Chapter 2

“Katie?” Cody looked down at her brand new driver’s license and wrinkled her nose.

“Having something close to your own name makes it easier to remember,” Special Agent Roth gave her another one of his patented empathetic smiles that did little to make Cody feel better. She reached up to run her fingers through her now dark mocha coloured hair and nodded. If she argued he’d only tell her that it was for her own good, again. “Now with Rebecca….”

“You can’t expect her to remember all this,” Cody held up the new birth certificate along with the rest of the paperwork that was meant to cover their tracks.

“Reba, Rebecca…,” the agent was trying to be positive about everything but Cody rolled her eyes.

“She’s been called Becka or Becks since she was born…but we’ll try.” It was the best that Cody could offer. They were about to leave her with a toddler who hadn’t spoken in days in a pokey, empty old craftsman house in a strange city without a single soul that she knew to help. She was finding it hard to be positive about much.

“You’ll start at Trees Hall tomorrow as an assistant to Marian Clark, the women’s coach. I know you’re not much older than most of the girls there but…it helps with the cover and she’s…well she did some training with us so she’ll be someone you can talk to,” he continued with another one of those smiles that was beginning to lose its intended effect as he handed her an identity card and a swipe card that she assumed would get her into the Olympic sized pool at the university. “You’ll be able to put in some training of your own,” he added with a wary glance at her. For her part, Cody squared her shoulders and did her best not to think about losing the rest of the season and maybe the rest of her career. That was selfish. Her niece needed her and after all, blood was supposed to be thicker than water.  “And you’ll be meeting with your private client…,” Agent Roth pulled out his iPhone and turned it around to show the schedule to her.

“Every other day? What am I supposed to do with Becks while I’m doing all this?” Cody glanced at where the little girl was seated on the floor in front of the TV, apparently enthralled by Dora the Explorer with her thumb firmly planted in her mouth and her other hand holding tight to the same carnival teddy bear that she dragged with her everywhere.

“That’s where I come in.” Cody looked over at the female agent who had been, thus far, standing near the door, uninvolved and seemingly uninterested in the conversation. The woman smiled, a warm, encouraging sort of smile as she crossed the floor and went to sit on the arm of the lived in leather sofa. “My name is Cathy and I’m here to work with Reba.” At Cody’s perplexed expression the woman’s smile broadened. “I have a degree in developmental psychology and through the Agency I’ve worked on a lot of cases like this one.” As Cody watched, the woman’s blonde pony-tail swung as she got up and walked over to Becky and squatted near her. The black pant suit and crisp, tailored white shirt made the woman look hard but the expression in her eyes as she looked at Becka said the exact opposite. “She’s in there. She just doesn’t want to come out yet, and who can blame her?” The agent got up and walked back over to retake her perch on the edge of the sofa. “We’ll start slowly, ah hour in the morning while you’re training and then I’ll take her to the day care at the university and you can pick her up from there.”

“Day care? Do you think that’s a good idea? All those other kids?” Cody glanced at her niece and lowered her voice. “She kinda freaks out at loud noises now and she was rocking on the plane and I’ve never seen her do that before.”

“Actually that’s not so unusual but it is something we can work on,” the agent smiled encouragingly. “One day at a time.”

It felt strange being on campus. Not that he stood out in his warm up gear and a gym bag slung over his shoulder. In fact, he looked like a lot of the other students. What felt strange was he had no idea what their lives were like and as he walked amongst them Sidney couldn’t help but wonder, if things had been different, what it would have been like to go to class, earn a degree. They probably all envied him, but he envied them. He envied them their freedom, their ability to come and go as they pleased, study what they want and stay out all night if they chose.

Mostly he envied them their anonymity. As he walked towards the sports complex, Sid kept his head down, the beak of his ball cap casting a shadow on his face. He couldn’t just go anywhere. He couldn’t even stay out all night like some of the guys on the team did. That was the downside to being Captain of the Pittsburgh Penguins and the face of the NHL. People…well, his agent, his parents, Mario…they told him that it was a fair trade off for being financially comfortable for the rest of his life.

