Third period. We tie it at six on a rebound I jam home from the crease. The celly is quick. Glove taps, helmet knocks, back to the bench. The game isn't over. Bruins take the lead back at fourteen on a power play we earned by a stupid hooking call I will think about for a week. The building is screaming. Paul is pacing the bench like a man trying to walk his own heart rate down.
Two minutes to go, Paul puts me and Theo on the same line for the first time all season. I don't know if it's strategy or desperation. I'm not going to ask.
Face-off in their zone. Theo wins it clean—I don't even know he can do that, he's never done it on camera, but he does it clean, he does it fast, and he drops the puck back to our D before the Bruins center has fully squared his feet. Shot. Save. Rebound. Scrum.
No.
I go get it. I want it more than any other human in this building. I dig it out from under two Bruins’ sticks with my left skate and I find Theo coming low across the slot and I don't even have to look; I just know he's going to be there. I slide it onto his tape.
Theo doesn't shoot. He doesn't have the angle. He snaps it back to me between his own legs, between his defender's legs, a no-look touch pass that my dead grandmother would call beautiful, and I take a one-timer shot top shelf over the glove with six seconds on the clock.
Noise.
I don't hear it. I see it. The building comes off its feet and the sound wave hits the ice and the boards vibrate under my skates. I turn. Theo is already airborne. He leaps on me, helmet to helmet, and I catch him because catching him is reflex now, and we go down against the boards in a pile. Glove hands. Grins through cages. The team piles on. Phoenix gets there first and cracks me in the back of the helmet withfucking vintage, Creed.
Theo is under me. His eyes are huge. His mouth is open. His face is all teeth.
“Hi,” I say, low enough that only the mesh of his cage gets it.
His whole face does a thing.
“Hi.”
“You wanna go home with me?”
“Yes.”
The weight of Phoenix lands on both our backs.
“Good.”
I peel off. The pile peels off. The arena is still screaming. The clock runs out. We win. The hand-shakes. The fist-bumps. The head-pat from the trainer. The salute to the crowd at center ice. Paul is the last thing I see before we go down the tunnel. Paul standing at the end of the bench with his arms crossed, not clapping, watching Theo skate past him. His mouth is small. Very small. Smaller than I've ever seen it.
Fine, coach. Tell me how it was sloppy.
The locker room is loud. Phoenix is doing something obscene with a stick. Park is pouring a water bottle down his own back. Two of the rookies are actually dancing. Somebody has a speaker going with a song I don't know and don't want to know. The smell is sweat and tape and the sharp cold of an ice-sheet body coming in from twenty degrees. I pull my helmet off. Theo is across the room pulling his off and his hair is stuck to his forehead. His face is red, he's still grinning, and he looks at me across the room; the grin drops to something private for half a second, and I feel it in my gear.
Paul walks in.
The room quiets a degree. Not all the way, the rookies don't know yet, but the veterans know.
“Good win.” Flat. “Creed, my office. Now.”
He walks out. The rookies look at each other. Phoenix makes a face at me.
I peel out of half my gear. Keep the base layers on. Keep the cup on, which is going to matter in about ten minutes though I don't know it yet. Pull on a team quarter-zip over the shoulder pads because I can't be bothered. Walk down the corridor.
Paul's office is off the locker-room hallway, second door on the right. Coach's name on a brass plate. Bare walls. One bookshelf. Desk. Two chairs.
I stand. I don't sit. He doesn't offer.
“Sloppy,” he says, not looking up from the stat sheet. “Undisciplined. You ran that Bruins winger in the second, legal, I know, I know. You took yourself out of position on the goal I won't complain about, but the rest of your game was trash.”
“Okay, Coach.”
“You want to throw your shifts away being a goon, fine. But my son doesn't play with you again. Not on my bench.”
There it is. He's not even pretending this is about hockey.
