Chapter 7
I froze in Crosby’s arms, first confused and then I remembered the events before Crosby had so taken over my world. It felt like an entire lifetime ago since the bad date and subsequent rescue mission from the airport.
Jen came sprinting through the kitchen glancing at us briefly before continuing through and out of the room. A second later, she had back pedaled into the kitchen once more, and was staring at us, her mouth wide open in shock. She stood there, looking at Crosby, looking at me, looking back at Crosby, and looking back at me, as if trying to figure out if she were hallucinating or something.

“How was Thanksgiving?” I asked her, cautiously breaking the silence. I felt Crosby release his arms, disentangling the two of us, and he took a small step away from me.

“What? No. That. What.” She couldn’t seem to form coherent sentences.

“Do you want a glass of water?” Crosby asked concerned.

“Probably a good idea,” I answered for Jen. Crosby moved and got out a glass, filling it with water. Jen tracked his ever movement carefully with her eyes as if watching prey.

“That is not the football player,” Jen stated, her voice was slow, as if she were carefully thinking out each word.

“Correct.” I answered. I heard a strange inhale behind me, which I decidedly ignored.

“That is Sidney Crosby,” Jen said, accepting the glass of water from Crosby, “Standing in your kitchen, without a shirt on and covered, covered in--?.” her voice trailed off

“Correct,” I answered again.

Jen narrowed her eyes, thinking for several long moments, before she began to smirk at the pair of us.

“It isn’t what you think,” I started but the smirk didn’t leave Jen’s face, only grew.

“I am going to go shower,” Crosby excused himself, allowing me time to talk to Jen.

I scowled at Jen, as I began to gather up all the breakfast stuff, “Jen, seriously nothing happened. Crosby was stuck at the airport.”

I tried to explain the events of the previous two days as I cleaned up the mess in the kitchen, Jen watched with observant eyes, not saying a word but that damn smirk never left her face.

“Righto,” Jen said innocently. I didn’t buy her act for a moment. However, I didn’t really want to go into detail about the situation because honestly, I wasn’t really sure what was going on.

---

“Sidney, next time you come to Colorado, like, let me know so we can actually hang out! See ya!” Jen called as Crosby and I loaded ourselves into my truck.

After Jen had arrived that morning, things had returned to the normal cold, awkwardness between Crosby and I. Unlike the tense relationship Crosby and I were falling back on, this did not apply to Jen and Crosby. The pair got on incredibly well, which was quite irritating to watch. I had shot her several looks throughout the day which clearly asked ‘Whose side are you on?’.

A small part of me yearned for the silly playfulness to come back on our car ride to the airport, but that was quickly and clearly all in vain. The ride back to the airport was incredibly strained and quiet. Whatever pleasant relationship we had started to build up seemed to have disappeared. I didn’t really understand what had happened, I mean, Jen had showed up--but it wasn’t exactly a secret he was here; James Neal knew, his family knew, even his damn girlfriend knew. So what was the problem with Jen knowing?

I sighed glancing over at him as we started to pull into the airport round-a-bout.

“What?” he asked, his voice was clipped and I could hear the anger in it. I felt my heart sink for some reason, and then I felt anger start bubbling in the pit of my stomach. What the hell did he have to be angry about?

“Seriously?” I simply said.

“What?”

“What do you mean what?”

“You gave me a look.”

I snorted as we pulled in the drop off zone, “Right.”

“I hope you and your boyfriend have a nice time.” He said as he was getting out of the truck.

“Me and my boyfriend?” I repeated stressing the my, excessively so, “Oh we will have a grand old time. I wish the best for you and your girlfriend as well.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh please, I'm not stupid,” I yelled back as he took his suitcase out of the truck, and shut the door. I just rolled down the window, ignoring the cold, “You and Taylor!”

“Taylor. Taylor, my girlfriend?” He started laughing at me. I looked at him, feeling hurt. Of course, this was the ass Crosby coming out yet again. Without waiting for him to say or do anything thing else, I rolled my window up, turned my head, and just drove off.

---

December passed in a blur. I competed, won, did press conferences, wooed the fans, competed and won again; all in all, a good month. But all month long no matter what I did, I just had a weird sinking feeling in my stomach. I had been asked several times by friends, coaches, trainers, etc, if I was sick or something, to which I’d laugh off reply it was just the jet lag or something. I began to tell myself that it was because Christmas was fast approaching, but for some reason, it felt like I was lying to myself.

Jen had invited me to spend Christmas with her family in Michigan, but I declined. I was in a competition until the Christmas Eve day, thus I would not really be able to get anywhere until Christmas day. I decided to fly back to Colorado for a few days before making the jump to up to Vancouver for New Years Eve. There was a big snowboarding competition at Whistler in the beginning of January, so a bunch of the boarders made plans to welcome the New Year in Vancouver. Spending the holiday there would allow us just a short trip up to the mountain after the crazy holiday, which was always a nice change.