At times like this, he really wondered.

Pushing the doors to Trees Hall open he was assailed by the smell of chlorine and a moist sort of heat. This had to be the right place.

Hitching his bag up onto his shoulder, Sid walked past a group of guys in one piece racing suits and goggles who would have made his teammate Jordan and his brothers look small. He followed their wet footprints to the change room and dumped his bag on the floor.

He didn’t have any high tech gear like those guys had and despite his friend Max’s urging, he wasn’t going to wear a Speedo. Pulling out a pair of black board shorts, Sid laid them on a bench and then reached to pull open one of the lockers. He felt a little like he was back in high school as he pulled out a personal combination lock one of the Pens trainers had given him and twirled the combination to open it; nine, seven, eight, seven.

Sitting on the bench, he undid his right sneaker and then rolled his sock down and put it inside. He repeated the actions with his left sneaker and then put both on the bottom of the locker. Unzipping his jacket, he hung it in the stall, and then tugged his t-shirt over his head, carefully folding it and placing it inside, on that little shelf where he’d stashed his lunch back in school. His track-pants followed, and then, with a careful look around to be sure that there was no one to film him or snap a picture with their phone; Sid shimmied out of his boxer briefs and into his board shorts. After pushing his bag inside, he closed the locker and twirled the dial on the lock and slipped his feet into his familiar yellow crocs.

“Here goes nothing,” he muttered to himself and then headed through the showers and out towards the pool. He hadn’t swum anywhere but Mario’s pool and the lake back home in…well, maybe since Shattucks. He rubbed absentmindedly at his arms as he stood on the edge of the deck and looked around. Glancing down at the waterproof watch he’d purchased for when he was out on his Sea-doo back home, he furrowed his brow. He was on time, so where was this swim coach?

Cody pulled her body through the water, using both legs to kick like a dolphin, aiming her hands straight ahead of her like the head of a missile. The water was quiet around her. None of that splashing and hollering that had been associated with the senior men’s practice earlier. She’d just been timing laps, walking back and forth along the side of the pool, yelling out times as the swimmers had taken their breaths. It had been pretty boring.

This, this was better. Her body sang as her muscles moved and stretched in ways that at once were familiar and yet, with all of the changes, all of the tension over the last few days, the exercise felt novel and not at all like a chore. She could hardly remember now why she’d complained so much about getting up at six in the morning to go to the pool to do laps. Especially after being stuck in a plane for hours and then setting a kid’s bed and bookshelf….

Breaking the surface of the water, Cody took a lungful of air and then reached forward. The crawl was the easiest and fastest stroke. It wasn’t her specialty. Not that she was bad at it, but it wasn’t the stroke that had won her a bronze medal in the last Pan American games. It was one of the best warm up strokes, but she promised herself as soon as she made the turn at the wall, she’d change it up and do the breaststroke, maybe she’d even speed up a bit.

This was her favorite, her forte. She loved the way the water skimmed over her head as she pushed through the water and how there wasn’t all that kicking and splashing. The stroke felt natural, the water calm around her. She could do this stroke for an hour if she wasn’t trying for speed but she didn’t have that kind of time.

Now when did the coach say her private ‘client’ was coming?

Cody’s hands met the wall and she slowly let her feet sink to the tiled bottom, where she stood up and peeled back her goggles.

“Are you Kate Irving?”

Cody rubbed at her eyes, blaming a combination of the tight, fogged goggles and chlorine for the image standing on the deck in front of her. He had the body of Ryan Lochte and the face of Michelangelo’s Cupid.

“Oh damn,” she hissed. When they’d said it was a hockey player she’d assumed it would be just some college kid in need of extra conditioning not the premier hockey player, maybe in the entire world.  “Hi,” she waved uselessly.

“I’m….” He began to introduce himself but there wasn’t much point.

“You’re Sidney Crosby,” she told him and he nodded, but didn’t smile in that self depreciating way that she expected. The superstar embarrassed and humbled by being recognized.

