Chapter One
Shay
The thing about locker rooms was that they had a frequency. A specific, chaotic, beautiful pitch that only existed when twenty,something men who'd just beaten the hell out of each other on ice were crammed into a tiled room that smelled like sweat and ambition and Kieran's truly offensive body spray.
I lived for that frequency.
"and then," I announced to the room at large, hoisting myself onto the equipment trunk like it was a throne, "the ref has the audacity , the nerve , to look me dead in the eye and call that a penalty."
"It was a penalty," Mivo said from his stall. He didn't look up from untying his skate.
"Mivo. Baby. Rookie. My left elbow barely grazed that man."
"You hit him so hard his helmet rotated forty,five degrees."
"That's called passion."
Reeves snorted from two stalls over, which I took as encouragement. Hartley, the veteran defenseman who communicated primarily through sighs and meaningful silences, made a sound that may have been a laugh or may have been theonset of a migraine. It was hard to tell with Hartley. I chose to believe it was a laugh because it was better for my ego.
Kieran looked up from his phone. "I have video."
"Destroy it."
"I'm sending it to the group chat."
"Kieran. I will end you."
He sent it to the group chat.
The room erupted , phones pulled out, guys leaning over each other's shoulders, the sound of the clip playing on three different devices at slightly different times like a terrible echo. Even Coach Denny, passing the doorway with his coffee and his clipboard and his permanent expression of a man who had chosen the wrong profession, paused to look at his phone, shook his head, and kept walking.
I spread my arms wide. "You see? Even Coach agrees that was not a penalty."
"Coach just walked away in silence," Reeves said.
"In awe."
I was aware , peripherally, casually, in the way you're aware of the sun when you're standing outside , that Felix had come in from the ice and was now at his stall on the far side of the room. He moved through the chaos with the particular efficiency of someone who had learned to exist in it without being part of it. Gear off in a specific order. Pads stacked. Skates unlaced left before right, which I knew because I knew everything about Felix Wren that I had zero business knowing.
I did not look directly at him.
Kieran had now set the clip as his phone wallpaper. Mivo and Reeves were debating the geometry of my elbow trajectory withthe seriousness of men arguing a criminal case. Hartley had retreated fully behind his stall door in the manner of a tortoise who had seen too much.
I was in the middle of a spirited defense of my own innocence when Charlie dropped onto the trunk beside me. He had the look he always had after a good practice , loose in the shoulders, hair damp, one of those quiet smiles that meant he was happy in a way that still sometimes caught me off guard. Charlie had not always been a man who wore his happy easily. He did now.
Henry Blackwell had done that. Wild.
"You know," Charlie said, stealing my water bottle without asking because he was my best friend and also my personal torment, "most people, when they're trying to stay out of headlines, don't assault referees."
"I didn't assault,"
"The man's helmet rotated forty,five degrees, Shay."
"Everyone keeps saying that like it's a fact."
"It is a fact. There's video."
I pointed at him. "You're the team captain. You're supposed to defend me."
