Rookie Mistake (The Power Play #6)

Chapter 1

ELI

Ihave exactly nine minutes to make a good first impression on the Atlanta Reapers, and I am doing it with one sneaker untied, a skate lace dangling from my duffel bag, a coffee stain on my cuff, and the kind of sweat that suggests I have either sprinted across a parking deck or committed a medium-sized felony.

The lobby is all steel and glass and polished floors and the quiet, expensive efficiency of a place that employs professional athletes and has very little patience for people who can't keep up.

Reapers logos gleam from the walls. Framed action shots line the corridor beyond reception.

Somewhere deeper in the building, I can hear the low thud of voices, the rattle of equipment carts, the distant scrape of skates against concrete.

Training camp. My first pro camp. My first real shot.

Twenty-two years old. Four years at Boston College.

Drafted late in the first round at eighteen and signed an entry-level contract that the team agreed to defer while I finished my degree, which everyone (including my mother, including my agent, including the Reapers GM) assured me was the responsible play.

The responsible play put me here, four years late, watching guys two years younger than me get their second pro contracts while I prepared for orientation.

My stomach flips hard enough to qualify as an internal injury. Sweat slides down my spine under the compression shirt. The skate lace bounces against my hip with every step like a countdown.

I grin anyway. Grinning has gotten me through draft interviews, junior hockey road trips, one catastrophic wedding where I accidentally hooked up with the groom's cousin (male, older, spectacular jawline, terrible idea), and approximately twenty-two years of pretending I'm not one bad shift away from being exposed as a fraud.

A good smile can buy you time. It can make people underestimate you. It can get you forgiven.

The grin is my first tool and my best one. It buys time. It makes people underestimate me. It keeps anyone from seeing how badly I want this, and the wanting feels like a medical condition.

There's a man at the front desk. Not the reception desk.

A different desk, off to the side, positioned where it can see every entrance and exit simultaneously.

He's older, Black, wearing a Reapers staff polo and a lanyard, and he's watching me with a calm that suggests he has been watching nervous rookies walk through this lobby for decades.

His eyes track me from the door to the reception desk. I feel assessed, cataloged, and filed in the time it takes me to cover twenty feet of lobby.

"Eli Mercer," I say to the woman at reception, a little breathless, aiming for charming and landing somewhere closer to deranged. "Please tell me I'm fashionably late."

She glances at the clock. "No."

"Tragically?"

"Catastrophically."

"Great. Love that for me."

Her mouth twitches. Not quite a smile. I'll take it.

"Conference Room B. End of the hall, left side. Orientation is almost over."

"Fantastic. I enjoy making an entrance."

From the desk by the door, the older man watches me go.

He doesn't say anything. The watching is its own communication.

The watching says: I see you. I see the grin and the sweat and the coffee stain and the performance underneath all three.

I have been seeing people in this building for thirty-one years and you are not the first to arrive performing and you will not be the last.

The corridor is long and smells like floor wax and athletic tape and the institutional cleanliness of a facility that costs more per square foot than my mother's house.

I half-jog toward Conference Room B, duffel bag slamming against my hip, and I almost make it before the door opens and a flood of other rookies starts filing out.

Great. I've arrived at the exact humiliating moment where everyone can see that I've missed everything.

One of the rookies (big defenseman, Alberta accent, looks like he bench-presses livestock) gives me a sympathetic once-over.

I give him a cheerful thumbs-up. Yes, I know. I'm thriving.

"Mercer."

The voice comes from my left. Low, cool, accented, and impossible to ignore.

I turn.

The man standing in the corridor looks like the universe reached into my personal weakness inventory, found tall men with dark skin and severe faces and the build of someone who ends careers near the boards, and decided to get creative.

He is tall. Comfortably over six feet. The kind of frame hockey produces in men who spend their lives punishing people in corners.

Dark brown skin. Short-cropped dark hair.

A close beard that follows the hard line of his jaw.

Sharp cheekbones and a straight mouth and a nose that has been broken at least once and came back better.

His expression suggests he is considering whether I am worth the administrative paperwork of murdering.

My brain produces two simultaneous assessments. The first is professional: veteran, defenseman, one of those guys who makes life miserable for anyone who likes having fun. The second is not professional: hot enough to be a workplace safety issue.

"Yes?" I say.

He holds out a folder.

"You missed orientation."

The accent is Russian. The voice is deep and cool and unimpressed. The face is a problem I am going to have to manage with the same discipline I bring to my skating, which is to say: poorly and with a lot of improvisation.

