Caught by the Hockey Captain

Nathan was the hockey team's resident troublemaker. On the ice he was cocky and impossible, yet every night he logged on right on schedule, humbly seeking guidance from the tactical god 'IceTyrant'. And me? I was Quinn, the team's invisible gofer, hauling gear and washing jerseys all day while the players looked down their noses at me. Then one day he found out who I really was. He backed me into a corner, gripped my chin, and said, "Quinn, I've got money, and I make the rules." "Reject me one more time. I dare you." Later the whole school saw it. That hockey captain, usually too cool for everyone, was chasing after me with a plate of peeled shrimp, "Baby, just one more bite. Please." Chapter 1 I dreamed of playing hockey. But I was a girl, and dead broke. I couldn't even afford a used pair of skates. Just to stay close to the ice, I clung shamelessly to a spot on the school team, the lowly gofer who washed stinky jerseys and lugged equipment every day. Because my family was poor, the guys on the team made plenty of fun of me. The person I hated most was the captain, Nathan. He was all muscle and no finesse, a guy who played on brute force alone and ran the team like a squad of shock troopers. On top of that, he came from money, always had his nose in the air, and was impossible to talk to. Take this afternoon. Tiffany, the cheer captain, "accidentally" knocked over a whole basket of jerseys I'd just washed. "Oops, sorry, didn't see someone crouching down there." Tiffany covered her mouth and gave a dainty little laugh. I gritted my teeth and crouched down to pick them up. Nathan happened to walk by, stick in hand. I figured that as captain he'd at least do something about the toxic bullying. Instead he was frowning, still griping to the vice-captain. "Our blue-line defense was like wet paper today. Bunch of useless idiots." He didn't even glance at the jerseys strewn across the floor, just took one long stride over them and strode off. Watching his arrogant back, I let out a bitter laugh. Back in my dorm that night, with nowhere to vent, I logged straight into my hockey-forum alt account: IceTyrant. I found the game-recap post Nathan had put up that afternoon and hammered out a merciless reply. "If this is how you captain a team, you'd be better off coaching a peewee team." "All you do is bulldoze through on brute strength. Did you leave your brain in the locker room?" "Drop your left wing's center of gravity, run a 2-1-2 forecheck to cut off their passing lanes. You can't even read the play that far ahead. You hold a stick like it's a fireplace poker." I figured a stuck-up rich boy like Nathan would go to war with me in the comments. Instead, in less than five minutes, my DMs pinged. Nathan had sent a sketch he'd drawn himself on a tactics board. "Who are you? How'd you know our left wing's positioning was off? If we run a high press, how do we cover the gap it leaves in the back?" He seemed sincere enough, so I tossed off three lines nailing the key points on adjusting his skating lines, then logged off and went to bed. The next afternoon, I stood outside the locker room with an armful of freshly washed jerseys and quietly swallowed. Inside, Blake, the vice-captain, was so mad he was kicking the lockers. "Nathan! You blew off the whole team dinner for some forum con artist who won't even show his face?" Nathan lounged on the bench, long fingers toying with his hockey stick, not sparing Blake so much as a glance. "That one high-press tip he threw out will save us from getting chewed out by Coach ten times over." Standing outside the door, I felt a tangle of emotions. So he really had taken my words to heart last night, and gone straight to drilling them. Just then Tiffany came over with two cups of coffee, looking to seize the chance to fawn over Nathan. As she passed me, she pulled the same trick, ramming her shoulder hard into mine, and the coffee in her hands was about to splash across my face. This time I was ready, and I ducked sharply to the side. Splash! One cup sailed past me and landed dead-on across Nathan's limited-edition skates just as he pulled the door open. Tiffany went white and pointed at me, crying foul first. "Nathan! Quinn dodged on purpose, that's why I spilled it on you!" My heart sank. Nathan looked down at his ruined skates, then raised his head, those pitch-black eyes finally landing on me... and on Tiffany. He pressed a hand to his forehead, his face full of impatience. I thought he'd finally clued in about stopping the bullying. Tiffany thought her tattling had worked. But the next second, Nathan pointed at the hallway exit. "Can you two stop blocking my phone signal in the doorway? I need to get back to my dorm and wait for IceTyrant to log on." Then he just walked right around us and left. I watched him go, my mouth twitching. This guy was a hopeless hockey-brained idiot. Chapter 2 Back in my dorm that night, I opened my laptop and logged into the IceTyrant account. My inbox had been bombed by Nathan. "Master, you there?" "Master, I used your tactics at practice today and it was insane! How'd you even spot that I was half a second slow on my turns?" "Master, talk to me. I ditched the whole team's plans just to sit at my computer and wait for you." Looking at his messages, all wagging tail like a big dog, I thought back to how he'd been all afternoon, eyes on nothing but the puck. The guy wasn't actually mean-hearted. He