Puck the Coach’s Son (Puckboys Unleashed #3)

1. Theo

THEO

Dad says don't be late, so we're fifteen minutes early. That's how it's always worked.

He parks in the second row of the players' lot because the first row is reserved for guys whose names are painted on the asphalt.

My name isn't painted on anything here yet.

His is, on the wall above the office he won't see until after the tour.

He turns the engine off and sits for a second with his hands still on the wheel.

“Head down,” he says.

“I know.”

His knuckles tighten on the wheel and don't let go. I watch them, because I can watch them, because his eyes are out the windshield and not on me.

“No. Listen.” He turns. “They're going to test you. That's what a locker room does. Don't answer it. Skate your shifts. Play your system. Be useful. If you give them a reason, they'll eat you.”

“Yes, Coach.”

He doesn't correct me. He used to. I don't know when he stopped.

We get out. The October air off the lake is already the kind of cold that gets in under a jacket. Frosthaven. Even the city name sounds like a chirp waiting to happen. I pull my bag out of the back and Dad goes ahead across the lot without looking to see if I'm keeping up.

The facility is new on the outside and older on the inside.

The smell hits me before the doors finish swinging shut behind us.

Cold metal, rubber mats, sweat cut with disinfectant, that sweet scent that comes from the rot of tape and skate leather.

Every rink I've ever walked into has smelled like this.

It should feel like home. It feels like nothing.

Dad is already in conversation with someone in a Wolves polo at the front desk.

I stand with my bag between my feet and make myself small.

Someone has hung a Wolves banner behind the desk that's too new, the edges still creased from shipping.

The team's colors are gray and blood orange.

The logo is a wolf with its mouth open. I don't know why I'm cataloging any of this.

I always do. When I don't know what to do with my hands, I use my eyes.

“Theo.”

“Yes, Coach.”

He checks the time again. His thumb finds the inside of his watchband and stays there, a tell I've watched him hide from the press and from me and mostly from himself.

“Eli's going to show you around. I have a staff meeting. Dressing room, ice, training room, weight room, video, then back to dressing. On the ice at nine-thirty. Don't be late.”

“Yes, Coach.”

He's already walking. Eli turns out to be the facility manager, a guy in his fifties with a clipboard and a kindness around the eyes that he hides fast when I say my last name. He covers it by checking his watch.

“Laurent,” he says, like he's testing the sound of it. “Right. This way.”

The tour takes ten minutes. He talks, I nod. The dressing room has my stall already labeled with my name and number, 41, on a piece of white tape pressed to the wood above the hook. The tape is new. Everything is new. The other stalls have real plates.

“First day jitters,” Eli says, seeing me look. It's not a question. He isn't wrong.

“A bit.”

“You'll be fine.” He doesn't sound like he believes himself. “Skates at nine-thirty. Go get changed. Your gear's in the bag there.”

Eli leaves me alone in the room. That's when I find out I'm not alone.

Someone's sitting in the far corner stall in just compression shorts and a Wolves t-shirt, an ankle up on his opposite knee, rolling sock tape between his fingers. He looks up when the door closes behind Eli. I make eye contact by accident and can't take it back.

He grins. It is not a friendly grin.

“Laurent,” he says.

I nod. My hand has closed around the strap of my bag too tight. I make it let go.

“Twenty,” he says. “Twenty and your dad's the new coach. That's rich.”

“Yes.”

He laughs like I've confirmed something. “Yes,” he repeats, in a voice he must think sounds like mine. “You always this polite, sweetheart?”

The word goes through me like a hot wire.

I don't know what I do with my face. I hope I do nothing.

I open my stall and start to take my gear out one piece at a time, which is ridiculous because we're the only ones in here and I could just dump it all on the floor.

But I need something to do with my hands, and this is what my hands know.

“Not a talker. Okay.” He stands. He's taller than I thought. Broad through the shoulders. Fighter broad, not gym broad. I can see scar tissue on two of his knuckles. One of his eyebrows has a line through it where hair won't grow. “I'm Creed. Maddox. Left wing.”

I know who he is. Every player in the league has a chirp folder in his head for every enforcer in the league, and Mad Dog Creed has three pages. I nod again.

“Still not talking. That's cute.” He walks past me to the door. His shoulder brushes mine on purpose. He smells like a whole locker room: clean sweat and the lemon soap and a warmth I shouldn't be noticing. “Welcome to the Wolves, sweetheart. You're gonna love it.”

