Benson doesn’t push it in front of the room. He just tips his chin at me, easy, and says it flat, “Good Thanksgiving?”
Two words, and it means something happened up there.
“Incredible,” I say, grinning, lacing a skate. “Ate my body weight in brisket. Met a man named Hodge. Charmed an entire NHL front office. They’re going to name a wing of the building after me.”
Benson looks at me, then he lets it go.
I grin.
I played the best sixty minutes of my college life on no sleep, and I did it with my mouth shut about a thing I swore in a dark room I would never say, concerning a man I had decided, somewhere over Pennsylvania, I wanted to put through the boards.
He let her sit alone in torment for a week. He asked her through a door if she was sure it was his. He went to the draft and never once looked back at what he’d left bleeding behind him. And I can’t say a word of it to anyone — not the boys, not my dad, not a soul — because it isn’t mine to say. It’s hers. She handed it to me in the dark.
So I don’t say it.
I skate it.
The whole thing goes into the ice. I forecheck like I’m being paid by the hit. I score in the first. I score in the third. We beata top-ten team in their own building, and the bench is losing its mind. The scouts in the press box are scribbling, and I’d put money down that my dad’s somewhere texting Coach Linwood about it right now, but none of that is important.
I’m not playing for the scouts tonight. I’m not playing for my dad. I’m barely playing for the boys. I’m playing a name out of my own chest, and I can’t tell anyone whose, so I just play.
After, I’ve got Selena Gomez going on somebody’s speaker and I’m working the room while everyone packs up — swaying my hips, rolling my shoulders, narrating my own goals to anybody who’ll pretend to listen. Benson whips me with a towel and asks what the hell’s wrong with me. I answer him in song. Blue films a verse and loses it when I get up on the bench. I let my pants slide off my ass, and the room comes apart. One by one, the guys take off toward the bus, still laughing, shaking their heads, until the bench is empty and the last guy props the door. Blue unplugs the speaker on his way out, and the music just stops.
And then it’s me and Benson in the quiet of a locker room after a win, which is its own kind of loud.
He’s got his bag packed. He’s not looking at me.
“You good?” he says.
“I’m phenomenal, Reeve. Just scored twice in a building that hates me. I’m gonna sleep like a king and wake up even more handsome. Genuinely worried for the rest of you, long term.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Pretty sure it’s word-for-word what you asked.”
He zips the bag. He stands. And he looks at me the way he looks at me — flat, patient, a man who has watched me run this exact routine since we were freshmen and knows every gear in it.
“Connecticut,” he says.
“Was lovely. Crisp. The brisket alone—”
“Stan.”
“—was a religious experience, Reeve, I’m not going to apologize for a good brisket—”
“Stan.”
I shut up.
He doesn’t say anything for a second. He just looks at me. I look back, and I give him the grin. The full one, the one that’s walked me out of every room I’ve ever needed walking out of.
He nods slowly, like the grin told him exactly what he wanted to know, which it didn’t, because I didn’t let it, and he slings his bag over his shoulder.
“Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”
He claps me on the shoulder on the way past.
“Bus in ten,” he says, and he’s gone.
