Chapter 10
Practice was at eight the next day, which was a war crime under any circumstances.
That meant I had approximately forty-five minutes to become a functioning human being, which I spent mostly lying on my bathroom floor letting the tile do its cold therapeutic thing while I stared at the ceiling and made peace with my decisions. My head was doing a low-grade throbbing thing.
I was fine. We had already established this.
I checked my phone.
Three different people had sent me the same clip.
It was already at over a hundred thousand views. The thumbnail was me, on the table, arms out, grinning like I'd invented fun.
The caption said: WARDENS’ LITTLE LION PARTIES HARD AFTER TAKING brUTAL HEAD HIT — is management paying attention?
I watched it twice.
I looked incredible, honestly.
That was the thing nobody was going to acknowledge in any of the concerned coverage. I looked like someone who was having the time of his life, not like someone who was struggling, and if there was something hollow behind it then that was my business and nobody else's.
I set my phone face-down on the bathroom tile, got up, and got ready, because the alternative was lying there until the tile absorbed me, and I had things to do.
The reporters were waiting outside the rink.
Not the friendly kind, not the beat writers who covered games and knew the players and had at least a basic understanding of what they were looking at.
These were the other kind, the ones who showed up when there was a story that smelled like liability. Their cameras were up before I'd even gotten out of my car.
I put my game face on.
It wasn't that different from my regular face. Just a little more teeth, a little more ease in the shoulders.
"Morrison, were you medically cleared to play in your last game?"
"I was." Keep moving, keep smiling. "Dr. Cross cleared me himself, actually, so if you have questions about medical protocol, he's the one with the credentials."
"Are you taking concussion protocol seriously given your history?"
I stopped for a second, half turning, because stopping looked more confident than walking away, and confidence was the only currency that mattered out here. "I have a great medical team. I'm in good hands."
"Does Dr. Cross overstep with you? After you were benched last season—"
I smiled wider. "Doc loves bossing me around. We have a great dynamic. But he always does what’s best for the team."
Somebody laughed. A few cameras clicked. I kept walking.
I'd said it so well I almost believed it.
The door to the rink facility was twenty feet away, then fifteen, then I was through it, and the cold outside turned into the different cold of the corridor, the smell of ice and rubber matting that I'd been breathing my whole life and that still, every single time, did something to the knot in my chest.
Cross walked past me in the hall.
He had his tablet and the focused look of someone moving between places with purpose. He didn't slow down. He gave me exactly the same attention he'd have given the wall if the wall had been in his way, a slight adjustment of trajectory, nothing more, and kept going.
No acknowledgement of the reporters outside.
No acknowledgement of me.
Obviously.
There were a couple of reporters inside the rink for practice, standing at the boards with credentials and notepads, which Coach allowed occasionally for access pieces and which I generally considered a mild nuisance.
They had their cameras on the ice before anyone had even started drills, which meant everyone was performing slightly more than usual, which meant I was performing more than usual, which should have been impossible given my baseline.
Something was still wrong.
Not dramatically wrong, nothing that would read on camera, nothing that would make the reporters scribble something alarming, but wrong in the way a car sounds wrong before it stops, this small persistent wrongness underneath the normal noise.
My timing was off. Not by much, half a second maybe, but in hockey half a second was the difference between a good play and an embarrassing one, and I knew my own body well enough to know when it was lying to me and still couldn't quite catch the lie.
I pushed harder, the way I always pushed harder when something felt wrong, because the answer to not working was always more.
Then Jenkins went down.
It was nothing, the rookie just caught an edge wrong in a drill, went down sideways, came up wincing with his hand on his knee. Wasn't even a hit.
He hobbled to the boards and Cross was already there when he got there, already crouching. I watched from across the ice while he checked Jenkins over with his hands, asking questions I couldn't hear. Jenkins nodded, and Cross said something, and Jenkins laughed.
Laughed?
Cross said something that made Jenkins laugh, his hand still on the kid's knee, and the expression on his face was. . . It was different, it was a different face than the one I got.
I had been close to Cross more times than I could count. Training rooms, benches, corridors, alleys, his bedroom in the dark. I thought I had catalogued every version of his face.
I had not seen that one.
He helped Jenkins up. Said something else. Jenkins nodded again and Cross patted his shoulder, once, and sent him back to the bench.
I watched the whole thing.
Cross never uses that tone with me.
I didn't know why that was the thought I landed on, or what I was supposed to do with it.