On my way back to my house from the airport on Christmas Day, I stopped to pick up a ridiculous amount of Chinese food. Yes, it was completely off my eating plan, but fuck it, it was Christmas. My house was quiet, and quite lonely when I finally pulled in. I parked and unloaded everything before grabbing the cartoons of food, my laptop, and I headed into the great room. I was relieved when I saw my fireplace was already built and ready to be lit, with a huge stack of wood in the corner. I lit it and looked over at my Christmas Tree. Jen and I had set up the tree before I had left 3 weeks prior, but I frowned, as I saw the small pile had packages under the tree had grown substantially since I had left my house. I walked to inspect the packages and realized the added packages were all mailed boxes. Iris, my house keeper, who collected my mail must have moved all of the boxes under the tree so when I did finally get home, I would have a nice surprise. My heart warmed from this nice gesture as I settled cross legged on the floor in front of all the presents.

I started looking at the different packages: there were packages from friends around the snowboarding world, other athletes, non-athlete friends, as well as notable ones such as from my agent, sponsors, two marked in Russian, and an unmarked one from Canada. I ripped open the one in Russian from Magnitogorsk first.

The box obviously from Geno, had several items inside: a jersey from his KHL team, his Penguins jersey, and a penguin onsie. I practically died when I saw the onsie. Geno had asked what I had wanted for Chirstmas, and I had told him I really wanted a onsie. I hadn’t realized he would actually send me one.
I stripped off my sweatshirt and sweatpants and pulled on the onsie, feeling like Santa had come. I took my phone and snapped a picture before sending it to Geno with the text, ‘Absolutely the best gifts ever’.

Feeling snug and happy in my awesome gift, I turned to the other boxes. I bit my lip, looking at the small box from Canada. I took that next and carefully opened it. Inside there was a card and a wrapped box the size of a CD. I furrowed my brow as I opened the card, which simply said

LR,
Hope you enjoy this.
SC

‘SC?’ I thought, biting my lip confused as I moved on to open the wrapped gift. It was a CD, The Foo Fighters Greatest hits. I blinked several times, realizing two things at once. First, there were signatures of all the band members on the cover of the CD art, and I caught my breath. I carefully removed the CD flap and opened it up. Inside there was a message,

‘Lily Rivers, Over the years, we have loved to watch you learn to fly. Never knew you were such a fan. Let us know if you ever want to come to a concert.’

Second, I realized that Sidney Crosby was the single most confusing person on the entire planet.

---

“I can’t believe you are actually doing this,” Torstein Horgmo said in Norwegian grinning looking me up and down. English was obviously my first language, but Norwegian was the next language I had learned. It was rather useful since aside from Jen, most of the people I boarded with were from Norway. They were a fun, if not a bit insane, group of people.

I returned the grin, trying not to feel completely ridiculous in what I was wearing. It was early January and we were Whistler, BC, the competition we were involved with ended the day before. I had won both slopestyle and halfpipe, so I was feeling pretty good.

After the wins, I had gone back to my hotel room to clean up. I had just taken a scorching hot shower and changed into a pair of sweats and a certain shirt that technically wasn’t mine.

In the midst of Crosby’s laundry doing, Jen’s dramatic entrance, and everything else, Crosby had forgotten one of his shirts. It was the Penguins 87 dry fit shirt he had worn to workout in. Granted, I did have his phone number, and could ask for his address and mail it back to him. Actually, I knew several people who could tell me his address, so I had no need to even talk to him to mail him back his shirt. And despite all of these options, I was currently wearing Crosby’s shirt a month and a half after he forgot it at my house. Not even Jen knew that I had it, let alone wore it.

I flopped onto my bed, enjoying the sensation of doing absolutely nothing when my phone started going off. I reached for it, glancing at the caller ID as I did.

“Geno!” I happily cried into the phone.

“LILY I COME BACK!” my eardrum almost burst as he yelled into the phone excitedly.

I sat straight up, ignoring my aching ear, “WHAT?”

“Lockout over, I’m come to Pittsburgh soon, play for Penguins!”

As we talked more, I was formulating crazy idea in my head to welcome the Russian Bear back to the Penguins he so dearly loved. He explained that the season would actually be a compressed into just under 50 games starting in like, two weeks or something. Eventually, he had to go so he could work out details with his agent. I quickly called Jen to come over, but before that, changed my shirt and hid it.

This was all a couple of days ago.

“I sorta can’t believe I am doing this either,” I muttered back to Torstein in Norwegian.
But here I was, about to make a video for Geno.

I was, in the middle of the park, wearing the penguin onsie about to shoot some footage of myself snowboarding.

Jen was waiting for us at the top of the ski lift as we disembarked, “You ready?”

I sighed, nodding.

