ELI
Ihave exactly nine minutes to make a good first impression on the Atlanta Reapers, and I am doing it with one sneaker untied, a skate lace dangling from my duffel bag, a coffee stain on my cuff, and the kind of sweat that suggests I have either sprinted across a parking deck or committed a medium-sized felony.
The lobby is all steel and glass and polished floors and the quiet, expensive efficiency of a place that employs professional athletes and has very little patience for people who can't keep up. Reapers logos gleam from the walls. Framed action shots line the corridor beyond reception. Somewhere deeper in the building, I can hear the low thud of voices, the rattle of equipment carts, the distant scrape of skates against concrete.
Training camp. My first pro camp. My first real shot.
Twenty-two years old. Four years at Boston College. Drafted late in the first round at eighteen and signed an entry-level contract that the team agreed to defer while I finished my degree, which everyone (including my mother, including my agent, including the Reapers GM) assured me was the responsible play. The responsible play put me here, four yearslate, watching guys two years younger than me get their second pro contracts while I prepared for orientation.
My stomach flips hard enough to qualify as an internal injury. Sweat slides down my spine under the compression shirt. The skate lace bounces against my hip with every step like a countdown.
I grin anyway. Grinning has gotten me through draft interviews, junior hockey road trips, one catastrophic wedding where I accidentally hooked up with the groom's cousin (male, older, spectacular jawline, terrible idea), and approximately twenty-two years of pretending I'm not one bad shift away from being exposed as a fraud. A good smile can buy you time. It can make people underestimate you. It can get you forgiven.
The grin is my first tool and my best one. It buys time. It makes people underestimate me. It keeps anyone from seeing how badly I want this, and the wanting feels like a medical condition.
There's a man at the front desk. Not the reception desk. A different desk, off to the side, positioned where it can see every entrance and exit simultaneously. He's older, Black, wearing a Reapers staff polo and a lanyard, and he's watching me with a calm that suggests he has been watching nervous rookies walk through this lobby for decades.
His eyes track me from the door to the reception desk. I feel assessed, cataloged, and filed in the time it takes me to cover twenty feet of lobby.
"Eli Mercer," I say to the woman at reception, a little breathless, aiming for charming and landing somewhere closer to deranged. "Please tell me I'm fashionably late."
She glances at the clock. "No."
"Tragically?"
"Catastrophically."
"Great. Love that for me."
Her mouth twitches. Not quite a smile. I'll take it.
"Conference Room B. End of the hall, left side. Orientation is almost over."
"Fantastic. I enjoy making an entrance."
From the desk by the door, the older man watches me go. He doesn't say anything. The watching is its own communication. The watching says: I see you. I see the grin and the sweat and the coffee stain and the performance underneath all three. I have been seeing people in this building for thirty-one years and you are not the first to arrive performing and you will not be the last.
The corridor is long and smells like floor wax and athletic tape and the institutional cleanliness of a facility that costs more per square foot than my mother's house. I half-jog toward Conference Room B, duffel bag slamming against my hip, and I almost make it before the door opens and a flood of other rookies starts filing out.
Great. I've arrived at the exact humiliating moment where everyone can see that I've missed everything.
One of the rookies (big defenseman, Alberta accent, looks like he bench-presses livestock) gives me a sympathetic once-over.
I give him a cheerful thumbs-up. Yes, I know. I'm thriving.
"Mercer."
The voice comes from my left. Low, cool, accented, and impossible to ignore.
I turn.
The man standing in the corridor looks like the universe reached into my personal weakness inventory, found tall men with dark skin and severe faces and the build of someone who ends careers near the boards, and decided to get creative.
He is tall. Comfortably over six feet. The kind of frame hockey produces in men who spend their lives punishing people in corners. Dark brown skin. Short-cropped dark hair. A closebeard that follows the hard line of his jaw. Sharp cheekbones and a straight mouth and a nose that has been broken at least once and came back better. His expression suggests he is considering whether I am worth the administrative paperwork of murdering.
My brain produces two simultaneous assessments. The first is professional: veteran, defenseman, one of those guys who makes life miserable for anyone who likes having fun. The second is not professional: hot enough to be a workplace safety issue.
"Yes?" I say.
