FEBRUARY
Taylor Cunningham had never met a challenge he couldn’t kick the shit out of. It was how he’d made it to the NHL, by knocking down one roadblock after another. He lacked coordination in pee-wee hockey? He stayed another hour after practice to complete extra drills. His cross-ice passes weren’t crisp? Dad iced over their driveway and practiced with him before school. Backward crossovers tripped him up? Mom worked extra shifts at the fire station to be able to afford private skating lessons.
As a pseudo party decorator, however, he might’ve met his match.
“I don’t understand why I can’t get this to do what I want.” Tay stood in a mess of crepe paper streamers in blue and white and finally admitted to himself that just because he was great at hockey—he wasn’t on Toronto’s first line for nothing—didn’t mean he’d be able to grasp something as simple as twisting streamers into something pretty to be strung along the ceiling. Crafty he was not. The pile of ripped chunks at his feet was only growing bigger.
His linemate and best friend, Stanton, growled from where he held the roll ten feet away. “I literally don’t need you to do anything but stand there. Stop twisting your end.”
“But it got all wonky on your side.”
“I can fix it.” Behind his thick glasses, Stanton’s eyes were narrowed. “Just hold your end steady.” He walked backward slowly, carefully turning the roll of crepe paper as he went.
They stood in the middle of the dance floor of the party room the organization had rented in downtown Toronto’s Drake Hotel for tonight’s event celebrating the conclusion of the Foundation’s three-year campaign. As the organization’s charitable arm, the Foundation had surpassed their fundraising goal by thirty percent, giving tens of thousands of kids access to sports. Everyone associated with the Foundation, including its fifteen employees, Tay, and his teammates—all of whom had volunteered for the Foundation in some capacity or another—team management, the Board of Directors, and several key major donors—plus everyone’s families—would be in attendance tonight. There’d also be families who’d been directly affected by the Foundation’s programs, which was extra cool.
Around him, servers placed stark white covers over chairs and set the tables with cutlery, delicately folded napkins, and water glasses. A DJ was setting up in the corner opposite the bar. The hotel’s IT experts were testing the television that would play the Foundation’s thank-you video. And the rest of his teammates placed team swag at each seat, sprinkled blue-and-white confetti on each table, grabbed three or four chairs at a time from the adjoining storage storm to place around tables for the servers to cover, and hauled gift baskets full of donated items from their cars parked nearby for tonight’s silent auction. All proceeds benefiting the Foundation, of course.
Tay stared at his confetti-scattering teammates with envy. Someone had to be willing to trade jobs.
“Tay, pay attention.”
Shooting Stanton an apologetic smile, he focused once more on the stupid streamer, on keeping it steady. “Sorry.” In his peripheral, the party room door opened, admitting a teammate toting signed jerseys and hockey sticks for the auction.
“There,” Stanton said a minute later from thirty feet away, the rough length of the streamer. He gave a chin nod to the ladder behind Tay. “Up you go.”
“Good thing Coach isn’t here. He’d kill us if he saw us going up a twenty-one-foot ladder.” Ignorance for the win.
Lacroix, a D-man and one the oldest veterans on the team at somewhere in his mid-thirties, stopped on the other side of the ladder. “Here.” He set down his bag of confetti. Tay considered stealing it. “I’ll hold it steady for you, kid.”
Kid. Tay stiffened without meaning to, the word squeezing his chest and shooting outward to cast a cloud over his day, his sisters’ voices coming back from his childhood to haunt him.
“Mom, the kid got his pants dirty and my party starts in ten minutes.”
“Pedal faster, kid, or you won’t keep up.”
“It’s not all about you, kid.”
He’d been trying to keep up with his older sisters since he could walk, but at ten and twelve years older, they didn’t make it easy. He was constantly the little brother getting in the way or stepping on someone’s toes—literally—or getting dirty when he shouldn’t be or intruding on private moments. Twenty-three years old, two years since he’d been called up to the NHL from Toronto’s farm team, and two years into a Bachelor of Science in paramedicine, and bridging the gap was harder than ever, despite his success.
Just that his sisters—a lawyer and a doctor—were poised and sophisticated and smart, and he . . . was not. He didn’t always think before speaking, he liked loud bars with too many people, had always struggled with school, preferred his art classes over academics, would rather doodle on his iPad than study, and ate cold pizza for breakfast when he could get away with it.
His sisters loved him, he knew that, but they still treated him like he was ten years old. Tay respected the hell out of them for everything they’d accomplished; he just wished they saw everything he’d accomplished too. He’d made it to the NHL. Plus, his team was currently third in their division and it was looking good that they’d make the playoffs. Not to mention juggling a university degree with hockey was fucking hard.
Shaking off the urge to tell Lacroix not to call him kid—that was inviting him to tease him with the nickname for the rest of his life—he nodded his thanks and climbed up the ladder one-handed, careful with the streamer. Barely a quarter of the way up, he somehow twisted it wrong and got it all gummed up.
“Damn it.”
Why was decorating so hard? One would think that he didn’t have a creative bone in his body when that couldn’t be further from the truth. Hell, he’d been working on a comic book trilogy since high school. Not that anyone knew of it except for his immediate family, but that wasn’t the point. He was good at art.
Party decorating, he was coming to realize, was not art. Or, at least, not a form of art he’d ever excel in.
“Is Stanton scowling at me?” he called down to Lacroix.
“There’s a definite tick in his jaw,” Lacroix said.
Oops. It did give Tay a mental image of Rhys—one of the original characters he’d created for his comic. Rhys, too, was the clenched jaw type.
At first, the comic had been a one-page assignment for tenth-grade art class. But he’d loved his characters so much that it had evolved into a trilogy, the third installment of which he was now on. Once, he’d thought that he’d share it online just for fun, but then he’d chickened out. How did authors and artists and creative people put themselves out there without freaking out?
At the top of the ladder, he plucked packing tape he’d precut off the top rung and secured his end of the streamer to the ceiling above the chandelier. “That good?” he called down to Stanton.
“Yup!”
Able to use both hands now, Tay climbed down much faster than he’d climbed up. At the bottom, he turned to Lacroix. “Thanks, man. Can you help me get this thing over by the wall? Stanton needs to put up his end.”