---

To say that the video was successful, would be an understatement. Within the first day we put it up, it had reached a million hits on youtube. When I had the idea of the video, I really had no idea it would ever become viral. Though, I guess people don’t see a 21 year old 2 time Olympic gold medalist fly through the air on her snowboard doing ridiculous flips with a hockey stick wearing a penguin onsie very often. The video itself was set to the song 'Black and Yellow' by Wiz Khalifa and done masterfully thanks to Jen. I thought the song was appropriate due to the fact the song and artist's connection with Pittsburgh. Yeah, originally the song was for the football team or whatever, but I was making it about hockey now. And boy, was it going over well.

Not only did Geno love it, but apparently guys all over the NHL did. I had put it on twitter and the guys had gone and re-twitted it or whatever. I was slowly becoming a master at twitter because the list of people I followed had gone from 32 to 58 in the course of that very day. I think part of the reason the video had done so well was there was such a huge family of people who were hurting that their sport had been gone for so long. Now that hockey was coming back, people were celebrating in different ways. My video was just a silly way of expressing how happy I was that Geno was so happy to be coming back to his team.

---

A few days after I had posted the video, I was back in Colorado, well, Aspen, Colorado getting ready for the X-Games, when I had received a curious phone call. I was in the middle of getting ready to go out for the night.

“Nealsy?” I answered slightly shocked. I hadn’t heard from him since the text in November, well, unless you counted the retwit and thus re-connect via twitter. I put the phone on speaker so I could continue putting make-up on.

“Not just me, Paul Martin is here too,” James said his voice sounded sorta distance, as if he were on speaker phone as well.

“Hi Paul?” I stated as a question. It was a welcome call of course, but I was confused about why they were calling. Shouldn’t they be in the middle of some insane training week before their season started or something? I thought as I slid into the dress I was wearing for the night.
“So, Lily, we have a really awesome proposition,” James began, “We both were talking about it, and we think you have to come out to Pittsburgh and surprise Geno for the opening game.”

I started laughing, “Oh guys, I really appreciate this. I already looked at doing that, but it is during the Winter X-Games week which is one of the biggest competitions of the year, so there is no way I can make it.”

“What? No!” James said his voice full of disappointment.

I zipped up the back of my dress, “Yeah, it is a total bummer.”

“You know, we have plenty of other home games,” Paul supplied.

I paused, feeling sorta stupid. I hadn’t thought past that first home game, “Oh, yeah.”

The three of us started going through games and dates. Nothing seemed to work at first.

“What about February 18th? We have three straight home games that week, so it would be until the 25th?” James called out from their end.

I checked my schedule, “Oh my god, that week I have planned just to come back to Colorado for a week off!”

“Really?” both of them chorused excitedly.

“Seriously!” I started bouncing up and down, “So, like, I can just fly in and you’ll pick me up or something?”

“Yeah, and then you can crash with me,” James said his voice very suggestive. I heard a smacking sound and a yelp.

“Why’d you do that?” James whined.

“You know why,” Paul said disapprovingly. I put my heels on silently laughing.

I heard a loud knock on my door, “Lily, its me!”

“Torstein, it’s open!” I yelled.

“Hey, you ready?” I could hear Torstein calling from the other room.

“Yeah, almost. I am in the bedroom.” I answered back.

“God, you look hot babe.” He said as he walked in.

“You are just saying that cause you want to get laid tonight,” I teased. It was something the two of us teased about. Neither of us were remotely interested in each other, hell, he knew me since I was a fizz haired awkward 14 year old in braces, but it was always fun to joke about.

“This is true,” he shrugged, “But let’s get going.”

“Just need my phone and--” I stopped talking remembering I was still on my phone which was on speakerphone which meant everything Tors and I had said could be clearly heard by the two guys on the other end. I snatched up my phone, switched off the speakerphone and brought it up to my ear.

“I’m going to need to call you back tomorrow to plot out those details,” I quickly said. I heard both of the guys laughing.

“I want pictures of you! And you are getting laid?” James complained before adding, “Plus, who is this Torswhothing person? Would Geno approve? I know Crosby wouldn’t approve.”

“Righto, miss you too! Thank you both for being geniuses! Laters!” And I hung up wondering why James would say the thing about Crosby.

Notes

Hi friends!!! Well, Lily's life is pretty disjointed (like this chapter), but I don't want to spend too much time away from hockey (cough cough Sidney cough cough), BUT WAIT UNTIL THE NEXT COUPLE OF CHAPTERS (insert excited but evil laugh {they aren't finished yet, but I have an idea of where we are headed [it is awesome, at least I think so >.< ]})

Torstein Horgmo is a real snowboarder (an awesome one at that).

Once again, I am in awe of all of you. Words cannot express how much it means to me that this is actually being read. I will try to have the next chapter up in the next day or two. Please keep reading/subscribing/rating!!! Woot! Cheers!!!!!