The door swings shut behind him and I stand with a shin pad in my hand and breathe through my nose until my pulse stops trying to come out through my ears.

I've been in this building nineteen minutes.

The rest of the team comes in before I've got my base layer on.

They come in loud and already decided about me.

There's a ripple of volume, and then it drops three notches when they register the new kid, and then it comes back louder because they're performing for themselves now.

A guy with a curly undercut claps me on the shoulder too hard on his way past. Another one says my last name like it's funny.

Someone from a stall I can't see says, “Daddy drop you off, kid?” and a couple of laughs ride the tail of it.

“You didn't even let him sit down, Jax.” The voice comes from the stall across from Jax, and I recognize it from every league-feed interview I ever skipped past. Phoenix Locke. Captain. He's not speaking for me. He's speaking for the room. “Ease up. It's day one.”

Jax throws his hands up in mock surrender and goes back to unlacing his skates.

“It's day one, Cap. That's the whole point.”

“Twenty and a free spot,” says another voice from somewhere over my shoulder. “Must be nice.”

I open the laces on my skates and pretend the laces are a project. I don't look up. I don't look up even when someone leans close enough behind me that I feel his shadow on the back of my neck and says, right against my ear, “Don't worry, Coach's boy. We'll find a use for you.”

I don't recognize the voice. I don't turn.

Everyone is already dressed and moving toward the tunnel by the time I get my last strap tight. I'm the last one on the ice, which is exactly what I don't want.

By the time I come out of the tunnel and onto the ice, the room is full and loud and every head turns.

Not for long. Just long enough to register me, log me, file me.

I don't look at anyone. I skate to the blue line and line up with the rest of them for the national anthem no one sings at practice, which is a joke I used to make at my old team and don't make here.

“Look who's here,” someone says down the line. “Coach's boy.”

Someone else laughs.

“Daddy's little center.”

“Play nice, boys,” a third voice says, amused and entirely not interested in playing nice. “He's gotta warm up.”

I keep my eyes on the ice in front of my blades.

The lights in here are too white. Every rink has a different white.

The fluorescents at my old barn ran green around the edges, and the LEDs at the showcase rink in Minneapolis were blue, and this one is a cold hard perfect white like a hospital. It makes every face too clear.

Dad comes out of the bench door with a clipboard and a whistle. He doesn't look at me. I'm grateful for that, and then I'm angry at myself for being grateful for it.

“On the line,” he says.

Nobody moves fast enough.

“On the line,” he says again, and this time the whole rink hears what his voice can do, and everyone moves.

There's a shuffle of blades and a few heads go down and Locke, the captain, the one they call Phoenix, gets on the line first, which drops everyone else in behind him.

Good. That's how it's supposed to work. Dad likes leaders. He rewards them.

Except one.

Creed is the last one to the line. Not by a lot. Just enough that when we all take off on the whistle, his push-off is late, and he arrives at the first blue line a stride behind the group. He makes it look like it wasn't on purpose. It was on purpose.

“Again.”

We skate it again. This time he's on the line with everyone. This time, on the whistle, he grunts something under his breath that I can't hear, and he's off a quarter-second slower than the rest.

“Creed,” my father says.

Creed doesn't answer.

“Creed, do you have a problem with the whistle?”

“Sorry, Coach.” He says it in a flat voice, facing away.

“Look at me when you apologize.”

A ripple goes through the room. A couple of the guys on the line shift their weight. Phoenix's jaw sets. Creed turns his head, slow enough to make you watch, and he looks at my father like they're two dogs meeting in a parking lot.

“Sorry, Coach,” he says again. Slower. Louder. The mockery is so thin it can't technically be called mockery. Dad's jaw tightens.

“On the line.”

We skate it a third time. Creed is on the whistle. Dad doesn't acknowledge it.

The rest of practice is drills. Stick-handling, breakout, defensive-zone coverage, the forecheck system Dad made me memorize before I could legally drive.

I run the center's routes from muscle memory and try not to be in anyone's way.

Every time I come off a rep I don't look at the bench, because if I look at the bench I'll look at Dad, and if I look at Dad one of the other players will clock me looking.

So I look at the glass. I look at the Zamboni door. I look at anything but him.