Page 2 of Blueline Baby

I flag down the bartender and point at the permanent marker he keeps by the register. Then I roll my sleeve up and hold out my forearm. “Right here. That way I won’t lose it.”

She laughs the whole time she’s writing it and when she’s done, her friend grabs the marker to write her number right underneath it. By last call, there’s a third number scribbled near my elbow in completely different handwriting. I honestly have no idea how that one got there.

My arm looks like a dive bar bathroom stall when we finally leave. I have zero intention of calling a single one of them.

Jude throws an arm around my shoulders out on the sidewalk and squints at the ink running up my arm. “You’re such an idiot,” he says.

“Barry started it.”

“Barry did not start it.”

I hold my arm up under the streetlight and try to read one of the numbers but they’ve all started to blur together. By tomorrow morning, half this ink is going to be permanently transferred to my bedsheets anyway. Standing there at three in the morning, I decide that's definitely for the best. "Come on," I tell him. "Let's go find some tacos."

2

CHLOE

DO YOU WANT TO SEE MY STANLEY CUP?

JANUARY

My roommate Britt has now insisted for the third time tonight that the only reason we get to go to this hockey game is because she’s dating one of the players. The truth is that I’ve wanted to go to a Dallas game since the day I moved here for school but I couldn’t justify the money on tickets and so I sit at home, yelling at a TV that can’t hear me. So yes, I guess Britt is the only reason I get to go to this game, because Britt is dating a hockey player this month.

She claims they’re serious enough that he put us on a “list” and as I’m wondering exactly what that means we end up walking into a suite full of women who clearly all know each other and absolutely do not know us. Britt beelines toward the wall of food before I’ve even gotten my coat off. I just want to escape the suffocating perfume and the side-eyes, so I go find a chair by myself. Which is fine because I’m not the one dating a hockey player or here to make friends. I came to watch a hockey game from closer than my couch.

The puck drops and everything around me except the game fades. I’m muttering about how badly it’s already going for Dallas when a linesman blows a call so badly that I jump to my feet.

“Oh, come on. His skate was inside the line, that’s not offside. He’s standing right there, how can you miss that?”

The woman a few chairs over turns to look at me and laughs. I feel my cheeks heat as I realize I’m screaming at a team of professional athletes in a room full of their wives.

“Okay. Hello.” She’s a little bit older than me and she’s grinning. “Where have you been all season?”

I blink, caught off guard. “On my couch, mostly.”

“I’m Lorelei Barrett. My husband’s the one wearing the C and also screaming at the refs.” She gets up and switches to the empty chair next to me. “Tell me why that wasn’t offside, and then tell me everything else you think, because I’ve sat in this box for six years and I have been dying to talk to someone with an opinion.”

By the first intermission we’ve rebuilt Dallas’s top line, agreed the coach leans too hard on his veterans, and torn a referee apart for his calls. I like her more than I’ve liked a new person in a long time, and I don’t fully trust that, so I pull my attention back to the ice, where a Dallas defenseman has just decided the game is entirely about him.

He steps up at the blue line and skates the puck the length of the rink himself, weaving through the other team like the other four men on the ice aren’t even there, before burying it top corner. Then he glides back to the bench looking like the most pleased person in the state of Texas. It’s one of the most arrogant displays of raw talent I’ve ever seen.

“He left the entire weak side open to do that,” I say. “If they miss and it goes the other way, that’s a goal against, and he’ll be the reason.”

“That,” Lorelei says, sitting back and crossing her arms, “is Jack Anderson. He does something like that about four times a night. Twice it’ll be the best thing you’ve ever seen and twice it nearly kills them.” We watch him say something to a teammate that makes the whole bench laugh. “He’s going to be a problem for some poor girl someday.”

“He seems like he’s already a problem.”

“Oh, he is. He just hasn’t met the right one to be a problem for.” She bumps my shoulder with hers. “Come find me next game. I mean it.”

The party is in our building, which is the only reason Britt chose this apartment. She heard a rumor before she signed that half the team lived here and threw parties constantly. Every single part of that rumor turned out to be true.

By the time we’ve dropped our coats downstairs and come back up, the fifteenth floor apartment is packed wall-to-wall. There’s a game on a muted TV in the corner that nobody is watching except, apparently, me. Britt is already firmly planted in her player’s lap. I find a spot near the counter and settle in to do my job: make sure Britt gets home alive, and leave the very second that becomes possible.

I’m half-watching a different hockey player crash and burn spectacularly with a woman he’s been hitting on all night. He’s been explaining his plus-minus to her for almost ten minutes and she keeps giggling, though I’m positive she has no idea what the plus means. I know exactly what it means, and I’m mentally debating telling her that this particular player has an abysmal rating, when a massive shadow falls over the whole counter.

I look up, and it’s Anderson.

Up close, he’s somehow even bigger than he looked on the ice and he’s staring down at me with this slow, devastating grin, like I’m a present somebody left just for him. My stomach does an unnecessary flip.