Perez caught my eye from across the face-off circle. To my surprise, the sophomore gave me a short, approving nod before turning away.
I spat a mouthful of blood-tinged saliva onto the ice. When the trainer jogged toward the bench to check on me, I waved him off. Sitting out the rest of the practice wasn’t going to happen. Instead, I pushed through another twenty minutes of passing drills until the freezing air numbed the throbbing in my cheek.
By the time Coach blew the final whistle, the scholarship line had already cleared out. Striding toward the locker room, my ribs ached with every movement.
The humid locker room smelled thickly of muscle cream and stale sweat. Through the open doorway to the showers, I could hear Elliot and Trenton’s voices echoing over the running water. But out here, the room was quiet. Perez and a few other guys from Aleksey’s line lingered by their stalls, their eyes tracking me as I walked in.
My gear was everywhere. Bag dumped upside down. Pads against the wall. Towel scattered across the wet rubber floor near the center drain.
Hot anger crept up the back of my neck, but I forced my expression to stay blank. No one was getting the satisfaction ofseeing me rattled. So, instead of quietly gathering my gear and finding a new bench, I marched directly toward him.
Aleksey sat on the bench one stall over, stripped down to his sweat-drenched workout shirt and track pants.
Perez stood two stalls down, skate in one hand, watching. He’d been taping his shin pads when I walked in. Now he was just standing there, chewing his gum slower than usual. He didn’t say a word. The earlier nod on the ice hadn’t turned into backup in the locker room. Not that I expected it to.
Out of all my scattered equipment, my eyes zeroed in on my leather gloves. They were lying in a puddle of water right at the edge of Aleksey’s stall, soaking up the grime from the floor. Walking over, I bent down to snatch them up before the leather was ruined.
Before my hand could reach them, Aleksey slid down the bench. He lifted his boot and drove it down onto the wet floor. The thick rubber sole landed half an inch from my fingers, pinning the gloves against the ground.
My hand stayed right where it was. Instead of backing off, I slowly looked up and met his gaze dead on.
“Is this what desperation looks like?” I asked.
Aleksey held the stare. “You should learn to pick up your garbage, Johnny Jr.”
“Expensive garbage.” I glanced down at the gloves crushed under his boot, then back up. “Those cost more than your stick.”
A muscle twitched along his jaw. “Everything costs more than my stick. That’s not the flex you think it is.”
“No,” I said, “the flex is that I can afford to lose them. Can you afford to keep standing on them?”
The silence stretched. Perez stopped taping his shin pads two stalls down.
Aleksey leaned forward, his face stopping inches from mine. “At least my future is actually mine,” he whispered, his voicedropping to a dead calm. “Take away the Johnston name and your daddy’s checkbook, and you don’t even exist.”
A bitter taste flooded my mouth, but I silently held my ground, refusing to lean away. The locker room around us went quiet, making the fast thud of my heartbeat feel entirely too loud.
“And you’re not on the ice anymore,” Aleksey added. “No big bro or coach here to step in.”
He held my gaze for a long second. His dark eyes dared me to look away, dared me to blink first. Keeping my chin up, matching his stare until the silence stretched thin felt like a win. Finally, he lifted his boot off my glove.
My fingers closed around the damp leather. Snatching them from the wet tile took less effort than the walk away did. Perez didn’t look up as I passed, but his gum-chewing had stopped completely. Heading straight for the showers was my next step, and washing away the sweat and the heat of him couldn’t happen fast enough.
Later that night, the digital clock on my desk flipped to three forty-five. Cold air leaked through the gaps in the window frame, making the attic room freezing.
An open biology textbook sat atop my desk, but the black text blurred on the page, as exhaustion made my eyes burn.
Across the cramped space, Matt shifted under his quilt. As far as random freshman roommates went, I had lucked out. Matt was a quick, compact forward from California who kept his side of the room clean and didn’t ask too many questions. He was still shivering his way through his first Midwest winter, especially in this drafty attic. The mattress springs groaned as he peeked over the edge of his blanket.
“You’re still up?” Matt mumbled. His eyes were barely open.
“Trying to read,” I said.
He rubbed his face. “It’s three in the morning, man.”
“Go back to sleep.”
“Make sure you actually sleep eventually,” he said, turning over.
