Page 184 of Slashed Bonds

He’s the most observant man I’ve ever met. He catalogs. He’d have noticed by the third week that the green was back, that the hoodie was the same hoodie, that the woman he was paying for didn’t own a second coat. If it had been a problem, I’d have heard about it. He’d have left a fourth set in the room with a note, or stopped coming, or said something through the mask.

He didn’t. He kept coming. He bought the room.

He bought the whole fucking floor. And then he built another one.

So. He can see the shack.

Knox is with the team.

That part I’m less at peace with, and I keep checking the mirror like he might be running behind us. He’s on the bus, on Killian’s lap most likely, on a leash they bought today. A proper one, leather, with a brass clasp and a second handle up near the collar for crowds, which Killian had produced from a bag this morning after we came down from the shower without a word about where it came from or when he’d had time.

The three of them went shopping. For my dog. After a threesome. Before a game.

I’m starting to wonder if that’s the ritual now. Not the lipstick. Not Nikolai’s left-right-left. The morning. The three of us, or four, in a ring or a shower or a kitchen, and then a win. And the fact that we aren’t doing it tonight, that the night’s going to be a party and a bed and sleep, feels like a thing we’ve forgotten to do. Like leaving the house without a key.

We’ve done it once. Once is a coincidence. Ask me after the next one.

The next one.

There’s going to be a next one. That’s the piece I keep bumping into in my head like a chair in the dark. We won. The rejects won, in overtime, in Ashford’s building, and the bracket says the winner advances, and so we’re advancing, and there’s a sheet of ice somewhere next week with our names being written on it right now.

It wasn’t clean.

I’d like it on record that I know that. Everyone on the bus was buzzing like we’d won a title, and that’s the overtime talking, the ten minutes of nothing at the end that turned a game into a thing people felt in their teeth. The crowd had never seen us work. They didn’t know what clean looks like for us. I do.

Okonkwo missed the clear on the first goal. He had the shooter’s stick in his reach and he looked at the puck instead, and a kid who should’ve been on the bench put it through a screen and Nikolai never saw it.

Marchetti took a slash he didn’t need to take. Behind the play, out of frustration, because Halvard said something to him on the way to the bench, and we spent two minutes killing it and they scored on the back half of it anyway.

And me.

Say it. Dark’s only useful when it’s accurate.

Second period. Two-on-one, me and Dubois, the sophomore back alone. I had the puck on my forehand and Brandt was deep and the lane to Dubois was open, and I held it. One beat too long. I wanted the shot, I wanted it so badly I could feel it leave my stick before it did, and in the beat I spent wanting it the sophomore took away the pass and Brandt came out and the shot went into his chest and that was that.

You hold it too long.

I told Nikolai that in a scrimmage five days ago. He turned it around on me tonight without saying a word, with one look from his crease after the whistle that said he’d seen it and we’d talk.

We will. Tomorrow. Cassian’s called a debrief for ten, which means he’ll have the tape cut by six and the whiteboard in his room rewritten by eight, every mistake in four colors. What we did right. What we did wrong. The sophomore’s pinch is going to have its own page. Killian’s wrist shot is going to be a conversation Killian doesn’t want to have.

But tonight Coach said celebrate.

Halloran’s exact words, in the room, over the noise: You’ve got until I see you at ten. What you do with it is between you and God. Which is as close to a blessing as that man gives, and the room took it the way it was meant, and Greenie started a chant I’m not going to repeat.

Drinking. Chaos. The wee hours. A party with people who want me there. When did I last go to one of those.

Which is why I’d like a change of clothes.

And which is why I’m sitting in Cassian’s sweater doing arithmetic on something I haven’t let myself think about in a year.

A paycheck.

The win means one. Roz said it when she recruited me, in the parking lot at Hollow Creek, and I’d filed it under things people say. But it’s real. The bracket pays per round, the house takes nothing, and sometime next week a number’s going to land in an account I opened with a lawyer’s help and have never once seen above three figures.

I could buy a coat. A real one. It’s getting cold, and the hoodie’s the hoodie.

I could go shopping. Next week. Walk into a store with lights and racks, and buy a thing because I wanted it instead of because the last one had a hole, and the thought is so foreign that I turn it over twice to check it isn’t a joke.