was just completely oblivious to how people worked. I typed out a line. "I watched your old game tapes. Everyone's just recklessly aggressive, dropping the gloves at the drop of a hat, all chasing the spotlight, and you play like a bunch of strangers. It doesn't matter how good the tactics are if the captain doesn't give a damn about his own teammates and lets bullying slide right under his nose." He fired back a shocked reaction sticker in a heartbeat. I thought he'd argue, but instead he wrote, "Damn... you've got a point, Master. I wanted every single one of them to get stronger so badly that I really never thought about balance. I'll fix it first thing tomorrow! Can you break down the tactical details for me some more?" Faced with this pure-hearted fanatic who only ever bowed to skill, most of my anger from the day somehow melted away. I rolled my eyes and was about to walk him through the power points of a backhand flick when my hand slipped and hit the sticker beside it. A "Peppa Pig bawling her eyes out" sticker went through. My stomach dropped. It was a sticker I used all the time on my main account, totally at odds with the cold, ruthless tactics-genius image of IceTyrant. The other end went silent for a full minute. "Master... did you get hacked?" I quickly hit unsend. "My cat stepped on it." "So even a legend like you keeps a cat! That's adorable! I'm buying you the best cat treats money can buy and shipping them tomorrow!" I stared at the screen, speechless. Nathan's brain really did not work like a normal person's. The next afternoon a cold front rolled in, and the rink was like an icebox. Hands shaking, I dragged dozens of heavy bags of gear toward the storage room. Normally the backup guys handled the heavy lifting, but today Tiffany had called them all off to help set up some welcome party, leaving me alone at the rink to do the grunt work. On the third bag, my fingers stiff with cold, my feet slipped and I went down hard, bag and all. My palm was scraped raw, oozing bright red blood. I was gritting my teeth to push myself up when a pair of black skates suddenly appeared in front of me. Nathan had come back at some point. He looked at me, his face frighteningly dark. My chest tightened. Great, here comes another lecture about being in the way. "What did you do to your hands? They look like two rotten carrots." His tone was harsh as anything, but he grabbed my wrist and pulled my hand up to his eyes. I instinctively tried to pull it back. "It's fine, I just fell..." "Fine my ass! You get tetanus and the team's the one paying to fix you up!" He let go of me in irritation, turned and marched to the locker room, tore the place apart until he dug out an unpackaged first-aid kit, and dumped it straight into my arms. "Put a bandage on it yourself. And don't get blood on my jersey." Then, to my surprise, he bent down, hoisted the gear bag I couldn't budge with one hand, and tossed it into the storage room like it was nothing. I froze where I stood, staring at his broad back. This guy... maybe he wasn't so unbearable after all. Chapter 3 What surprised me even more was that Nathan had actually taken my online scolding to heart. Balance the team, stamp out the bullying. Before dinner, Coach Dawson came to inspect the rink, and Tiffany gathered a few cheerleaders around him, playing cute and fishing for credit. "Coach, setting up for the party today was so exhausting. Some of the support staff didn't just refuse to help, they slacked off the whole time." Tiffany raised her voice on purpose and shot me a sideways look. Coach Dawson frowned and turned to me. "Quinn, what's going on with you?" Before I could get a word out, Nathan skated straight over from the ice. "Old Dawson, if your eyes are going bad, go get some glasses." Nathan leaned on his stick with one hand, his gaze ice-cold. "Quinn hauls the whole team's gear by herself. She clears the rink, she washes the jerseys." "Meanwhile some people don't do a lick of real work and just run their little cliques at the rink all day. This is a place to play hockey, not a reality show. Quit putting on an act." He turned and fixed his eyes on Tiffany. "If I catch you pulling your little stunts and getting in the team's way again, you're out of this rink tomorrow." Tiffany's face flushed crimson in an instant, tears welling in her eyes, and she covered her face and ran off. Nathan's outburst left Coach Dawson with no way to save face. He pointed at him for a long moment without managing to get out a single word. I stood in the corner, staring at Nathan in shock. He'd actually noticed the most insignificant nobody on the team. And he was standing up for me. No, more like... he was defending the order of his team, but along the way he'd pulled me out of the mud too. He'd just been too obsessed with hockey itself before, and forgotten everything else. Now that "Master" had spoken, he carried it out swiftly and decisively. Back home that night, the moment I logged on, a message from Nathan came in, fishing for praise. "Master, I gotta say, you read things dead-on. How'd you know there was bullying on my team? I cleaned up the whole locker-room culture today! Made that troublemaking cheer captain cry." The corners of my mouth lifted before I could stop them, and my fingers tapped at the keys. "Guess you did one decent thing." He shot back instantly. "You bet! I also helped out that girl who does our laundry. Her hands are all