Chapter 12
I'd been off the ice for four days.
Four days of rest protocol and no screens and Cross's voice in my head every time I reached for my phone, which was ironic, because Cross himself had apparently had nothing to say to me since he handed me my laundered shirt and told me to go home.
Nothing.
Not a text. Not a check-in. Not even the clinical kind, the how's the headache, scale of one to ten kind that I would have deflected and complained about.
Four days of rest protocol was apparently self-directed. Autonomous.
Just me, just Wesley Morrison, unsupervised, alone in my apartment with my takeout containers and wax cheese.
Which was fine.
I'd passed this morning's assessment. Brief, efficient, professional. Cross had looked at my eyes and asked his questions and made his notes and told me I was cleared, and I'd said thanks, and he'd said you're welcome, and that had been the entire interaction, and I was fine about it.
Yet despite getting back on the ice, I was in a terrible mood.
The locker room was loud, pre-game loud.
Chappell had his headphones in and his eyes closed and his mouth moving, which nobody asked about. Dylan was already in full gear, because Dylan was always already in full gear.
I was fine. I was getting dressed and I was fine and the game was in forty minutes and everything was fine and Cross had not texted me once in four days which was completely irrelevant to any of this.
"Morrison goes viral, gets pulled at practice, comes back for the home game,” Knox said. Not to me. To Searcy, across the room, not even looking in my direction. "Media eats this shit up. The PR team's probably losing their minds jerking each other off about it."
He said it the way Knox said everything, loud enough that there was no pretending he hadn't said it, blunt as a closed fist, not bothering to aim.
I heard it the way I heard everything today, which was wrong.
"You got something to say about me, Knox, say it to my face."
Knox turned around. Full attention.
"The hell's your problem?" Having Knox’s full attention was a whole thing, like standing in front of something large that was deciding whether to move. "I'm having a conversation."
"About me."
"Yeah, about you, Morrison, because you did something worth talking about, that's how it works!
" He was already getting louder, the Knox dial turning the only direction it turned.
"You went viral being a dumbass, and I made one comment.
One. You want to cry about it, go cry about it somewhere I'm not. "
"I'm not crying about anything—"
"Then what the HELL are you doing?" His voice bounced off the lockers.
Someone across the room went very still.
"You waltz in here with that face on like the whole world did something to you personally and you're looking for someone to take it out on.
Fine. You want to pick a fight? Pick a real one.
But don't come at me with this half-assed bullshit like I'm not going to notice what you're doing. "
"Knox—" someone said.
"No!" He pointed, arm fully extended, finger aimed at my face.
"No, I'm serious! What is your problem? You got cleared!
You're playing tonight! Act like it! Instead you're in here looking like someone pissed in your protein shake and going after me for having a conversation with Searcy, who, by the way"—he gestured broadly at Searcy—"also thinks it's a good narrative, so if you want to be mad at someone be mad at him too! "
Searcy raised both hands. "Leave me out of this."
"Too late, you're in it—"
"That's enough." Dylan was on his feet and between us with the efficiency of someone who had been running this particular interference since we were teenagers. "Both of you. Right now."
Knox pointed at me over Dylan's shoulder, voice dropping to something that was somehow louder for being more controlled.
"Get your head right, Morrison. I don't know what's going on with you, and I don't care.
Fucking fix it. We need you on the ice tonight, and right now you're giving me nothing.
Sort your shit out before puck drop or I swear to god I will be a problem for you in ways that have nothing to do with this conversation. "
He sat back down.
The locker room held its breath.
I didn't have anything. No justification, no explanation, no version of this that made sense.
The live wire had found something and the something was Knox and Knox could take it.
That was not a good enough reason and I'd done it anyway and now twenty-two people were staring at their skates on my behalf.
"I need air," I said, to nobody, and walked out.
Dylan watched me go.
I could feel it without looking. The way Dylan watched me was different from everyone else watching. His watching had weight and history and too many years of knowing exactly what my problem was before I did.
I didn't look back.
The corridor was empty and cold and smelled like rubber matting.
Twenty seconds. I’d give myself twenty seconds and then I'd go back in and tell Knox he was right and put my gear on and be the version of myself that functioned.
"Is something wrong?"
Fifteen seconds, apparently.
Cross was in the corridor.
Of course he was. Cross was always in the exact location where I was trying not to have a problem.
I had stopped being able to tell whether that was a conspiracy or just a fact about how small the facility was.
It didn't matter. He was here, and he was looking at me with the assessment look and he was already saying something efficient about stress response and the game being in forty minutes.
I put my hand up.
"Don't," I said.
He stopped.
