Page 3 of Home Ice

A beat while the reporter waited for more.

“Any advice for young players watching how this room—“

“Play better. Next question.”

“The cat photo got four million—“

“The cat’s not even ours. Next.”

Varga’s voice echoed off the cinderblock, and the scrum laughed and shuffled. The boom mic dipped low enough that Varga swatted at it like a mosquito.

I was almost out the far side of it when one of the beat guys, Deckert, a decent guy I’d met in the fall, turned and found me. “Rafe, the guys in the room were talking this morning like there was some news from you today. Anything you want to say about that?”

Every phone and camera swung toward me at once.

“Yeah,” I said. “I told the guys this morning that I’m gay. Wanted them to hear it from me first, and they did, and then Cross changed the power play, so.” A couple of them laughed. “Honestly, the power play was bigger news for us.”

“How are you feeling about—“

“I feel good. It’s a great team and an excellent organization. Just excited to play hockey.” I gave them a warm smile and a small shrug. Varga had taught me how to respond to the media in my first month—be boring on purpose; boring is a superpower. So far it had worked.

“Rookie year, small town in Saskatchewan. This is a big city moment for a farm kid. Fans are already—“ Deckert flipped his phone around briefly. “There’s a whole thing forming out there. The polite prairie kid. You’ve seen it?”

“My mom sends me most of it,” I said. It was the boring truth, and it got a laugh.

“Okay—enough,” Varga announced, arriving into my scrum like a snowplow. “This is my media time. He is contractually uninteresting for two more years. Ask me the things.”

“Lucas, one more on the relationship announcement—“

“It was beautiful; I cried, he cried, and the cat doesn’t care about us. We’re done here.” The group laughed as they broke up and stashed their equipment.

Varga was quiet for a few steps as we walked toward the gym. “You’re good at that,” he said.

“You taught me.”

“I did. Guess I’m a brilliant teacher.” He held the gym door open for me. “You’re the best student I’ve ever had, honestly. Little bit scary how fast you take to it.”

It was a compliment.

The gym at the North Branch facility ran the length of the building’s east side, floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the river. In January the water moved dark and slow between crusts of shelf ice.

The board said conditioning, which after eleven days off was less a workout than payment on a bill that came due. I racked plates for front squats and tried to remember what my legs had felt like in December.

Kieran was already at the next rack over, working through goblet squats. It was too easy. He’d trained over break. He caught my eye between reps.

“Next week,” he said. “You eat spicy?”

“Sure.”

He set the dumbbell down and looked at me. “That was fast,” he said. “The short ribs have gochujang in them. It’s not polite fast-food gochujang. If you show up next week and sweat through dinner and tell me it’s great, Heath will believe you, and I won’t.”

“I grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan,” I said. “The spiciest thing my mom makes is a dill pickle.”

“There it is,” Kieran said, satisfied, and picked the dumbbell back up. “I’ll make a milder batch on the side. Not for you, officially. Officially it’s for Heath, who grew up in Wisconsin with salt and pepper.”

“I heard that,” Heath said from the pull-up bars.

“You were meant to.”