Crash Out (After the Whistle #2)

Chapter 1

The thing about playing hurt was that the crowd never knew the difference.

Neither did I half the time, which was either a testament to my pain tolerance or a pretty serious character flaw.

Probably both.

I'd been running the trick since I was sixteen, since the first time a hit rattled something loose and I looked up at the arena lights thinking exactly one thought: get up.

So I got up, because the alternative was lying there while hundreds of people quietly revised their opinion of me.

Hard pass.

I had a personal policy against giving anyone that kind of ammunition.

Tonight the ice is mine, motherfuckers.

Third period, Wardens up by one against Sentinels, and I was running hot—the kind of hot where your body stops asking questions and just goes.

I took Dylan's pass at the blue line and didn't think, because thinking was for suckers who hadn’t had three energy drinks before warm-ups.

I could see the opportunity, like the ice was doing me a personal favor, and I took the shot from a place I had absolutely no business taking it from—

It went in.

The building lost its fucking mind.

The Morr Roar started somewhere in the upper bowl. It always started up there with the diehards, the ones who'd been doing it since my first season last year.

Then it came down in a wave.

Their hands raised like paws, fifteen thousand people doing their best lion impression just for me, just for Wesley Morrison—which should have been ridiculous and was instead the best sound in the world.

I had my arms up before the red light confirmed it, because I knew, I always knew, and the Morr Roar was still rolling through the building when I turned to point at Dylan—

Then the hit came from the right.

A defenseman I hadn't tracked, coming in fast and low, and the contact was hard enough that my helmet snapped back. Everything went white for a second before coming back slightly wrong.

The crowd did that thing crowds do, that big collective inhale, the half-second where fifteen thousand people decide whether to celebrate or panic.

I got up slow.

But then I smiled, and fifteen thousand people lost their minds all over again. That was the deal. That was the transaction.

I had been doing this since I was a little kid. The grin, the arms, the give them the moment. In foster care it was smaller scale. Different audience. Same transaction.

The system had been running since before I knew it was a system. Since before the Morrisons. Since before anyone had shown up.

So I gave this crowd the moment, and they gave me the noise, and everyone went home happy and nobody had to know that my ears were ringing and the ice looked slightly tilted.

I was maybe twenty percent sure I’d just rattled my brain loose.

Twenty percent was fine, right? That meant there was an eighty percent chance everything was totally fine. I liked those odds.

"Let’s go—" Dylan, somewhere behind me, used the voice my older brother reserved for I'm watching you and I hate what I'm seeing. Coach was adding to the noise from the bench. The whole rink was still going.

I found the bench out of habit.

Dr. Cross was already watching.

He was standing at the far end of the bench in his usual spot. Black hair, blue eyes, a face that had never once considered smiling. He just stood there, completely still, while the whole arena went absolutely feral around him.

It was all either very impressive or deeply concerning, and honestly I’d been going back and forth on that one for months.

Okay, so. Here’s the thing about Cross.

The rookies called him the Ice Doc behind his back. I thought that was generous. Ice was still something. Dr. Cross was more like a broken thermostat that nobody had gotten around to fixing. Or like one of those deep-sea fish that live somewhere pressure would kill a normal creature. Or like—

Okay, you know what, it didn’t matter. The point was: extremely cold, possibly not human, medically required to be around the team all the time.

The Ice Doc clocked me. I clocked him clocking me. I looked away first because I had a game to finish and not for any other reason.

He didn't look away. I knew because I checked.

The next shift, I couldn’t deny that something was off.

Nothing the crowd would catch, that wasn't their business and I wasn't making it their business. But my edges felt wrong, my peripheral vision was pulling some weird nonsense on the right side, and when Jenkins hit the boards thirty feet away I flinched like he'd done it directly in my ear.

Adrenaline, I told myself. You took a hit. Your body's being dramatic about it. Let it have this one.

I pushed through the rest of the shift on muscle memory and the kind of stubbornness that had gotten me this far in life, and came off the ice feeling mostly fine, or a convincing enough version of mostly fine that I was prepared to stand behind it.

Cross was right there when I got to the bench.

“You’re slow,” he said, not looking up from his tablet.

“That’s not what my fans think.”

"You're slow to track.”

"Still scored," I said.

"Sit down."

I laughed, and it came out sharper than I wanted. "And if I don't?"

Cross looked up. And the thing about Cross's full attention was that it didn't feel like most people's full attention. Those ice-blue eyes staring at you landed differently, heavier.

