Breakaway (The Power Play #2)

Chapter 1

WES

The thing about being an enforcer is that everyone sees the fights and nobody sees the cost.

What they don't see is the locker room after.

The way my hands refuse to close around a water bottle because the tendons are screaming.

The ice bags that become so routine the trainers have them ready before I sit down.

The particular silence that surrounds me in the postgame, a bubble of space that the team maintains without being asked, because nobody wants to be near the violence once the entertainment value has expired.

What they don't see is the drive home, when the adrenaline drains and leaves behind something flat and grey, and my apartment is dark and my hands are swollen and I stand in the kitchen and bake bread because kneading dough is the only thing I've found that resets the wiring in my brain.

My name is Wes Chen. I'm twenty-eight years old.

I play right wing for the Atlanta Reapers, though "play" is generous because my primary contribution to the team is hitting people.

I am six-foot-one and two hundred and ten pounds and I have been told by multiple sources that I am intimidating, which is useful in hockey and useless in every other area of human existence.

I was also, as of this morning, staring at a plate of biscotti that someone had left in my equipment stall.

The note was handwritten on a piece of yellow paper torn from a legal pad. The handwriting was round and slanted and so aggressively cheerful that it practically bounced off the page: Thought you might want some. You looked like you could use a cookie yesterday. — L

L.

Luca Moretti. Equipment manager. Three weeks on the job.

Italian-American. Loud. Aggressively friendly.

Completely unbothered by the fact that I had responded to his first attempt at conversation with a monosyllabic grunt and his second attempt with silence and his third attempt with what I've been told is my "murder face," which is apparently a real thing that I do and which has been known to make rookies physically relocate to different parts of the locker room.

Luca Moretti had not relocated. Luca Moretti had come back with biscotti.

I picked one up. It was golden brown and perfectly shaped and dusted with powdered sugar that left white fingerprints on my scarred knuckles.

His grandmother's recipe, he'd told anyone who would listen, which was everyone, because everyone listened to Luca.

He had the kind of warmth that made people lean in.

A gravity. Not the cold, dense gravity of a planet, which was my kind. The warm gravity of a sun.

I did not want the biscotti. I did not need the biscotti.

I was a professional athlete with a nutritionist and a meal plan and zero interest in unsolicited baked goods from a man who smiled too much and talked too much and had a jawline that I had noticed exactly once and was not going to notice again.

I ate the biscotti. For quality assessment purposes only.

It was, predictably, outstanding. The almond flavor was subtle and the texture was the precise balance of crisp and tender that separates an excellent biscotto from a mediocre one.

The ratio of butter to flour. The restraint with the sugar.

This was not casual baking. This was someone who cared about the details, and I respected details because details were the only thing I trusted.

I ate a second one. For comparative analysis.

"Good morning, sunshine."

I looked up. Luca Moretti was standing in the doorway of the equipment room, holding a cup of coffee in each hand, wearing a Reapers staff polo that was slightly too big for him.

It hung off one shoulder in a way that exposed the line of his collarbone and the start of a tattoo that disappeared under the fabric.

I had not noticed the tattoo before. I was not noticing it now. I was looking at the coffee.

"I don't drink coffee," I said.

"This one's mine." He held up the left cup. "This one's yours." He held up the right. "It's tea. Earl Grey. I noticed you drink it in the mornings but the stuff in the break room is terrible, so I brought some from home."

I stared at him. He had noticed what I drank. He had noticed, and he had done something about it. The tea felt different from replacing skate blades or retaping sticks. The tea felt personal.

"Why?" I said.

"Why what?"

"Why do you keep doing this."

"Doing what? Being nice?" He sat down two stalls over, which was closer than most people chose to sit near me, and crossed one ankle over the opposite knee with the boneless ease of a person who was comfortable in every room he entered.

"It's not a strategy, Chen. Some people are just nice.

I know that's a foreign concept for a guy whose primary social skill is punching, but I promise it's a real thing that exists in the world. "

"My primary social skill is not punching."

"What is it, then?"

"Silence."

"Silence isn't a skill. Silence is the absence of a skill. It's what happens when the skill should be."

He said this with a grin. Not a mocking grin.

A warm one. The kind of grin that invited you to laugh at yourself without malice, and I understood in that moment why everyone on this team had adopted Luca Moretti within three weeks.

He made people feel like they were in on a joke instead of the subject of one.

He started organizing a box of replacement laces with the focused efficiency of a man who genuinely enjoyed his job.