I didn't want his tone. I didn't need him to be gentle with me.
I needed him to stay out of my way and let me do my job.
The fact that he'd apparently reserved some separate, functional, human version of himself for everyone else on the roster was just information. Noted. Filed. Moving on.
I tried something stupid.
I knew it was stupid when I set it up, which was my particular brand: full awareness of the mistake while making it, narrating your own car crash in real time.
The reporters were there, and my timing was off.
Cross was over at the boards being warm at Jenkins.
I went for a move I'd landed maybe sixty percent of the time in practice even when I was feeling perfect.
A sharp cut into a spin shot from a terrible angle, the kind of thing that worked when your body was cooperating and very much didn't when it wasn't.
It didn't.
My edge caught wrong, the spin turned into something uncontrolled, and I went down sideways on the ice, not like Jenkins, not a gentle wobble, but hard, my shoulder hitting first and my helmet after, and the world did a slow, horrible tilt that had nothing to do with the fall.
I stayed down.
Not by choice, not this time. Just stayed there, because the ice was cold and level and the ceiling of the rink wasn't tilting like my vision was. I needed exactly four seconds of not moving while everything recalibrated.
The rink went quiet.
Four seconds.
Then skates on ice, fast and deliberate, and Cross was kneeling next to me with one knee on the ice, touching the back of my helmet with two fingers, not pulling, just contact, just here, and his voice was low and completely even.
"Stay down."
Not loud. Didn't need to be. The command had this quality to it, his voice, like it came from somewhere solid, and my body did the thing it always did with Cross which was obey before my brain weighed in.
"I'm—"
"Stay down, Wesley."
I stayed down.
He was already checking, hands moving, and I stared up at the rink lights and did a private inventory that I wasn't going to share with anyone.
Head: doing something.
Vision: coming back online.
Everything else: functional, annoyed, embarrassed.
The reporters were definitely getting footage of this.
After a moment Cross sat back and looked at the bench, and I knew what that look meant before he even moved, because I'd been on the receiving end of it before, and the knowing landed somewhere behind my ribs and sat there hot and humiliating.
He signaled.
He was pulling me.
Right here, in front of the whole team, in front of the reporters, in front of every person on the ice who was pretending not to watch while absolutely watching. He was pulling me, and there was nothing I could do about it except decide how I wanted to handle the next thirty seconds.
I ripped my gloves off.
"I'm fine." I got up, and the world tilted again, less this time, manageable, and I grabbed it and shoved it down. "I slipped, I caught an edge, it happens to everyone—"
"Off the ice."
"Cross—"
"Hey, fuck face." Dylan was at my side, which I hadn't heard happen, his hand on my arm, and there was something in his voice that I hated, something between I told you and something closer to fear that he'd never admit to. "Go with doc."
"I don’t—"
"Wes." Dylan said just my name, flat, and the fear was definitely there under the flat, and I hated it. I hated being the thing that put it there.
Coach said nothing. Just stood at the bench and watched, which meant he wasn't going to intervene, which meant he'd told Cross to make these calls and was going to let him make them.
Suddenly I was outnumbered in a way that felt less like being protected and more like being handled.
The humiliation of it had an edge on it that was close to something else, something I didn't have a word for.
Cross turned and moved toward the gate without looking to see if I was following.
I followed.
Because what was the alternative? Standing on the ice in front of the reporters and the whole team making it worse. I followed, and I didn't say anything, the sound of the team going back to their drills behind me.
In the corridor, away from the ice, away from the eyes, I stopped walking.
"Don't." I pulled my arm from Cross's vicinity, even though he hadn't been touching me, just needing the distance. "Don't walk me through the halls like I'm a kid who got in trouble."
He kept walking.
I caught up.
We were halfway down the corridor toward the training room when I tried to veer off, some stupid idea about going to the locker room instead, about making this something I was choosing rather than something that was happening to me, and Cross's hand closed around my arm, not hard, not rough, just completely certain, that particular quality he had where his grip felt like a fact.
He didn't pull.
Just stopped me.
"If you lie to me again," he said, not looking at me, just forward, like this was a statement he was making to the hallway, "I will sit you longer."
I didn't say anything.
His hand dropped.
We walked the rest of the way to the training room in silence, and the door shut behind us, and the corridor noise disappeared, and it was just the two of us in the particular quiet of a room where things had been said before, where things were about to be said again.
I still hadn't caught my breath.
I told myself it was the fall.