologne.
The cities were six time zones apart, so the girls were long out of school by now, even if they’d stayed to take part in one of the clubs they were active in.
Mickey pulled up the group text he had with Clara and Lena and, since they liked to practice their English, he sent,How are you? What’s new?
Not very clever of an opener but his phone buzzed a moment later with a few lines about school and activities and he texted with them for a few minutes.
Inside the locker room, Tanner waggled his eyebrows at Mickey as he spotted him sending a goodbye message to the girls. “Oooh, are you talking to someone?”
“Yes. My sisters,” Mickey said drily.
“Oh.” Tanner’s face fell. “I thought you were dating someone.”
“No.” Mickey tugged off his Harriers tee, then slipped on his base layer top.
“You had a hookup a few weeks ago though, right?”
Mickey nodded.
He hadn’t dated much since he’d been here in Boston, but he periodically went home with someone from the bar or met someone on a hookup app who seemed interesting. He was nowhere near as devout about keeping things casual the way Crawford was, but he had little time for something more serious.
Hockey was the most important part of his life right now.
“Well, are you going to hook up again?” Tanner pressed.
“No, she was only in town to visit some friends,” Mickey said with a shrug.
“Well, what about the guy who?—”
“Clay,” Mickey replied, exasperated. “Getting laid is not important to me right now.”
Tanner gaped at him. “You are young, not horribly ugly, and you play in the NHL. You should be enjoying your life!”
“I am,” Mickey said in a mild tone, because Tanner was intense enough for the both of them. “I’m enjoying playing hockey and I hook up when I want to. I don’t need to have a rotating cast of characters coming in and out of my bedroom.”
“I still think Clay’s full of shit about all his hookups,” Crawford said from Tanner’s other side. “There’s no way he gets laid that often.”
Mickey strapped on his elbow pads. “I can confirm it’s true. Unfortunately, I hear the people he’s having sex with far more often than I’d like.”
“He’s probably paying them to pretend,” Crawford snarked.
“Even more unfortunately, I have literallyseenit,” Mickey said with a sigh. “But now Tanner knows sex anywhere but the bedroom is off-limits.”
