She blinks. “You heard that?”
“Ice is muted when you’re not fighting.” I drop one shoulder against the tunnel wall. “I filed Rourke four times. Let it go four times. The ref caught it on the fifth.”
“I know.” She looks at her screen. Back at me. “I was tracking.”
“Were you tracking the entire game?”
“That’s my job.”
“Toni.”
She stops. Looks up. “Were you watching me specifically?”
A pause. One beat. Two. The kind of pause I've learned to read."
“Yes,” she says. Just yes. Clean. No cover story.
My lungs constrict with an emotion I’m not ready to name while I’m still in pads and skates and smell like a professional hockey game. I push off the wall. “How’d I do?”
Her mouth forms an almost-smile, but she pulls it back just before it reaches her lips. “You read the Rourke situation correctly all four times. The position you took on the third incident was textbook.”
“Textbook,” I repeat.
“It was good, Max.”
She says it the same way she said your last coach was wrong. Like it’s just true, and she’s saying it because it’s true, and that’s all. No agenda. No bait. No clipboard distance. I look at her for a long second, my stomach uneasy. The tunnel is emptying. The locker room's getting loud. I've got maybe three minutes before Trey looks for me. “You came down from the press box,” I say.
“I needed to log the post-game observations.”
“You could do that from up there.”
She doesn’t answer right away. Her pen clicks once. Twice. “The sight lines are better down here,” she says. The genuine smile. The one she saves.
I smile. Slow. “Mm-hm.”
Her chin tips up. “Don’t.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re doing the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where you look at me like you already know what I’m going to say before I say it.”
I take one step closer. One step. Less distance in a tunnel that's almost empty now. “Do I know?”
“You took a retaliation penalty today,” she murmurs.
“I’m aware.”
“Because of a reporter touching my elbow?”
“He laughed too hard at your jokes.”
“I wasn’t making jokes.”
“Exactly.”
