Power Play Read Online Free Page B

Canucks. He was a captain.”
    He was also crazy, if his Twitter account was anything to go by. “You think we should make our blue-haired, lip-pierced goalie the captain. Even though he’s crazy.”
    “Yes.” Misha paused. “One time I played with a goalie who would eat sand before a game.”
    “Sand? Did you say sand?” Max made a face. “Ew. Why? That doesn’t make any sense.”
    “He said that it kept him from losing focus.”
    “How?”
    “I have no idea.” Misha picked up another cheese stick. “I have never had these before.” He deftly poured some sauce on his appetizer plate and delicately twirled the piece of fried mozzarella in the sauce. It looked fancy—like how rich people ate. If rich people ate mozzarella sticks.
    “So we keep Drake and make him the captain,” Max continued, trying not to watch Misha’s fingers and his strange and elegant mannerisms.
    “I would recommend that. Yes. Perhaps tell him to get rid of that earring in his lip.”
    “It’s a lip ring,” Max said, nonsensically. “Not an earring.”
    Misha gave him a look that Max was beginning to interpret as his “is that so, stupid American” look. He waved his hand. “The lip ring, then. I do not understand why anyone would want one of those.”
    “For kissing, maybe,” Max said, infused by a sudden, alcohol-driven urge to… what? Say slightly PG-rated things to Misha? He was smoother than that when he tried to ask Tara Pike to the eighth grade school dance.
    “For… kissing.” Misha went very still.
    “Yeah,” said Max, and he barreled on. “For kissing.”
    The tension between them wasn’t unpleasant, but Max wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. They stared at each other for a moment longer, and then Misha put down his knife and fork and quietly said, “I’ll get the check.”
     
     
    BY THE end of training camp, they had a team of, if not champions, at least passably decent hockey players.
    A rousing endorsement to be sure. But it was a start, and that was all they needed. They had a clean start, a new team, a new attitude, and a new coaching staff behind the bench. The season was alive with possibilities, and the excitement in the arena was palpable.
    Or it would be, if Max led some kind of charmed, Lifetime-movie existence. Which he did not. And he knew that because watching Lifetime movies was a guilty pleasure he absolutely would not admit to anyone.
    What he really had was a team of misfits captained by a goalie with anger-management issues and a facial piercing, coached by the man who ended Max’s professional hockey career, and owned and managed by a sleazy asshole who was going to use that for publicity.
    It was also a team that had five players named Jacob. And even though he’d been half responsible for signing said players, Max had completely managed to overlook that.
    “Wait. Seriously?” Max groaned when the fifth Jacob, who was actually Jakob, introduced himself the first day of practice. “What’s your last name?”
    “Wawrzyniak, Coach.”
    Max exchanged a look with Misha. “Congrats, Jakob. You’re the only one who gets to keep his first name.”
    On the ice the team looked… not good, exactly, but they weren’t terrible. Max didn’t dream of Kelly Cup glory, but he didn’t have nightmares either. It was pretty much the best he could hope for at that point in the season, because they were a new team who needed time to play together and nail down their dynamic.
    Misha was a good coach, but he was shit at talking to the players. His normal method of communication was to stare at them until they skated off to do what he told them. He never had to shout, and he somehow made his whistle sound threatening. Max’s own whistle sounded like a goofy cartoon noise most of the time.
    As the more personable of the two—though there were pieces of hockey equipment easier to converse with than Misha—Max was mostly in charge of player relations, retention, and general locker-room