I sat with my shin pad in my hand and stared at the floor in front of me, and something happened that I had absolutely no preparation for and no framework to explain.
My entire nervous system woke up.
Not in a general way. Not in the way your body responded to adrenaline or exertion or the relief of finally playing after two months of watching. In a specific, targeted, completely inconvenient way that started somewhere in the center of my chest and radiated outward in a manner I recognized with the specific horror of recognizing something at the worst possible moment.
I was aware of Theron Kincaid. Physically aware, the way you were aware of heat from a source you hadn’t noticed until it was already warming your skin. The way his voice had dropped ongood game—low and unhurried and meant, genuinely meant, without performance. The laugh lines. The salt-and-pepper hair. The broad set of his shoulders from the old injury that had ended his playing career, which I knew about because I’d read everything available about this franchise and its coach in the first forty-eight hours after the trade, when information had felt like the only form of control available to me.
He was across the room now, talking to one of the assistants, his back half-turned, and I made myself look at my shin pad.
I was twenty-three years old. He was in his fifties. He was my head coach. He was, by every functional and institutional and basic common-sense measure unavailable, the single most off-limits person in my professional universe. He held my career in his hands more literally than that phrase usually meant—and he had spent the last two months making decisions about my future with the same authority other people used to decide what they were having for lunch.
And I was sitting here noticing his laugh lines.
I put the shin pad down with more care than it required and started on the other one, because my hands needed something to do, and the alternative was sitting in the middle of a playoff locker room with my face doing things I couldn’t afford to have it do.
It didn’t mean anything. That was the conclusion I arrived at by the time I had both shin pads off and was working on my skates. It was pattern recognition misfiring. It was two months of controlled distance from any form of genuine acknowledgment followed by thirty seconds of direct, specific approval from a man whose approval I had been working toward without admitting I was working toward it. That was all. The body responded to what it had been trained to want, and I had been trained badly by someone with bad intentions, and theappropriate response was to note the weirdness and not act on it.
I unlaced my left skate.
He was still across the room. I could tell without looking—that was the worst part, the new and unwelcome awareness of exactly where he was in a space, the way you tracked something warm without meaning to. He’d moved to the far corner now, talking to one of the defensive coaches with the clipped, efficient shorthand they used after games, the debrief language that had its own rhythm.
Don’t look.
I looked.
Chapter four
Game Misconduct - A penalty that ejects a player from the game.
Dante
The hotel bar was Renaud's idea. or rather, it was Renaud's instruction delivered with a grin, which I’d come to understand was how he operated when he wanted something to happen without making it an order. Not that he ever needed to make an order. People seemed to genuinely want to be in his orbit.
He caught me just as we got off the team bus while I was still carrying my bag, still in that post-game state where the body was cooling down and the mind was doing the opposite, still half-occupied with the image of Kincaid’s laugh lines that I was actively trying to evict.
“Hotel bar,” he said. “Twenty minutes.”
“I was—”
“Hotel bar,” he said again, in exactly the same tone, and walked away.
That was the entire conversation.
I stood in the corridor for a moment with my bag on my shoulder and considered the various reasons I had to decline. There were several. They were all reasonable. And they all dissolved, somewhat, under the weight of the fact that Maxim Renaud had just told me to come to the team bar, and in two months of being invisible, nobody had told me that before. Renaud wasn’t just the team captain, he was the sun that all the players revolved around, and some days, even when no one was speaking to me much, I felt better just by being in his presence.
I went back to my room, showered, changed into something that looked like I’d made a decision about it, and went downstairs.
The bar at the hotel off Michigan Avenue was the kind of place that existed specifically for this purpose—wide booths, low lighting, a long mahogany bar that could absorb a hockey team without complaint. I’d been in a hundred rooms like it over the last two years. I’d sat in exactly zero of them with this team.
They’d pushed two tables together near the back. Keegan was already there, leaning back in his chair with a beer and that kind of relaxation he had, the kind that looked effortless and probably wasn’t. Varga was next to him, and Morozov, and three of the younger forwards whose names I’d memorized from the roster sheet and was still in the process of matching to the actualhuman beings attached to them. Ilyin came in right behind me and dropped into the nearest chair without ceremony, and then Renaud materialized at the head of the table as if he’d been there all along.
I took the open seat between Morozov and the wall because it was the one that existed and sat down.
For the first few minutes I was mostly quiet while more players joined the group. That wasn’t unusual for me. They were talking about the game the way teams always talked about games after them, with a mix of grievance and analysis and dark humor that was its own dialect. The power play goal got taken apart twice. Someone made a joke about the bounce that I didn’t quite catch but laughed at anyway, half a second behind everyone else, and Morozov turned to me and said, in his amused, heavily accented English, “You don’t know what he said.”
It was Aurelian that had spoken. There were two Morozov brothers. Not twins but born eight months apart. Azarian was silent as usual. In two months, I didn’t think I’d ever heard him speak.
“Not even a little,” I admitted.
