Page 25 of Single Pucking Orc

“There is no newsletter,” Tarmek said from the blue line, not turning around.

“Cap.” Fen pressed a glove to his chest, wounded. “The newsletter has a readership now.”

He’d made himself leave the phone and gone to the ice. He took a lap, and another, and let the only completely simple thing left in his life settle into him. Cold air, the hiss of steel, the clean quiet of the ice before four thousand people came in and turned it into noise. His legs knew what to do. His hands knew. For a lap and a half he wasn’t a male who’d only learned he had a daughter at the beginning of the week. He was just a body that could skate.

Then on the last lap of warmups, Tarmek did what he did every game. He peeled off towards the far boards and slowed just slightly as he passed the third row up in section 114. A woman with short red curls and a paint-stained scarf had her palm against the glass, and Tarmek touched the glass where her hand was. He didn’t stop. He didn’t even really smile, although his face softened a little. A quarter-second of contact through an inch of tempered glass, and then he was gone, back into the flow of warmup like it hadn’t happened.

Tarmek’s mate Edie kept her hand on the glass a beat longer, watching him go, smiling.

He’d found it funny for a season. The entire locker room had. Cap’s got a routine, they’d say. Don’t touch Cap’s routine or the sun won’t come up. It had been an easy joke. Tarmek was the most controlled male any of them had ever met. But a small chaotic redhead who’d rolled into town to paint a mural had rearranged everything in eight weeks.

He didn’t find it funny tonight.

The ache came up out of nowhere, because he didn’t have anyone in a section. He had a sitter named Bex and an app and a baby asleep in a crib he’d successfully put together despite the stick figures. There was no palm waiting for him on the glass. There was no one who’d driven in to watch him skate. That had never once bothered him in eleven seasons of professional hockey, not for a single second, but it bothered him now, tonight, watching his captain’s glove come away from the boards.

He gave his head a shake and went to get his stick.

Get it together, Stonebreaker. You have a job to do.

It happened in the second shift of the first period.

He was doing fine. Better than fine. He’d been buzzing, first shift, all that scattered energy funneling down into the game the way it always did. He’d hit Korvash with a saucer pass in the neutral zone that had drawn an actual ooh from the crowd. He was a professional. He’d played tired before. Tired was nothing. Tired was a Tuesday.

Then, somewhere in a building holding four thousand people, up and behind him, maybe two sections over, a baby cried. Just a regular baby. Some family’s baby out too late at a hockey game, one thin thread of sound in a roar of thousands—and his head snapped around before he’d decided anything. Before he’d even understood he’d heard it. Some brand-new circuit that had installed itself in him four days ago and could not be uninstalled fired straight through eleven seasons of trained instinct. His whole body turned towards a sound that had nothing to do with him. It could not possibly be Charlie, who was five miles away asleep with a nursing student named Bex.

The puck went off his stick and onto a Teal Terror defenseman’s blade like it had been gift-wrapped.

He recovered. He backchecked hard, got a stick on the guy, killed the rush before it became anything, and the play whistled dead in the corner with no harm done. But he knew. And he skated to the bench with his ears hot under his helmet. Coach didn’t say anything, and he sat down and stared at the ice. That is a genuinely insane thing my body just did, he thought, and didn’t have any idea what to do about it.

Later—much later, second period, on the bench between shifts—Brogan spoke without looking at him. The older orc sat there the way he always sat, still as a boulder, watching the play with his terrible flat scowl, his mask pushed up.

“You heard it.”

“Heard what?”

“Mm,” Brogan said, and that was it.

Brogan didn’t look over. He didn’t explain how he knew, or what he knew. He was a forty-one-year-old goalie who lived alone and refused to discuss his personal life under any circumstances. So how did he know? He just made that low sound in his chest and kept watching the ice, but somehow it settled Rognar more than anything anyone had said to him in four days.

You heard it. Like it was normal. Like it was something that happened to people, and you survived it, and you kept playing. He went over the boards on his next shift. He didn’t play well, but at least he stopped playing like he was arguing with himself.

Coach Morrison caught him working it out on the bench in the third. He leaned down and said, quietly, “Stonebreaker. She’s fine. You’re not. Go win me the game and go home.”

“I always win you the game.”

“Half a game tonight. It was a good half.”

They won. He didn’t deserve it, but they won, four to two, with Korvash scoring the empty-netter and pointing both gloves at Fen, who had assisted, in a display that was going to require a fine.

The locker room afterwards was the usual glorious wreck—steam and shouting and someone’s terrible speaker playing something with too much bass, tape balls flying, and Jensen holding court about a save of Brogan’s that had frankly been mostly luck. Rognar peeled his jersey off and sat down heavily in his stall and looked at his phone.

The app said Charlie was asleep. The text from Bex said she went down like a champ, she’s an angel, do NOT worry. He’d worry.

“The Broken Stick. Everyone.” Korvash climbed onto the bench in the middle of the room, which was banned, and pointed around the locker room like a general. “Team dinner. Jensen’s buying, because Jensen said a thing about my hair earlier that he’s going to regret financially.”

“I said it looked like a floor mop,” Jensen said, “and I stand by it.”

“Two hundred dollars of standing by it. The Broken Stick. Everyone.”