“I hate you. Come on, practice in twenty.”
I follow him and somewhere between the rink and the door I drop the black coffee in the trash without looking back. Rodriguez doesn’t notice because he’s too busy analyzing the difference between can’t and won’t.
The maple latte is empty by the time I get to my stall.
Twenty minuteslater I’m in the crease and my head is not where it’s supposed to be.
This doesn’t happen to me. The crease is the one place where my brain shuts up. It’s only angles and distance and where the puck is going. I’ve been this way since juniors, better on the ice than I am anywhere else, the rink is where I make sense and everything else in my life is the part I can’t figure out. So when Dex winds up from the left circle I’m set and reading it but my brain serves up the image of her behind that counter and the puck beats me clean through the five-hole. I stand there for a second like I don’t recognize myself.
“Almardon!” Coach’s voice bounces off the boards. “You sleeping in there?”
“No, Coach.”
“Then act like it.”
I reset. The next drill Jack Anderson sends a pass across the slot and Dex one-times it and I get the blocker on it, a clean save that snaps the puck up into the netting. Good. That’s more like it. My body remembers what to do even when my brain is being useless.
Anderson skates by the crease and taps my pads with his stick. “There you go, kid. See it, stop it.”
“Yeah.” I drop back into position. “See it, stop it.”
Luca’s working on the other end of the ice with the goalie coach, doing his thing, taking up the whole net with every bit of his six-four frame and moving like someone built a wall and taught it to be athletic. I watch him swallow a shot with his glove without flinching and I try not to compare myself the way I always do. He’s six-four. I’m six-one. He’s been the starter for years. I measure the gap every day.
Dex scores on me again with a shot I should have had.
“Come on, Z.” He taps his stick on the ice. “That was a meatball. I’m giving you meatballs out here.”
“Throw it again.”
He does and I snag it out of the air and squeeze it in my glove.
“Better.”
“Throw it again.”
He does. I catch it. He does. I catch it. We go back and forth until the rhythm takes over and I stop thinking about anything except the puck and the angle and my glove closing around rubber. For a few minutes everything is quiet and simple and the way it’s supposed to be.
Then practice ends and I pull my mask off and my brain goes straight back to the coffee shop. The way she saidnice to meet you. The warmth underneath it. The fact that she’s three streets away from this building and I have her name now but I still don’t have her number. I need to go back there.
Tomorrow. I’ll go back tomorrow.
4
MACKIE
He comes backthe next day. And the next. And the next.
By Friday, I’ve figured out that he likes maple and vanilla, hates caramel, and will drink basically anything I put in front of him as long as I’m the one handing it over. I’ve been using him as a test subject for new recipes all week and he hasn’t complained once, he simply takes whatever I make and thanks me like I’ve done him some huge favor when really I’m just seeing how far I can push it before he admits he doesn’t actually like black coffee.
It’s annoying how endearing that is.
He’s also terrible at small talk. On Tuesday he asked if it was a busy day when there were exactly two other people in the cafe. On Wednesday he asked about the espresso machine and I joked that it takes years of training, I’m basically a surgeon, and he nodded seriously like he believed me. I almost felt bad. Almost. Thursday he tried to compliment the music, which was Mr. Brightside for the nine hundredth time, and I said “it’s a classic” with a straight face and watched him agree like we were discussing Beethoven.
Every single day he stands at the counter a little too long, ears pink, fumbling for something to say. Every single day he chickens out of whatever he actually wants.
I know what he wants. I’ve known since day two.
He wants my number.