His hands moved quickly, sorting by color, by length, by type.

Good hands. Precise. The hands of someone who had been a hockey player himself once, before whatever ended that career redirected his attention from playing the game to servicing the people who played it.

I knew his story because the team grapevine was efficient and I was a better listener than anyone gave me credit for.

College hockey at Northeastern. Shoulder injury, sophomore year.

Three surgeries. Career over. He'd taken the equipment gig because he couldn't leave the sport, and there was something in that detail that I recognized.

The refusal to walk away from the only world that made sense to you, even when the world had made it clear you couldn't occupy it the way you'd planned.

I picked up the tea. It was hot and perfectly steeped and the cup had a small sticky note on the side that said "For Grumpy" with a smiley face drawn in blue ink.

Something happened in my chest. A small event. A flutter, or a tightening, or some other involuntary cardiac response that I would not be acknowledging or investigating.

I peeled off the sticky note. I put it in my pocket.

I did not examine why I put it in my pocket instead of throwing it away. Some actions do not require analysis. Some actions are just neurological events. Misfires. Static shocks. The human equivalent of a puck hitting the post and bouncing the wrong way. It doesn't mean anything. It's just physics.

I drank the tea. It was the best Earl Grey I'd ever had.

"Thank you," I said. The words felt strange in my mouth, like a language I'd learned once and forgotten through disuse.

Luca looked up from his laces. His face did something complicated.

Surprise, first. As if "thank you" was the last thing he'd expected from me, which was fair because it was approximately the last thing I'd expected from me.

Then warmth. Then a smile that was different from his usual broadcast smile, the one he gave everyone.

This one was smaller. Specific. Aimed like a shot to the top corner that you didn't see coming until the light was already on.

"You're welcome, Chen."

He went back to his laces. I went back to my tea.

The locker room was quiet. The fluorescent lights hummed.

Somewhere in the building, a Zamboni was running, the distant drone of it a sound I associated with every rink I'd ever been in, every city I'd ever played in, every version of my life that had led to this one.

My hands, for the first time in recent memory, were not shaking.

I did not think about why. I was very committed to not thinking about why.

I was going to drink this tea and eat these biscotti and go to practice and hit someone and come home and bake bread and continue living my life exactly as I had been living it, which was alone and functional and fine. Fine. Everything was fine.

Across the locker room, Cole Briggs walked in with Mik Volkov a step behind him.

They weren't touching but there was a closeness to them that I'd been watching develop all season, a magnetic alignment that made them look like two halves of something whole.

They were out now. The whole world knew.

And the world had mostly continued spinning, which was either inspiring or irrelevant depending on your perspective.

I'd been happy for them. Genuinely. When Mik kissed Cole on the ice after the overtime goal, I'd felt something in my chest that was warm and unfamiliar and I'd attributed it to the adrenaline of the playoff win.

But it wasn't adrenaline. It was envy. Not of their relationship specifically.

Of their visibility. The fact that they could walk into a room and the space between them could say what it said and no one flinched.

I was not envious because I wanted what they had.

I was not attracted to men. I was twenty-eight years old and I had been attracted to women for the entirety of my conscious life and the fact that I was currently sitting in a locker room holding a cup of tea that a man had made for me and carrying a sticky note that a man had written for me and feeling a sensation in my chest that a man had caused was not evidence of anything except that I appreciated good tea and good biscotti and good penmanship.

That was all this was.

Luca finished his laces and stood up. "Practice in forty," he said. "I sharpened your blades yesterday. You were skating a little dull on the right edge. Should be better now."

"You noticed that?"

"It's my job to notice that."

He walked out. The polo shifted as he moved and I caught another glimpse of the tattoo. Just the edge of it. Dark ink against tan skin, curving along his shoulder blade. It could have been anything. A word. A design. A map to a place I had no business wanting to visit.

I finished the tea. I put the cup down. I looked at my hands.

The scars were permanent. Eleven years of fighting had written a story on my knuckles that would never be erased.

Fractures healed and rehealed. Scar tissue layered on scar tissue.

These were the hands of a man who had turned his body into a weapon because that was the only way the world had made space for him.

I flexed my fingers. They moved without trembling. The Earl Grey was warm in my stomach and the biscotti was sweet on my tongue and the sticky note in my pocket was pressing against my thigh like a secret.

Everything was fine.

I was going to keep telling myself that until it became true, or until the lie collapsed, whichever came first.

Based on my experience with lies, the collapse was usually faster than you expected.

-e