Page 67 of A Loser by Christmas
“My agent.”
He heads out of the room to take it and is gone for so long that I have to follow. I slip away from the table to find him in a living room where a new bauble dangles from a fir tree branch and a video of a crackling log fire still plays on the TV. It paints his face with flickering gold.
Calum looks up from his phone. “She says they don’t want me back.” He grabs a remote, and the flames of that log fire pause. “At least, not yet. They don’t want me to fly back until the media team figures out a response to this. Told me to stay put right here until they do that.”
He typesJunointo a search bar, and there it is, the first full-length YouTube upload I’ve made in ages.
I know Calum’s reputation. It doesn’t match how softly he reads out the title.
“The big, bad, and brutal truth pro hockey wants you to ignore.”
He reaches for my hand again, holding it even tighter in front of a TV that now shows a thumbnail I put together in a servicestation. Calum is on the screen with London spread out below an egg-shaped glass capsule. Here in Cornwall, he turns to me, his worry just as transparent. “But if you uploaded it to YouTube, that means?—”
“I can’t use the same content for the contest?”
There’s nothing unique about a video three hundred thousand subscribers will have been notified about like Dad was.
“Non.” I shrug. “It’s too late anyway. I missed the deadline.” It passed while he kissed me outside this cottage.
“But you needed that win.”
Yes, I did once. That was before Dad and I started to speak the same language. I don’t need cash for repairs now or to win a trophy that already has my name on it.
Sure, winning would have been good.
Calum kisses me again to confirm my real truth.
Losing for him is even better.
EPILOGUE
LONDON IN LATE JUNE
CALUM
London is a sight for sore eyes. Six months since I last saw it sparkle at night, I bet it’s just as stunning on this summer evening. The thing about hockey players is that we’re goal oriented. That means I barely notice.
I’m so locked in on Valentin.
He’s why I don’t stare up at Big Ben like usual or watch the London Eye make its slow revolutions beside the river. Tonight, I’m so focussed that even Tower Bridge doesn’t register until my cab is halfway across it, and I only lock in even harder once my driver drops me at the foot of a red carpet.
Valentin should be on it.
Reporters pounce before I can locate the prettiest sight in this whole city.
Believe me, I try to deke them, but like Valentin, they’re tenacious. At least they aren’t here to stalk me the same way Lito Dixon once did under party fireworks to snap the photos that almost cut short my Christmas. Like me, these reporters are guests, here to celebrate a form of journalism. That doesn’t stop them from firing questions in my direction.
“Hey, Calum!” one reporter calls out. “How would you rate your season after having so little ice time?”
How would I rate my season?
If I had scorecards, I know what number I’d award to the isolation an NDA and not wanting to worry my folks forced on me. I’d give that bullshit a big fat zero. Everything that came after I found Valentin trying to save an unborn duckling deserves a different number. A rock solid ten out of ten, because he saved me too. It’s that plain and simple.
I give this reporter a less personal answer.
“I’d rate this season as a real challenge. Couldn’t have got through it without my team.”
I keep scanning the crowds, searching for a jaw as sharp as any skate blade, and for dark eyes that never miss a thing. Camera flashes mean I’m blinded, still blinking when another reporter calls out.
