"Cool, cool." Hand on my shoulder, warm smile. Then the voice drops a few degrees. "You do what she says, and you don't get cute with the coach's family, newbie.”
Seriously? This dude didn’t even know she existed ten minutes ago.
"Wasn't planning on cute."
"Nobody plans on cute," he says, and walks off.
I sit there another minute. Whatever that was, it had nothing to do with hockey. But I can't take that on. Not my circus.
Same as the last three teams.
I won't be here long enough for it to matter.
Caleb
Coach's office smells like Slim Jims and big dick energy. There's a mini fridge humming in the corner, a wall of framed teams going yellow at the edges, and a man behind the desk who decided exactly who I am before I said a word. He doesn't tell me to sit. So I don't. I've learned the chair is a trap. You sit, you settle, you start talking, and talking is how guys like me end up backed in a corner.
"You know why I did it that way, right?” he asks me.
"Public? Yeah. So the team polices it for you. Cheaper than a babysitter."
His eyes flick up from the folder. Coaches hate it when you turn out smarter than the report says you are. It wrecks the story they've already written in their heads, the one where I'm muscle with a temper and nothing else underneath.
"Three transfers in four years, Adams. Everybody keeps handing you a fresh start, and you keep burning them to the ground." He says it tired, not mad. Mad, I can work with. Tired is harder.
I shrug, because I don't have anything for him. I can barely explain myself to myself, let alone to a stranger with a whistle. The truth, for whatever it's worth, is that I don't decide to burn anything down. It just goes up, and I'm always the one standing closest to the match. Guess I was just born that way.
"No answers, huh." He nods like that proves a point. "Good news is, I'm not giving you a fresh start. Fresh starts are for guys who've earned the benefit of the doubt. I'm giving you a last chance." He shoves a folder across the desk. "You want on my ice, you give me weekly conduct reviews, academic checks, and anger management on Tuesdays and Fridays. This is a non-negotiable. You miss one, my daughter writes it down, and what she records is the paper trail that follows you the rest of your career. However long that ends up being."
I pick up the folder. It’s a cheap manila thing, couldn't weigh any more than two ounces, yet somehow it sits in my hand like a brick. I've held my whole future in one of these before. Different state, different desk, same weight. It never gets lighter, no matter how many times you carry it.
Here's the part nobody in that office gets to know. I want it. The league, the contract, the one thing my old man swore up and down I'd never have the discipline to earn. This dump of a program in the armpit of Nevada is the last open door I've got left, and we both know it. That's the real leash. Coach Dixon's just the guy holding the end.
"One more thing." He waits until my hand's on the doorknob. They always save the real message for the door. "There's a reason my team doesn't know Jasmine, and it's that she and I both like it that way. She handles your paperwork, and you keep it professional." He lets it sit there a beat. "That is not a suggestion. Do we understand each other?”
I look him dead in the eye, because a man holding my whole life in a folder needs to believe me. "Understood."
I'm pretty sure it's the first lie I've told since I landed in Nevada.
Conference Room B has one table, six chairs, and a poster about academic integrity with a faded eagle peeling off the wall. It's seven forty-five on a Tuesday, and I'm reporting in like a good little felon, which is fine. I've been worse things than punctual.
She's already set up. Spine straight, sleeves shoved up to her elbows, papers laid out in columns so square they look machine-cut. Conduct agreement. Class schedule. Counseling schedule. A pen sitting perpendicular at the top of the stack like a blade at a fancy place setting.
"You don't believe in saving trees?" I chuckle. “Isn’t this a digital world now?”
My snarky charm usually gets me something from the ladies, but not from this one. Nothing. Not even a look.
Half the lights are off in the room. The back half. That's the bank with the tick in it, the one that's been buzzing since I sat down, the kind of small noise that makes me want to climb up and rip it out of the ceiling with my bare hands. She's sitting under the quiet half. I'd bet my last dollar she has never once sat under the loud half. Nobody else in this building would catch that. I do.
"Sign where the tabs are," she says. No hello or anything, but that’s cool. Hellos are overrated.
I read it first. Every page. You read what you sign, that's rule one, learned the hard way. And I can tell the slower I go, the more it gets under her skin. She cracks when I linger on page four.
"It says what my father said it says."
"Your father says a lot of things."
“It’s clear.”
