1
The thing about playing hurt was that the crowd never knew the difference.
Neither did I half the time, which was either a testament to my pain tolerance or a pretty serious character flaw.
Probably both.
I'd been running the trick since I was sixteen, since the first time a hit rattled something loose and I looked up at the arena lights thinking exactly one thought:get up.
SoI got up, because the alternative was lying there while hundreds of people quietly revised their opinion of me.
Hard pass.
I had a personal policy against giving anyone that kind of ammunition.
Tonight the ice is mine, motherfuckers.
Third period, Wardens up by one against Sentinels, and I was running hot—the kind of hot where your body stops asking questions and justgoes.
I took Dylan's pass at the blue line and didn't think, because thinking was for suckers who hadn’t had three energy drinks before warm-ups.
I could see the opportunity, like the ice was doing me a personal favor, and I took the shot from a place I had absolutely no business taking it from—
It went in.
The building lost its fucking mind.
The Morr Roar started somewhere in the upper bowl. It always started up there with the diehards, the ones who'd been doing it since my first season last year.
Then it came down in a wave.
Their hands raised like paws, fifteen thousand people doing their best lion impression just for me, just for Wesley Morrison—which should have been ridiculous and was instead the best sound in the world.
I had my arms up before the red light confirmed it, because I knew, Ialwaysknew, and the Morr Roar was still rolling through the building when I turned to point at Dylan—
Then the hit came from the right.
A defenseman I hadn't tracked, coming in fast and low, and the contact was hard enough that my helmet snapped back. Everything went white for a second before coming back slightly wrong.
The crowd did that thing crowds do, that big collective inhale, the half-second where fifteen thousand people decide whether to celebrate or panic.
I got up slow.
But then I smiled, and fifteen thousand people lost their minds all over again. That was the deal. That was the transaction.
I had been doing this since I was a little kid. The grin, the arms, the give them the moment. In foster care it was smaller scale. Different audience. Same transaction.
The system had been running since before I knew it was a system. Since before the Morrisons. Since before anyone had shown up.
So I gave this crowd the moment, and they gave me the noise, and everyone went home happy and nobody had to know that my ears were ringing and the ice looked slightly tilted.
I was maybe twenty percent sure I’d just rattled my brain loose.
Twenty percent was fine, right? That meant there was an eighty percent chance everything was totally fine. I liked those odds.
"Let’s go—" Dylan, somewhere behind me, used the voice my older brother reserved forI'm watching you and I hate what I'm seeing. Coach was adding to the noise from the bench. The whole rink was still going.
I found the bench out of habit.