frostbitten. Turns out she's been getting bullied every day and never said a word. Looks like a total pushover." My heart skipped a beat. Right after, Nathan sent a voice message, his voice carrying that trademark swagger of his and a faint, hard-to-catch frustration. "But hey, Master, do you think she even appreciates it? I helped her today and she didn't say a single thank-you, just stared at me with those big eyes. Am I a ghost or something, that scary?" Listening to his breathy little complaint, I burst out laughing. All the exhaustion I'd built up over the day vanished. I typed out a line. "Maybe she thinks you've got a rotten temper and she's afraid to talk to you. Go easy on her from now on." Nathan sent an eye-roll sticker. "There are only two kinds of people I'm ever nice to in this life: my parents, and you, Master. Everyone else doesn't rate." Looking at that cocky declaration on the screen, I touched my burning cheek. This silly guy. If he knew the Master he worshipped every day was the very pushover he looked down on... I couldn't imagine the look on his face. Chapter 4 This double life went on for a whole semester. The weather slowly warmed up, but the rink was still as cold as an icebox. I sat on a plastic chair by the boards, mending a jersey that had come apart at the seam. Blake sent the puck flying off his stick, and it shot straight at my head. "Quinn, look out!" Blake shouted. I had no time to react. All I could do was shut my eyes and cover my head. The pain I braced for never came. A gust of wind swept past, and Nathan's tall frame blocked me. He caught the blazing-fast puck in his hand with a low grunt. I opened my eyes and saw a spot of red seeping from the edge of his glove. "Are you okay?" I shot to my feet, my voice shaking. Nathan tossed the puck back onto the ice and turned to glare at me. "Are you stupid? You don't know how to duck? If I hadn't caught that, you'd be in the hospital with a concussion right now!" His tone was sharp, but his brows were tightly knit and there was a panic in his eyes he couldn't hide. "I... I didn't react in time." I lowered my head, and from the fright my eyes stung. And sure, he'd been fierce about it. But he'd genuinely done everything he could to protect me. At home, even if my little brother smashed a rock on my head, my mom would only yell at me for not dodging. Nathan looked at my reddened eyes and raked a hand through his hair in agitation. He suddenly pulled off his oversized team jacket and dropped it right over my head. "It's freezing and you're sitting there shaking like a leaf. Put it on. If you get sick from the cold, who's going to do our chores?" I poked my head out of the jacket, but he'd already skated off. That night, the IceTyrant account got a message from Nathan. "Master, I played hero and saved a damsel today. Boosted team unity again! But why was that girl so cold? Downright rude! What on earth do women even think about?" I was about to reply, "She's thinking about how to poison you." Then Nathan had a sudden epiphany. "I get it, she's still scared of me. I need to be gentler, right, Master?" I'd meant to type out that she wasn't scared at all... But honestly, who wouldn't want to see a gentle Nathan? After that, our relationship in real life turned deeply bizarre. On the surface, Nathan still strutted around like he owned the school, bossing me around to do this and that. But he'd "accidentally" leave the team's extra catered meals on my desk, claiming "even a dog wouldn't eat this." I received a jar of imported medicated hand cream for my cracked and frostnipped hands the next day, its label peeled off, which Nathan said was junk Blake didn't want. But I'd seen with my own eyes that he'd spent half an hour picking it out at the pharmacy the day before. In this secret, warped relationship, I slowly began to panic. Something was wrong. Why did my heart stutter every time I saw him? Something was seriously wrong! I started deliberately avoiding him. A month before the tournament, the team went into closed-door training. During the lunch break, I hid in the empty locker room and pulled out my tactics notebook, furiously reworking the positioning charts for the upcoming game. I was so tired I actually fell asleep facedown on the table. When I woke up, a familiar jacket was draped over me, and my tactics notebook was gone. Cold sweat broke out all over me, and I bolted from the locker room. At the end of the hallway, Tiffany was holding my notebook, blocking Nathan as he came out of the restroom. "Nathan, actually... I never told you, but I'm the one behind that account." Hiding around the corner, I stopped breathing. Nathan looked at the notebook in her hands, filled with tactical diagrams in a delicate hand. "You're... IceTyrant?" There was a seriousness in Nathan's voice, unreadable, just not very pleased. How could that be. This was the Master he cared about most. Tiffany blushed and put on a shy, bashful look. "Mm... I was afraid you'd think a girl like me doesn't understand hockey, so I never dared admit it." That notebook was packed with all my tactical workups, exactly the same as the tactics IceTyrant had given Nathan. She must have snuck a look inside while I was asleep. I bit my lip bloody, forcing down the urge to rush out and expose her. I didn't want... I didn't want Nathan to see me as a con artist who'd been playing him for a fool. Nathan didn't take the notebook. He stared hard at Tiffany.