“I am,” he stated simply and then held his hand out to help her out of the water. Cody stared at his hand, at the thick fingers and the strong, substantial wrist and muscular forearm. Unfortunately that also led her gaze directly to his six pack and the tight, dark spirals of hair that lead from his navel to the waist of his board shorts.

Embarrassed, she forced her gaze back to his hand and accepted his hand out of the water. As soon as her feet were flat on the deck she dropped his hand and tried to ignore that it felt like he might have broken hers’.

“So, you’re here for some training,” she reached for the towel that she’d left draped over the edge. She rubbed her arms and then bent to rub off her legs. It was too hard to look at him in all his thickly muscled, amazingly, deliciously handsome glory. Besides, she told herself, they were both there on a professional level. This wasn’t a date.

“I’m broken, apparently,” she heard him mumble. She looked up at him and found him staring straight ahead, looking exceedingly unhappy to be there.

“Oh yeah?” she stood up and draped the towel over her shoulder.

“Yeah,” he nodded again, just once and then she was sure she saw just the briefest hint of a smile cause the corners of his full mouth to turn up, “concussion.” He pointed to his head and then shrugged one, massive shoulder. “I’m not allowed to do strenuous work outs.”

 

“Ah,” it was her turn to nod. “Well a lot of people find swimming therapeutic when they can’t do any real weight bearing. So…what can I help you with?” She watched him look skeptically at the pool and was suddenly reminded of being in high school gym class with a room full of teenage girls who had just been told they had to play touch football. “We could just swim laps,” she suggested casually. “Sometimes it’s easier to get motivated when you have someone to do it with you.” Just like a sullen teenager, the young hockey phenom shrugged his massive shoulders and made a sort of grunting noise that Cody decided to take as agreement. Cute but not very talkative, she made a mental note as she eased her toe back into the water. “So crawl? Butterfly? What’s your thing?” When he stared blankly back at her, she feigned the motions, waving her arms in the air until she felt more than just a little foolish and let her arms fall back to her sides.

“I swim at the lake…I don’t know…I guess,” he shrugged those massive shoulders that looked like they were meant for swimming and then looked sheepishly at the pool. “Crawl?” He looked back at her, perplexed, and just for a moment Cody had to fight the urge to grab his cheeks and pinch them he looked so adorably young and naïve in that moment.

“So maybe we can occupy your time with learning a few strokes,” she beamed at him and then hopped sideways into the pool. “You look like you’d be great at the butterfly.” She bit back the part about how broad and round his shoulders were and how massive his chest was. He probably knows that, she told herself as she watched him sit down on the edge of the deck and ease himself, gingerly into the pool; he probably doesn’t need me to tell him. 

Max and Jordy would have been rolling around on the deck beating the hell out of each other just to be the first one to talk to her Sidney mused as he stuck his head under the hot water of the shower and rinsed the chlorine from his short, dark hair. Most of her teammates would have had several crude things to say about the skin suit that had hidden nothing from the imagination.

For himself he hadn’t thought much about her body, not that he hadn’t noticed the feminine curves, they were pretty hard to miss, but there wasn’t much point in getting caught up in pretty girls, not now when he wasn’t playing. Mario’s wife Nathalie had hit the nail on the head when she’d compared him to a bear with his head caught in a honey jar; angry and blind to everything around him. He wasn’t exactly good company at the moment.

Although he had to admit that, right this minute, he felt good. His muscles felt warm and stretched. It had felt good to use them after being forbidden to for so long and she’d been right about it being therapeutic. He felt more relaxed than he had in days, maybe in weeks and wasn’t that exactly what the doctor had ordered?

Sid turned his face up into the spray and concentrated on the way the water felt beating down on his skin. There’d been days recently where he hadn’t been able to enjoy something as simple as taking a hot shower. The water had felt like needles on his skin. He’d barely been able to stand it for two minutes. In comparison, standing under a cheap shower head with lukewarm water running down his face and chest felt like heaven.