"I passed this morning," I said. "I'm cleared. I'm fine." I dropped my hand. "Can you just—five minutes? Can you not be my doctor for five minutes?"
The corridor held the quiet.
I hadn't planned to say the next part. I'd been not saying it for four days, since the training room, since the collar and the knuckle and the way he'd said Wesley like it was a specific thing he meant.
Since he'd handed me my shirt, laundered and folded, and walked away, and hadn't once in four days sent a single text to ask if my head hurt or if I was sleeping or if the wax cheese situation had been resolved.
Four days.
Not that I was counting.
"You didn't check on me," I said.
Cross went very still.
"Four days of rest protocol." I could hear how it sounded.
I could hear exactly how it sounded, and I couldn't stop.
"You gave me all these instructions: sleep, eat something real, don't look at your phone.
And then nothing. Not once." I stopped. Started again.
"Jenkins gets a knee thing in practice and you're right there.”
“Jenkins hurt his knee? When?”
“Days ago! You said something and he laughed. Your whole face was different."
I couldn't find the end of it, which was a problem, because Cross was looking at me and the end of it was the thing I wasn't going to say, which was: you looked at him like he mattered and you look at me like I'm a liability you're managing and I have been thinking about your thumb on my jaw for four days and you didn't even text me once.
"You look at everyone on this team like they're worth the time," I said instead. "And you look at me like I'm a problem you have to deal with."
Something moved across his face.
"That's not what I see," he said.
It wasn't an answer. It didn't explain anything. It just landed in the corridor between us and didn't close anything at all.
We were standing too close. Close enough that I could see the pulse in his throat. Close enough that if he moved an inch forward his chest would hit mine.
I should have stepped back.
I should have said something smarter than what I'd already said.
Instead I stayed right where I was and looked at his mouth like it had personally offended me.
I crossed the distance.
He didn't move back. That was the first thing. He saw me coming and he didn't move back, just stood there and let me close the space between us, and when I got there I got my hand into the front of his shirt and kissed him.
Holy shit, I kissed him.
And not softly, either.
My lips on his lips were fast and desperate, the way I did everything, and I felt him inhale sharply against my mouth. This small caught sound, like I'd gotten past something before he could stop me.
Then Cross kissed me back.
I’ll be one hundred percent honest here. I hadn't been ready for that.
His hand came up to my jaw, the same grip, that fucking thumb exactly where it had been in the training room, nothing like the assessment and completely like it, and he kissed me back.
Slow and deliberate and thorough, the way Cross did everything, and I felt it from my jaw to my spine, felt it in my chest where the stone had been sitting for four days.
My hand was still in his shirt.
I forgot about the game. Forgot about Knox and Dylan and the forty minutes and the reporters and the viral video and everything I'd been running on for four days.
It was just his hand and the fact that Cross was kissing me like I was something he'd been trying not to do this to for a very long time.
Then he stepped back.
Not far. Just enough. His hand dropped from my jaw and he looked at me and I looked at him and we were both breathing slightly differently than we had been a minute ago.
His face was different.
His blue eyes were looking at me in a way that had no professional purpose whatsoever.
Then he picked up his tablet from where he'd apparently set it against the wall at some point without me noticing, and he looked at me one more time, and he said:
"You should go warm up."
And he walked away.
I stood in the corridor.
The building noise came back in stages, crowd somewhere overhead, the PA doing its pre-game thing, the warm-up music starting up through the floor. The clock had kept going without my permission. Thirty-something minutes.
I went back into the locker room.
Knox looked up. His face had migrated from explosive to neutral, the post-eruption version, the Knox equivalent of calm. I crossed to him and said it low, just the two of us: "That was my problem, not yours. My bad."
Knox looked at me for a second. His jaw worked.
"Yeah," he said. "It was." A beat. "You good?"
"Getting there," I said.
He nodded. That was all Knox needed or wanted, and I respected that about him more than I could usually say out loud.
Dylan was watching me from across the room.
I looked at him. He looked back. Something in my face made him not say a word—made him just hold it for a second, something unreadable moving through his expression—and then he looked back at his gear.
I finished getting dressed.
The room moved through its ritual around me and I moved through it with them, the familiar sequence of it, and I didn't think about the corridor.
Didn't think about the hand on my jaw or that's not what I see or the way Cross had looked at me before he said you should go warm up like that was the last safe thing he had.
I thought about the game.
We filed out. I went through the tunnel and the crowd came up loud and immediate and enormous, fifteen thousand people in one voice, and I stepped onto the ice and the cold hit me the way it always did.
The stone was gone.
Something else was in its place, louder and more complicated and considerably more dangerous, but the stone was gone, and I didn't know yet if that was better or worse.
The game was starting.
I skated.