She gave nothing away, but I fucking felt it. Her anger simmering right under the surface.
I lean over the boards, blow out a breath, and let the one quiet thought come up before I shove it back under the ice with the rest:
She wants to take notes on me?
Almost run me over?
Good.
I declare war, Linwood.
Chapter 4
Aspen
Did he…
Did he just…
Did this idiot — this NHL prince, this glorified dancing monkey on skates, this six-foot-four golden-retriever-shaped misuse of a first-round pick — just mock me?
In front everyone?
Did he take a perfectly ordinary goal and turn it into a private joke with me as the punchline, on broadcast television, with a camera pointed at the glass?
He can go to hell.
The whole rink is on its feet. Every single person in this building is standing and roaring. I am the only one sitting, perfectly still, perfectly composed, a stone in a river of noise, because I learned a long time ago that the woman who doesn’t react is the woman who wins, and I will sit here like a marble statue of myself before I let him see one flicker cross my face.
My hand is around my phone, white-knuckling. I can feel the case biting into my fingers.
I make myself let go. One finger at a time. Index, then middle, then the rest, slow, deliberate, the way I’d talk a tremor out of my own hand at a Tuesday meeting. I keep my chin level. There is a camera on this glass, and I know it, and somewhere in a production truck, a director is wondering who the girl in row three is and why number eleven skated all the way across the ice to draw on the window in front of her. I will not be the punchline and the reaction shot. Pick one, Ermington. You don’t get both.
And then I lift the phone and open the note.
I type, in my hands that will not stay still. Player 11. Goal, 2nd period. Top corner, glove side. Off the rush — carry by Theo Marsh, drop pass, finishes clean. No hesitation on the release.
I type it because I am a professional. I am my father’s report-writer before I am anything else, before I’m even a person. I type it because the only other available option is homicide.
He’s back out for his next shift before my hands have settled, and I watch him, because that is the job my dad has me on. And the job doesn’t stop just because he humiliated me.
As I watch him, my throat closes up. Not only because he’s my archenemy, but because he’s good.
He’s good.
He plays the game in the future tense. I have spent my entire life being told I have a freakish eye for this sport, the read, the instinct, the thing that can’t be coached, and I am watching a boy carry the identical gift down the right wing at full speed.
The only difference between his gift and mine is what’s between our legs.
But my father downplayed my talent as a child. He put me on the couch next to him instead of in skates, and I wonder what I could’ve been if he believed hockey wasn’t just a man’s sport.
And the fury that comes up out of me is so much older than tonight.
If I had been born a boy, I would be on that ice. I would be the one my father calls, the investment, the one he’s proud of. I’d have the bench mob and the broadcast camera and the stupid signature in the air, and I would have earned every inch of it the same way I earn everything — and instead I got a girl’s body and a girl’s chair and a girl’s job, taking dictation on the boy my father treats like the son he didn’t have, while everything I am sits second. Permanently, structurally second.
And for one moment, in the bottom of all that heat, I catch a glimpse of the truth, that the man who decided I’d be in the chair instead of on the ice was never Stanley Ermington.
It was the man who sends me to watch him. The man whose Cup photo sits on my desk at home. The man whose two words on a text message can run my whole day uphill or down, and who I would set myself on fire for to make proud, and who has never once, not one single time, suggested that the eye in my head might be worth anything other than reports.