It was only the commotion caused by a rowdy group of what looked to be freshman that tugged him back to reality. Shutting off the water, Sid grabbed a towel and, keeping his head down, went to his locker and spun the lock. His muscles tensed as the young men around him laughed and joked amongst themselves. He expected, at any moment, to be recognized, to be asked to pose for pictures, to have to smile and behave as if he hadn’t a care in the world. That was another one of the downsides to being Sidney Crosby. He rarely got to eat his dinner while it was warm when he went out to eat. He never got to see the beginning or the end of a movie. He understood that people were excited to see him and he tried not to hold it against them, but sometimes, in a situation like he was in now, it was a bit harder to smile and pretend he didn’t mind the invasion of his private time.

The first thing he did was to put on his ball cap and pull it down low. The second thing he did was to shimmy into his briefs, pulling them up under the towel. Only then did he start to relax, by inches. The young men didn’t seem to be taking any notice of him. One or two gave him a sideways glance when he pulled his Penguins RBK equipment bag from the locker to put it beside him in the bench. ‘Way to draw attention to yourself dummy’ Sid ridiculed himself as he dropped his sneakers to the floor and tugged his socks out.

Right foot first, just like when he put on his skates. It felt good to do these like this, normal. He was a slave to his routines and it felt good to be doing something that was close to what he would do if he was at the rink.

Of course it would have been better to actually be at the rink.

Zipping his jacket closed, he rolled his trunks up in the towel and put it in the bag and then hitched the bag up to his shoulder. It felt like a lucky escape that none of the students currently surrounding them had intruded upon his space. Maybe my luck is turning around, he thought to himself as he weaved through the students, feeling almost invisible. It was a really good feeling. He’d have to thank that Kate Irving chick…and maybe Mario too. Maybe this swimming lark wasn’t so bad after all.

Making a mental note to do just that, Sid pushed the door open and walked out into the hallway, already thinking about grabbing fish taco on the way home when he stopped, mid step. Now that, he thought to himself, Max would be all over that.  Painted on jeans, knee high soft looking brown boots and an even softer looking amethyst coloured sweater with a deep v-neck that show cased milky white skin and more than just a hint of cleavage. Best of all, an abundance of dark, luxuriously shiny russet coloured hair curled around her shoulders and fell softly onto her cheeks.

She was the exact reason that TK, Jordy and Max could almost always be found handing out pizzas at Student Rush ticket nights. Young, impressionable, gorgeous girls who were used to eating cup a soup and mister noodles who practically clawed each other’s eyes out for a chance at steak and lobster and the chance to sleep on Egyptian cotton sheets and say they’d fucked a professional athlete.

Sid grinned at the thought of college co-eds fighting one another over a Cheshire Cat grinning Max when she turned to look his direction, an already warm smile broadening and hazel eyes filling with light. He cursed his lack of chick radar as Gronk would call it as he realized that he’d just been ogling his trainer.

Feeling his entire face get hot, Sid tried his best to get his expression under control as she dropped her own bag on the floor and turned towards him. He was trying to think of something to say, some way of explaining why he’d just been staring at her like she was some kind of prized heifer in a four H show when she walked right past him like he wasn’t even there at all. Sid looked down at his hands as if he was expecting to see them fade before his eyes, as if he really was becoming the invisible man.

“Hi Reba. Did you go to the park with Cathy?” As Sid watched, Katie picked up a little girl with a riot of blonde curls and big blue eyes that reminded him immediately of Jordan’s. The little girl nodded mutely, her thumb stuck between her full pink lips, her round cheeks pink from the cold outside. She looked like one of Raffaell’s cherubs. “Ready to go home?” Again, the little girl nodded, still looking quite serious, but Katie’s smile widened and Sidney found himself smiling too. How could you not smile at such a beautiful child?

“Should we get some hot chocolate on the way home?” the other woman asked and the little girl turned her head and smiled, ever so briefly around her thumb and nodded a little more enthusiastically. “Okay then, let’s go.”

Sid watched them go, wanting to follow them, wanting to go and do whatever made that little girl smile but he stayed where he was until they were already outside and lost in the crowd of students and then he turned and headed towards the other parking lot, to go home, alone.