Those same eyes made me want to take a step back. They made me want to absolutely not take a step back. They made me want to say something stupid, which was a problem because I was already opening my mouth—

The crowd noise felt like it was coming from farther away than it should have.

"Sit down, Wesley."

I sat. I told myself it was my choice.

Cross was already crouching in front of me, and, look, the proximity was fine, it was medical, it was literally his job. I was not going to make it weird. I grabbed the edge of the bench just to have something to do with my hand.

He reached for my chin to hold my head still, and I tracked the penlight and answered his questions. Score, date, name of the Sentinels’ starting center, and I got all of them right because I was not concussed, I was just—

"He's fine, Doc." Dylan had appeared at my shoulder, because my older brother had a supernatural ability to show up when I didn't want him to. "Watched the whole thing. This idiot went down hard, but he got up clean."

Cross didn't look at him. He was looking at me, only me.

The doc’s thumb shifted slightly along my jaw, adjusting the angle, something clinical like that, and his blue eyes tracked across mine, and the noise and the ice behind me went a little far away.

Then Cross sat back on his heels and stared at me for one beat too long.

"One shift," he said.

I was on the ice before the words left his mouth.

We won.

Because hell yeah we won.

Not gracefully, the Boston Wardens never did anything gracefully—which was part of our brand at this point, lean into it, put it on the merch—but we won, and the locker room afterward was exactly what happened when twenty-three guys who'd been clenched for sixty minutes all let go at the same time.

Music loud as fuck. Gear everywhere. Jenkins was doing something on a bench that I was going to call dancing out of respect for our friendship.

Chappell was crying, which happened every win and which we all collectively pretended not to see, and also because Chappell was six-foot-three and none of us were stupid.

I was at the center of it, which was where I kept myself. Feeding the room, laughing when I was supposed to, absorbing the contact and sending energy back out at a markup. It was a skill, same as any other skill, and I'd put in the reps.

The last five minutes of the game, I had almost forgotten what I was doing. I wasn't sharing that part.

It had been maybe ten seconds, this gap, this skip, where my hands and legs kept doing the right things but whoever was supposed to be home had briefly stepped out.

I'd come back to myself mid-shift with the puck on my stick and zero memory of how it got there, and I'd laughed and kept going because what's the alternative?

By the final buzzer, I'd mostly landed on fatigue as an explanation, or the hit.

Or the energy drinks that had lapped each other and were now fighting.

Definitely one of those things. I wasn't taking questions. Comments closed.

I was halfway out of my gear when Jenkins materialized at my elbow, still vibrating at a frequency only dogs and very excitable rookies could achieve.

"Okay so Searcy wants to go to Broderick's," he said, "and I want to go to Broderick's, and basically everyone wants to go to Broderick's, and Big Morrison"—he pointed at Dylan across the room, who was already shaking his head—"is being lame about it, so you have to come."

"Jenkins." I put a hand on his shoulder. "I was born to go to Broderick's."

"Hell yeah!" He pumped his fist. "Okay, but also, no offense, do you think you could maybe not, like, hook up with someone tonight? Because last time you left with the bartender at O'Connor's, and he keeps asking me about you and—"

"He was so hot," I said, and then immediately heard myself say it and winced. "Okay, you’re right. I'll go, I'll have a drink, I'll go home alone like a person with functional decision-making skills."

"Morrison."

The locker room didn't go quiet, it was too loud for that, but the guys nearest the door realized it. I felt the ripple, and I turned around.

Cross was standing in the locker room doorway with his tablet, which meant he had something to tell me officially.

I grinned at him. "Miss me already, Doc?"

The Ice Doc looked at me—not the quick professional sweep he usually gave me, but actually looked, straight on. Ice-blue eyes like lasers aimed directly at me.

"Training room," he said. "Seven a.m."

"I'll be there," I said. "I'm a morning person."

That was a complete lie, and we both knew it.

Cross held my gaze for one beat too long, and then he turned around and walked back into the training room and let the door shut behind him.

“You think he’s got bodies buried somewhere?” Jenkins whispered. He followed it with a fake shiver. “Or maybe he’s one of those vampires who play baseball in the rain. He’s at least thirty-something, but I don’t think he’s—”

“Shut up,” I whispered back.

The locker room kept going around me. My head was making a sound I had decided was the alcohol I was going to consume in approximately forty minutes.

Going out, I decided, was a genuinely great idea. I was going to go out, and be loud, and be twenty-three, and everything was going to be totally fine.

Totally fine, I thought, as I left the locker room.

My head rang when the door slammed behind me.