"Counterpoint," I say, taking the folder, "I arrived dramatically."

Our fingers brush.

It should not feel like anything. Skin and paper and a fraction of a second. Static at most.

Instead it lands sharp and immediate, a match strike in a dark room. Heat from the point of contact, traveling up through my hand, my wrist, settling somewhere behind my sternum with the insistence of a thing that plans to stay.

I look up too fast. He's looking at me with the evaluative patience of a man deciding how much of himself to offer based on the quality of the first impression. The first impression, given the coffee stain and the sweat and the lateness, is not working in my favor.

But something in his shoulders tightens. Subtle and quick, gone a second later. I see it because I see everything. I see everything because seeing everything is how I survive: I watch people's reactions to the grin, the joke, the performance, and I calibrate in real time.

His calibration slipped. For a fraction of a second, the control slipped.

Interesting.

"Nikolai Sokolov," he says.

The name lands with the weight of recognition.

I know who Nikolai Sokolov is. Every young forward with pro ambitions knows.

Elite shutdown defenseman. Eight seasons.

Two All-Star nods. The kind of player scouts use as shorthand when they want to explain to juniors how quickly professional hockey will humble them.

His mother is Russian (Irina, a former figure skating coach who moved from Moscow to Detroit). His father is American (Marcus, a retired firefighter). The dark skin is his father's. The accent is his mother's. The combination is devastating in a way I am choosing not to examine.

I offer my hand properly. "Eli Mercer. Speedy winger. Poor sense of direction. Good cheekbones."

He looks at the hand. Then at me.

"Your confidence is exhausting."

"Thank you. I work very hard at it."

A pause.

Then the corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile. More like his face has briefly considered the concept and rejected it on moral grounds.

I decide this is the greatest personal victory of my adult life.

A staffer appears behind us, clipboard in hand, looking stressed about logistics in the way that young staff members always look stressed about logistics.

"Mercer, right? Sorry. We were trying to get ahold of you. We've got a temporary issue with player housing. Your apartment isn't ready. Maintenance. Burst water line on the third floor, and the building manager just told us they're looking at multiple days, not hours."

"Fantastic," I say.

"So Coach said since Sokolov is already on the rookie buddy program for this camp..."

Nikolai turns his head. "I did not sign up for the rookie buddy program."

"...we're putting you with him until housing clears the unit. There's a furnished guest room. Standard onboarding placement."

The silence that follows is the specific silence of a man whose control has just been invaded by circumstances and who is recalculating every variable in his life.

I look at Nikolai. Nikolai looks like a man considering early retirement.

"Oh," I say, brightening. "You're my babysitter."

"No," he says. "I am your temporary inconvenience."

I should explain something about the Reapers, because the Reapers are not a normal hockey team.

Five openly queer couples. On one roster.

Cole Briggs and Mikhail Volkov (the kiss on the ice that changed everything).

Jonah Park and Ren Briggs. Wes Chen and Luca Moretti.

Mars Santos and Theo Kimura. And the newest, Jamie Kowalski and Declan Osei, the rookie and the journalist who found each other last season while I was watching from Tampa and thinking: that team. I want to be on that team.

Not because of the couples. Not entirely.

Because of what the couples represent: a building where the hiding is optional.

A culture where the performance doesn't have to include straightness.

A place where a twenty-two-year-old bisexual winger from Tampa who has been performing since puberty might, possibly, be allowed to stop.

I haven't told anyone in professional hockey. The bisexuality lives behind the grin, in the space between who I am in public and who I am at 2 AM when nobody's watching.

The Reapers built a building where the hiding might not be necessary.

I am standing in that building with a coffee stain and a duffel bag and a match-strike in my sternum from touching Nikolai Sokolov's fingers for a fraction of a second, and I am thinking: this is either the safest place I've ever been or the most dangerous.

Both. Both is usually how my life works.

Behind us, at his desk by the door, the man in the Reapers polo pulls out his phone. He types something. He puts the phone away. He returns to watching.

Later, much later, I will learn that his name is Gerald.

That Gerald has been watching people in this building for thirty-one years.

That Gerald texts his wife Lorraine about the things he sees, and that Lorraine texts back, and that their text thread is the most accurate record of the Reapers' emotional history in existence.

Gerald's text: Another one.

Lorraine: The rookie?

Gerald: The rookie and the Russian.

Lorraine: Again?

Gerald: Different Russian. Same story.