Page 27 of My Pucking Enemy
“So…are you quitting?” His face is pained, and I realize that this is about more than my secrets or his, about me filing a complaint against him with HR.
A smile spreads over my lips. “Oh mygod!”
He glances around. “What?”
“Luca McKenzie,” I say, and I watch the full weight of his name hit him coming from me. It feels strange on my tongue, like a word in a language I’m only just learning. Something that still feels foreign, but approaching fluency. “You need me.”
“What? No—”
“You don’t want me to quit because you know I’m helping the team,” I counter, the words coming out quick, my eyes darting up to his. “You know you won’t get to the play-offs without me!”
“I didn’t say that—”
“Oh, this isrich!” I pretend to wipe a tear from my eye from the laughter. “I wish I could record it. Wait—will you say it again?”
“Wren.” The serious tone in his voice cuts through my laughing, and I sober up, eyes finding his. It’s unnerving how serious he can be, how his gaze feels like it’s cutting right through me. “Are you going to quit, or not?”
I hesitate, the cold pushing against my face along with his intense stare, making me feel like I’m under a microscope.
The moment he stopped me, chasing after me, not letting me walk away, I’d already known I wasn’t going to quit. Or maybe it was an empty threat to start.
I like this job. I love working with the team. I’m even starting to grow fond of the players.
“No,” I finally say.
His shoulders lower slightly, letting go of just a fraction of that tension they hold. That’s the thing about Luca McKenzie—the guy is wound up tighter than anyone else I’ve ever met, and my father and I were regularly on the run from international police.
Luca wants control. It’s the thing he craves more than anything else—that’s why he’s so intimately involved with the administration of this team. It’s why he hated the idea of me joining, and it’s why he planned out his life—and hismarriage—by trying to control all the variables.
My fingers twitch to reach up, run over his shoulders, try to work out some of that tension. For only a second, I let myself think about what it would be like to unravel him, to be the one to take him apart and let all that pent up energy inside him go.
I could give him an outlet. Somewhere to put his need for control.
“Okay,” he says, breaking me out of my thoughts, and I’m glad my cheeks are already red. I’m glad he’s too focused on his relief to notice the look on my face, to read the way that I’m obviously grappling with the thoughts in my head.
“Okay,” I return. “Now, can we go inside? I’m freezing to death.”
Luca
Wren doesn’t quit.
And she doesn’t tell anyone else what I told her. I know she doesn’t tell Sloane, because if my sister knew, I would know. Mostly because she’d be at my house, banging on the front door, demanding answers.
Wren doesn’t tell anyone, and after the incident with the private detective stuff, things get even easier between us. We mesh during meetings on strategy, building off of one another, and every game that comes and goes is another opportunity for us to test our theories, implement new approaches.
“It’s just weird,” Callum says, putting his hands up after we sweep the Pittsburgh Penguins, and we’re walking back to the bus that will take us to the hotel. “You hated her so much, and now, all of a sudden, the two of you are best friends. Honestly, I’m kind of hurt that you replaced me so fast.”
“We’re not best friends,” I insist, even as I save a seat for her on the bus, snag her wrist and pull her down next to me so we can talk through the offensive strategy for the next game. “Not even close.”
Every Tuesday and Thursday morning, Wren and I get together to go over game film, talk about the different players. Slowly, and in a very round-about way, she tells me some of the stories from her past. Things that relate to what we’re talking about.
“Psych them out—it’s a real thing,” she says one morning in early December, after someone has gone through the complex and decked every room with winter-themed decorations. They were trying very hard to be inclusive—this room has a Christmas tree, a menorah, and something I’m pretty sure has to do with the winter solstice.
“Hockey isn’t a poker game,” I say, thinking of the stories she told me about her and her father playing their way through Atlanta, only to leave with several jackpots and several pissed-off casino owners.
I’m still fuzzy on the details, since Wren has never directly told me, but I’m getting the sense that her dad might have something to do with the fact that she’s on parole. She’d laid out the detailsquickly, without fanfare: she couldn’t leave the country, and she had to check in every few months. There was also the sense that someone was always watching her. But on the whole, her parole is much more relaxed than what other people get. Something to do with the time she spent working for the FBI before coming here.
And her dad, her past, are all tangled up with the reason why she doesn’t have a passport today. Someday, I’d like her to tell me the entire story. My brain aches for the minutia of her past.
