I don’t blame her because I know I’ve been a coward.
I have been a coward for so fucking long. The cowardice has had a hundred costumes — distance, hockey, the future, the draft, theplan, and the version of me I keep telling myself I haveto be — but underneath all of it, under every excuse I have ever fed myself about why I could not have her, the truth is that I was afraid she was the kind of love I couldn’t survive. I was afraid that if I let her be number one, then everything else would fall. I was afraid that loving her right would mean rearranging my entire life around her, and I didn’t know how to do that and still be a hockey player.
So I let her go.
I let her go and I told myself it was for her.
And the lie of it has beenkillingme. Slowly. Quietly. In the small hours of every morning of the last two years. In every space I have walked into and looked for her face and didn’t see it. At every party, I have left early because the girl across the room was wearing her color.Ourcolor. In every single time someone has asked me if I’m seeing anybody, and I have saidno,and meantI already saw her, and there is no one else to see now.
I’ve been a coward.
I’m tired of being a coward.
I skate back a few feet. The puck sits balanced on my blade. I have the softest hands on this team. Coach has said it since I was a freshman.Golding’s hands, he says,Golding’s hands are a goddamn gift.
Tonight I am going to use them on something other than a goal.
I lift my stick.
I hit the puck.
Not hard. Not the way you shoot. The way yougivesomething. The way you set a glass of water down at someone’s bedside in the dark. Just enough lift. Just enough mustard to clear the plexi. It arcs up — clean, slow, the kind of trajectory a coach would call lazy and a poet would callkind— and it comes down on the other side and lands right in her hands.
The crowd roars louder this time.
She catches it against her chest with wide eyes. She looks down at it in pure shock, her mouth open, and then she puts her hand up against the glass.
“Go,” she mouths.
Her eyes are shining.
I cannot breathe.
I have taken pucks to the throat and breathed easier than this.
Benson is back at my shoulder.
“Okay. Showtime. Move.”
He grips the back of my jersey. He skates me away from the glass. I don’t resist him. My heart is going like a fucking boombox inside my chest, against my pads, against my ribs, against the inside of the chest protector that has never had to hold this much before.
I look over my shoulder.
She’s holding the puck against her sweater. Both hands. Like a thing she does not want to ever let go of.
She hasn’t moved.
I don’t look at her again during warmups.
I can’t.
If I look at her again, I am going to forget how to play hockey, and I’m here to play hockey.
When the puck drops, the world goes small.
This is the part I have always loved about hockey, the part that nobody who has not played a contact sport at a real level will ever understand — the way the entire spinning weight of your life shrinks down to the patch of ice in front of your skates and the man across from you who wants the same small black thing you want. Tonight the small black thing is irrelevant. Tonight the man across from me is a kid called Bauer from UMass who has been chirping our bench since warmups and has a wide square jaw that is begging to be hit. And tonight my chest is full of something I don’t have language for, something that has beenclimbing up my ribs since I watched a girl in a blue sweater press her palm to the glass and mouth the word go, and there is nowhere on God’s green earth for that something to go except into the body of the boy in maroon trying to take the puck off my stick.
So I take it off his.
