And I can’t fucking breathe. Her smile lights up her eyes, which are a warm brown. She is like the living, breathing picture of female perfection.
In a goalie’s pads. Fuck me.
“Anton Bayer,” Coach snaps. “We were having a conversation. And now you’re staring at a girl.”
Dazed, I look back in his direction. “Sorry, sir. I just didn’t realize…” The sentence has no rational conclusion. I just didn’t realize that a ten-second look at a woman from ten yards away was enough to make me feel so much. Curiosity. Intrigue. Hunger, even. Who knew I had a thing for goalies?
“Yeah, the Bombshells’ season is starting up at the same time as yours,” Coach says. “It’s going to be an adjustment sharing this facility.”
“Exactly,” I agree, as if I’d been thinking the same thing. And in truth, I had forgotten all about Rebecca’s investment in women’s hockey. “The, uh, new renovation looks great, though.”
Coach grunts his agreement. Over the summer, they’d done a lot of work on the practice facility. The full-sized practice rink—where I’m currently making an ass of myself in front of Coach—got five hundred additional seats and a new, high-tech roof. There’s a new stadium-worthy scoreboard hanging from the ceiling.
And—this is the wildest thing—an entire new story was constructed on top of our state-of-the-art locker room facility. So our dressing rooms are still there, but there’s a new suite for the women’s team above us.
I’d known all that. It’s just that it hadn’t really sunk in that there’d be actual women here in the building with us. And I really hadn’t anticipated that my brain could be stolen by the goalie on day one.
Lordy, I’m going to have to watch myself. Coach was absolutely right when he said this is my year to settle down and contribute. It isn’t just my sprints that I’ve been training. It’s my mind. I need to be tougher than I’ve been.
Focus, man. Come on.
Coach checks his expensive watch. “Let’s do this, Bayer. We’re starting. Get out there.”
I vault over the wall to get in a couple of warmup laps as my teammates troop down the chute to join me. I lean into my glide, lengthening my stride and stretching my legs. But as I round the ice, something silver glints at me from the surface. I stop, lean down, and remove my glove to pluck some kind of hairpin off the ice. It must have escaped when the world’s most sensuous goalie shook out her hair.
So much for avoiding her. I straighten up and skate hastily toward the end of the rink where I’d seen her disappear. And there she is, helmet under her arm, watching my teammates warm up. She’s wearing a frown now, which puts a crease in her forehead. I have the urge to smooth it out with my fingers.
But that would be creepy and weird, so I speak to her instead. “Excuse me, miss? I think you might have dropped this when you were giving that little girl the puck. Nice move, by the way. You made her whole year.”
The beauty turns, and her eyes widen slightly. “Sorry. Are you speaking to me?”
“Yeah. I don’t know your name. But I found this on the ice.” I hold it out, and her eyes widen again.
“O-oh,” she stammers. “I didn’t…” She catches herself. “Never mind. thank you. I hope you didn’t trip on it.”
“Nah. No worries.”
She reaches out and takes the pin from me, brushing my palm with her fingertips. And just that small contact ripples through me like an electrical current. “Welcome to Brooklyn,” I hear myself say in a husky voice. “Was today your first practice?” That would explain the number of journalists.
“Yes,” she says with a quick smile that I feel right in the center of my chest. “Was it that obvious?”
“What? No.” I laugh. “I didn’t see any of it.”
Behind me, an assistant coach blows the whistle, calling for the first drills.
“But I’m about to have my own practice now,” I add.
“Well, good luck to you, then. I hope it goes better than mine.”
“Thank you.” Still, I linger a moment longer, staring into those soft brown eyes. “You have a nice day,” I say stupidly. Then I force myself to turn and skate away.
I didn’t even get her name.
Two
Like the Caribbean Sea
SYLVIE
It isn’t until he skates away that I remember to breathe. Everything about my encounter with the big, blond hockey player was strange.
In the first place, I didn’t know a man’s eyes could be that brilliant shade of turquoise-blue. I missed the first thing he said to me, because I was wondering how that color was possible.
And then there’s the hairpin. I don’t wear them, but my mother did. We had the same thick hair, which she wore in pretty up-dos, while I’m more of a ponytail girl.
My mother died a year ago, but since then, I’ve been finding hairpins everywhere. She leaves them for me to discover.
Yes, that sounds crazy, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Reality worked a little differently for my mother than it does for other people. She was a deeply spiritual, mystical person. She was dedicated to prayer, joy, and inner knowledge. And her intuition went well past the normal range and right into, well, freaky.
I’m convinced that her spirit was just stronger than everyone else’s. She was a cosmic force. And even though she’s left this earth, she’s still sending me frequent signs. Like a silver hairpin on the bathroom sink at home, where nobody has been but me. And a copper one in the pocket of the dress I wore to her funeral. There was even a hairpin with a tiny jewel on it that appeared on the windowsill one night when I was washing the dishes. I set down the sponge, and it was just there.
So the appearance of a hairpin just now at this rink, where I never expected to be, is just more proof of her divine powers. And her nosiness, too. Maman is trying to tell me that she’s still beside me, even though I’ve suddenly relocated five hundred miles from our home in Ontario.
Brooklyn was never part of my travel plans. Fifteen months ago I graduated from college. I had hoped to make the Canadian women’s team, but they already had a full bench of excellent goalies, and none of the women’s pro teams had knocked on my door.
There were only five teams in the league—that made for ten professional women goalies on a continent of millions.
Then, three months after graduation, my mother died, and I stopped thinking about hockey. Or anything, really. Mourning will do that to a girl.
So I was floored earlier this month when the phone had rung and someone had said, “Hi, Sylvie Hansen? This is Bess Beringer. I’m a sports agent, but I’m also in charge of recruitment for the Brooklyn Bombshells. I know this is last minute. But how do you feel about guarding the net for Brooklyn?”
For a moment, I’d honestly thought I was being pranked.
But Bess had been dead serious. “The season begins in ten days. I realize you probably weren’t planning to change your life today. But if it’s possible, we’d love to have you.”
“Would I be trying out?” I’d asked, still a little unsure that the conversation was real.