Fallon rolled her eyes. “I’m fantasizing about how good it would feel to get a full eight hours of sleep three days in a row.”
“Aren’t we all.” Harley leaned in closer. “So does that mean you aren’t going to see him again?”
“Only on TV.” And in that weird dream she kept having that involved him in only basketball shorts and then nothing at all. She really needed to stop eating Spicy Cheetos before bed.
Harley let out a sigh and shot her a sympathetic look as if Fallon ever wanted to see that man again. “Too bad.”
“Not really.” The last thing she needed in her life was one more pain in the ass.
“So he was a disappointment in bed?” Harley wrinkled her nose in sympathy. “Damn. I had hopes for that one.”
Fallon ground her teeth together and counted to ten. “I didn’t sleep with him,” she said for what felt like the thousandth time since Friday morning.
“I’m not judging.”
“It’s the truth.” Not that anyone believed her.
Haley gave her a conspiratorial wink. “I’m with you whatever you want to say.”
Fallon didn’t get a chance to try to set Harley straight because Cameron West, the clinic’s director, started the staff meeting. As usual, it was a lot of bad news wrapped in success stories about the people they’d helped. The short of it? The clinic was helping people who desperately needed it, but their budget couldn’t cover all the work that needed to be done.
“Hey Fallon, can I talk to you for a minute?” Cameron asked after he adjourned the staff meeting.
Her stomach sank. Good news rarely followed that question. “Sure.” She walked over to where he stood by the coffeemaker. “What’s up?”
“There’s no good way to put this. Our grant application for the money to fund a full-time salary for you wasn’t accepted. I’m so sorry.” He patted her on the shoulder. “If it’s any consolation, it wasn’t just you. The grant process has gotten so competitive with federal funding dropping that we got waitlisted for the proposal for our pilot services program, too.” He rubbed his palm against the back of his neck as he grimaced, the strain of the clinic’s budget obviously doing a number on his stress level. “It looks like the food pantry and job training pilot programs will end when the money runs out at the end of the year.”
The news for her was bad, but thanks to her job at St. Vincent’s she wasn’t going to have to worry about how to pay her bills. The services the outreach programs could offer, though, would make a real difference for people like Sylvia and her family.
They couldn’t give up. Too much was at stake. “There’s got to be something we can do.”
“Hope for a miracle,” Cameron said. “Our donors have given generously, but we just don’t have enough support to cover the clinic’s financial needs and the additional outreach programs. Something has to give.”
“It’s not fair.” And just because there wasn’t anything she could do to change it—not with her bank balance—that didn’t mean she was going to just sit back and accept it.
“But it is life. We just have to learn to accept the things we can’t change,” he said. “And in light of this, we’d completely understand if you want to cut back on your volunteer hours since the full-time position isn’t going to happen.”
She may have started volunteering at the clinic with the understanding that it would turn into a full-time, paid position, but she believed in its mission. “You can’t get rid of me that easily.”
And there had to be a way to raise enough funds for the outreach program before the money ran out. All she had to do was figure out how.
…
Locker rooms on the day before a big game always felt different, more electric with a sense of heaviness in the air. It was like the last few moments before the first bolt of lightning lit up the night sky. There was no way to explain it, but Zach’s body always got tuned up tight, knowing on instinct that something was about to break. It was the best feeling in the world. He had his earbuds in and his favorite playlist blasting but hit pause on his phone and yanked out the buds when Coach stopped in front of him.
“You planning on playing like you did the last game?” Coach Peppers asked, holding his usual mug of three-fourths sugar and milk with one-fourth coffee.
Zach stopped taping the blade of his stick—toe to heel—with white tape. That’s the color he used during the last game rather than his usual black. It seemed to have made a difference.
“Yeah.” Last night was the first time in over a year that he’d gotten on the ice without the weight of what he’d let his parents do to him bearing down on his shoulders. From the first face-off, it had been like the days before hockey had become tainted with all of the bullshit that came with actually getting to play the game he loved.
“Good.” Coach leaned in a little closer. “How’s the other thing?”
Besides the trainer, Peppers was the only one he’d told about the food poisoning. Not that there was anyone else to really tell. It wasn’t like he was going to call up Stuckey, his defensive partner, or Christensen, Petrov, and Phillips, the forward line they most often played with on the ice, to tell them about his puke-a-thon. But his coach? The man who’d known him since he was a teenager and knew the real reason why he’d left his hometown team and signed with the Ice Knights? Yeah, he’d told the old man.
“I’m fine.” Zach sealed the tape at the top of his stick’s toe and got the scissors so he could cut off the extra.
The other man took a drink of his sugar-spiked concoction and looked around the locker room. All the other guys were going through their pre-ice-time rituals. For some guys, like Stuckey, it was the same as before a game—listening to New Age music blasting on the headphones while chewing his way through an entire pack of spearmint gum. The majority of the team, though, just talked smack as they got ready, as opposed to the near dead silence of right before a game.