“Flint.”
Not me.
Not Paul.
Maddox.
Maddox is suddenly there, behind Magnus, close enough that his stick is across Magnus's chest at the level of Magnus's collar bone, horizontal, in cross-check position except he has not cross-checked, he has just put the stick there. He is not skating. He is standing. His weight is forward. His helmet is on.
Magnus tilts his head and looks at him, not at me.
“Mad Dog. This is a drill.”
Maddox does not move the stick.
“You're not doing the drill. You're standing in the line chirping a kid. Shut your mouth. Get back in the drill.”
“I was?—”
The stick presses a fraction harder into Magnus's chest.
“Shut. Your. Mouth.”
Maddox's voice is not loud. It is the thing voices do when they stop being sound and start being weight. It is the voice that went with the hand on my chest in the alley. The voice is the same voice. I am realizing this, which is a thing I did not want to realize on the ice, with my helmet on, in front of the team.
Magnus looks at the stick across his chest.
He looks at Maddox's face.
He looks at me.
The smile goes out of him. Not all the way. Most of the way.
“Fine, Creed. Fine.”
Maddox takes the stick off Magnus's chest. Magnus pushes off and skates to rejoin the rotation. Maddox does not look at me. Maddox does not say anything to me. He turns and skates to the far side of the line and stands there with his stick in his hands and his eyes on the drill.
On the bench, Paul has looked up from the tablet. He has seen the last five seconds of that.
Paul looks at Maddox. Paul looks at Magnus. Paul looks at me.
Paul does not whistle the drill dead. Paul writes something on the tablet.
I skate into my rep like a man breathing through something underwater.
Nobody chirps me for the rest of the practice.
It is not that they forget. It is that they remember. Magnus is not the only one who saw what Maddox did. The second-liners saw. The third-liners saw. Jax saw. Phoenix saw and his face did not move because Phoenix's face does not move at anything. But the grammar of the rink takes the event and converts it into information, and the information travels from stall to stall and rep to rep without a single word being spoken, and by the time we are in drill four the rotations are treating me differently.
Nobody hits me harder than they have to.
Nobody shoves me in the corner when I pick up a loose puck.
Grayson, who chirped me earlier, skates past and bumps my shoulder and says,good set, Laurent,which is not a thing Grayson has said to me all week.
Jax, at a water break, stands next to me at the bench with his mouthguard out and does not say anything, which is a thing Jax does with a person he has decided is okay.
Magnus does not look at me again.
