Chapter 5 #2
I ate half a turkey sandwich in my kitchen at eleven-fifteen because Coach Reid’s text sat in my head like a dare.
Then I checked my notebook for the drill sheet, set my alarms, and lay awake longer than I wanted, staring at the ceiling while my brain replayed Vanessa’s impossible and Declan’s don’t push your luck in alternating loops.
The next morning, I was on time.
Not early enough to be impressive. Not late enough to be me. Just on time, which felt like walking through a door that usually slammed on my ankle.
Recovery was quiet. Bikes. Stretching. Guys talking in low voices because nobody had enough energy yet to be fully obnoxious. Roman was lying on a mat with a band around his foot, glaring at the ceiling like it had personally failed him.
“You survived influencer prom,” he said.
“Barely.”
“Did you network?”
“I held a bag.”
“Heroic.”
I kicked his mat lightly and went to refill my water.
Coach Reid caught me in the hall outside the training room.
He had a tablet tucked under one arm, black quarter-zip, beard trimmed, eyes taking in too much the way they always did.
He didn’t stop me with a hand or raise his voice.
He just said my name, and my body listened before my attitude could object.
“Holloway.”
I turned. “Coach.”
“You left on time?”
“Ten-twenty-eight.”
“Food?”
“Turkey sandwich. Sad but compliant.”
His mouth almost moved. “You communicated early. Good.”
That was it.
One word at the end, controlled and low, not even meant to be a big deal.
My whole stupid chest opened around it.
I hated it immediately.
I took a drink of water to give myself something to do. Too pleased. Too relieved. Like I’d been waiting all morning for a grade and had gotten one I didn’t know I needed.
“Yeah,” I said, aiming for casual and landing somewhere near concussed. “I can occasionally follow directions.”
“I’m aware.”
He walked away before I could answer.
That should have been the end of it. Instead, the good sat under my skin wrong. I carried it through warmups, through the first set of drills, through a clean zone entry where I held support exactly where he wanted it. Every time I did the thing right, some part of me checked for him.
Not the assistant running the drill. Not Roman. Him.
By the second half of practice, I was irritated enough to do something about it.
Reid shifted us into a neutral-zone regroup drill. Simple. Repetitive. The kind where my brain started looking for exits because doing the same thing six times made my bones itch.
On the fourth rep, I stretched early.
The pass missed me by three feet.
Whistle.
“Again,” Reid called.
I circled back. “If Lowell moves it faster, that’s open.”
Lowell looked offended. “I moved it fine.”
“You moved it like you were mailing it.”
Milo laughed. Roman, from the other end, muttered, “Here we go.”
Reid skated closer to the boards, not onto the ice, but near enough that his voice dropped out of team volume and landed directly on me.
“Enough.”
The word cut through everything.
Not loud. Not angry. Final.
My mouth closed.
For one clean second, there was no noise in my head.
No lights. No buzzing. No argument forming. No need to prove that I’d seen the play before anyone else. Just that word and the boundary behind it.
Enough.
Reid’s gaze held mine. “You can argue after you’ve done it correctly.”
Heat moved up my neck. Not humiliation. Something stranger. My gloves felt too tight around my hands.
I wanted to snap back. I wanted to make Milo laugh, to give Roman the line he was waiting for, to turn it into nothing.
I also wanted, badly, to do the rep right.
That scared me more than getting yelled at would have.
I nodded once and skated back into position.
The next rep was clean. I stayed underneath. Lowell made the first touch, I gave him the option, then I released into space when it was there instead of when I wanted it to be. Puck to Milo. Shot. Rebound buried.
Reid blew the whistle. “That’s the read. Run it again.”
My lungs worked like I’d sprinted.
Practice moved on. I moved with it. I was still me.
I still chirped Milo when he whiffed a one-timer.
I still forgot where I’d put my backup stick and found it two stalls over for no reason I could explain.
I still had to ask Tessa to repeat a media reminder because her first version got eaten by three other conversations near the bench.
But something stayed quieter.
After showers, I hung back in the locker room under the excuse of re-taping a stick that did not need re-taping.
Guys filtered out in waves. Milo singing badly.
Sokolov complaining into his phone in Russian.
Lowell asking Benny about skate steel with the urgency of a man defusing a bomb. Roman paused near my stall.
“You good?”
I looked up. “Yeah.”
He didn’t believe me. He never did. “You got quiet after Reid clipped you.”
“Did not.”
“You absolutely did.”
“I was reflecting on my craft.”
“You were being weird.”
“Pot, kettle, divorced goalie.”
He pointed at me. “Low blow.”
“Accurate blow.”
Roman watched me for another second, then let it go. “Eat lunch.”
“Yes, Dad.”
“I’m too young and handsome to be your father.”
“You’re neither.”
He left me with a middle finger over his shoulder.
When the locker room emptied, the hum of the ventilation seemed too loud. I sat on the bench with tape stuck to my thumb and replayed it.
Enough.
You can argue after you’ve done it correctly.
I should have hated it. Every other coach who tried to pin me down like that made me want to chew through the boards. Vanessa correcting my shirt had made me feel like a prop with a pulse. Brand people telling me how to stand made my skin crawl.
Declan Reid drew a line, and some part of me had leaned against it.
That was the part I didn’t know what to do with.
It wasn’t about being organized. It wasn’t about drill sheets or alarms or leaving parties on time. Those things helped, sure, in the way a railing helped when stairs were icy.
This was different.
For one second on the ice, he had stopped me, and I had not had to keep stopping myself.
I stared down at the tape wrapped around my thumb until the edge blurred.
Declan didn’t just make things clearer.
He made me quieter.