Looked at me with those blue eyes, very close.
"Okay?" he said.
It was the same word I'd said to him. In the office, after the first easy kiss, the one that started everything. He'd saidyesand now he was asking me back and I didn't know if he knew he was doing it or if it just came out.
"Yeah," I said. "Okay."
He nodded once. Stepped back. Adjusted his tablet under his arm.
"Good game tonight," he said. Professional. Completely level. Like he hadn't just kissed me in a hotel corridor before a game.
He walked away.
I stood against the wall for a second.
My parents were coming up from Boston for this game. Rob had driven four hours each way to junior games in weather that should have kept him home. Linda had worked extra shifts so I could skate with better programs.
Rob and Linda Morrison were going to be in section 112 tonight.
Dylan and I were going to be on the ice.
I was going to score or I was going to die trying.
There wasno Morr Roar in this arena.
That was the thing I kept coming back to, in the warmup, in the first period, every time I did something worth responding to and the crowd responded by booing. No upper bowl, no section 214, no guy in the red jacket starting it from the rafters. Just the Hawks faithful doing what road crowds did, which was make noise that worked against you instead of with you.
I played anyway.
This was not new. I'd played road games before, I'd played in buildings that wanted me gone, I'd played through crowds that made every good shift feel smaller because there was nobody to amplify it. The transaction that usually powered me, the one where I gave the crowd the moment and they gave me the noise back—that transaction wasn't available tonight.
I played anyway. Not for the crowd. For something else, something that was harder to name.
Second period, Wardens down by one. Vrek pinched high on the left side exactly the way Matthew had said he would, and Dylan read it before I did—Dylan always read it before I did, Dylan watched film the way other people breathed—and the give-and-go happened in about three seconds. Clean and fast.Dylan's shot going top corner past Selig who had a point-nine-two-four save percentage away from home and was apparently having an off night.
Dylan skated past me.
I pointed at him.
He kept skating, jaw doing something that wasn't quite a smile but was closer than usual, and something in my chest was warm and uncomplicated and had nothing to do with crowd noise.
We tied it. Then we went up by one.
Then I lost the puck.
Third period, Wardens up by one, two minutes gone. I read an opportunity that wasn't there. I saw the gap, went for it, the way I always went for it when I was running on instinct instead of system. Holt was faster than I'd tracked and the puck was gone and I was standing in the offensive zone watching it go the other way.
The Hawks scored forty seconds later.
Holt did a lap. Standard celebration stuff, fist pump, the crowd going insane around him. Then one of the Hawks forwards—Decker—drifted toward the Wardens bench on the way back to his own zone and said something that was not directed at me.
It was directed at Dylan.
"Must be exhausting," Decker said, loud enough to carry, with the particular smile of someone who had done their homework. "Cleaning up after your little brother your whole career."
The bench went very still.
Dylan's jaw set. That was it. That was the whole reaction—Dylan's jaw, Dylan's shoulders, Dylan processing it inward the way he processed everything inward, filing it in the place where he put things he never said out loud.
