I picked up my phone.
I looked at it for a long time.
I put it in my pocket.
I walked out.
Chapter Eleven
Shay
We won by four.
Four goals, clean and decisive, the kind of win that didn't leave room for argument or asterisk , the kind where you came off the ice and the locker room had a specific frequency, higher and brighter than the usual, the sound of men who had done something correctly and knew it. Coach Denny said three sentences and they were all good ones. Hartley almost smiled. Mivo did smile, fully, with teeth, which happened approximately twice a season and which Kieran immediately photographed for reasons that were entirely Kieran's own.
I sat in my stall and felt it , the win settling into my body the right way, clean and warm, the way the good ones did. A stone dropped into still water and instead of sinking, floating.
I was going to let myself have tonight.
I had decided this somewhere in the third period, somewhere between the second goal and the third, with the crowd loud and the ice fast and the particular feeling of a line clicking the way our line clicked when we were right , when the read was there before the play, when the pass was where it needed to be before you'd asked for it, when four years of knowing someone's game became something you could feel in your feet. Felix hadthreaded a pass through a seam that shouldn't have existed and I had been exactly where he'd put it, and the puck was in the net, and for thirty seconds on the ice there had been nothing between us but something working correctly.
I was going to let myself have tonight.
I had been careful for weeks. I had been quiet, giving Felix the distance he needed and telling Mivo his positioning was good and meaning it. I had been a version of myself that was correct and functional and sustainable and it had cost me something I was going to stop counting.
Tonight: no counting.
Reeves had a place. He had always had a place , a contact, a friend, a cousin, some configuration of people who reliably had a large apartment available whenever a significant win required a location. The details were never entirely clear and nobody asked because Reeves' logistics had never failed, and the apartment existed, and by nine,thirty it was full of the right people and the right noise and the kind of ease that came from a group of men who had spent the last three hours doing something hard together and come out the other side.
I was in the middle of it and I wason.
Not performing. That was the thing , the distinction I had been living inside for weeks, the difference between the two that I understood now with a precision I hadn't had before. Performing was maintenance. Performing was the load,bearing walls and the regular checks for cracks. This was different. This was the frequency from the locker room, the one I'd described in my head a hundred times , the beautiful specific pitch of a room full of people who were happy and loud and alive , and I was inside it and part of it and not managing it from behind glass.
I had the room and I knew I had the room and I let myself have it.
The story I was telling was about Reeves, specifically, and a rental car from the Vancouver road trip two seasons ago, and it had Mivo laughing so hard he had to put his drink down, and Kieran was beside me adding details he had no business still remembering, and Reeves was shaking his head in the specific way of a man who knew the story was accurate and resented it deeply and was also laughing.
"and at this point," I said, "the car is making a sound. Not a warning sound. Anopinionsound. Like the car has developed feelings about the situation,"
"It had a warning light," Reeves said.
"Reeves. The light had been on for forty minutes. It had graduated from warning tostatement."
"You told me it was fine,"
"I told you it was probably fine, which is a different,"
"You saiddefinitelyfine,"
"I said it with confidence, which I think you'll agree I delivered on,"
The room erupted. I rode it the way I used to ride it, easy and whole, not watching myself ride it, not monitoring the frequency for signs of structural failure. Just , in it. Present. Real.
I was laughing.
I had forgotten, in the weeks of careful fine, what it felt like to laugh without checking first whether it was the right volume.
It felt like the win. Clean and warm and exactly correct.
