Chapter 25
Ididn't fully remember getting back to the bench.
One moment I was on the ice with the world tilted, and I saw Nathan's face. Then I was at the bench and the boards were in front of me. Dylan was already there, which was not surprising, Dylan was always already there.
"Complete idiot," he said.
"Yeah," I said.
"Absolute—"
"I know."
"Decker is a fourth-line pest who says things to get a reaction and you gave him exactly—"
"Dylan." My voice came out slightly wrong. Not weak, I didn't do weak, but different, the words marginally harder to find than usual, which I was not going to examine right now.
Dylan stopped.
"How's your head?" he asked. Quieter.
"My head?"
His face did something funny.
Coach said something from the other end of the bench.
I caught about half of it. The half I caught was about the power play and positioning and nothing about me specifically, which meant Coach was letting Nathan handle the me part, which meant Coach had already made a decision about how this was going to go.
Nathan was at my shoulder.
I didn't know when he'd gotten there. He was just there, the way he was always there.
His hand came to my arm and he said something brief and professional to Dylan, and Dylan's jaw did another thing, and then I was in the tunnel and the crowd noise was muffled through the boards and the game was still going on the other side.
The tunnel was quieter.
Nathan had his tablet. He ran the assessment with the clinical efficiency of fifteen years of practice.
The questions. The eyes. The balance check that I almost failed—I caught it, compensated, and Nathan saw me compensate and made a note without saying anything about it, which was worse than if he'd said something.
Coach was at the tunnel entrance. Arms crossed. Watching Nathan's face the way you watched someone who was about to tell you something you didn't want to hear.
"What's the score?" Nathan asked.
"Tied," I said.
He made another note. I could see from the way he kept returning to the same place on the tablet that the numbers weren't good.
Not catastrophic—I knew what catastrophic assessments looked like, I'd been through enough of them—but not good.
Borderline on two measures, clearly wrong on a third, and he came back to the third one twice.
"Nathan," I said.
"Don't," he said. Still the tablet.
"I need to go back out."
"I know you think you do."
"My parents—" I started to say. The words were slightly harder than usual but they were there. Through the gap I could see the ice, the game still going, the clock running.
I thought about eleven placements and a Morrison house bedroom with hockey posters Rob had let me pick. I thought about the transaction, the system, the give them the moment and get the noise back that had been running since I was four years old in a house that wasn't mine yet.
Rob and Linda were in section 112.
"My parents are here," I said.
Nathan went still.
Not the professional still. The other kind, the kind that meant something had landed somewhere that had nothing to do with the medicine.
The kind that belonged to a man who had been performing the correct version of himself for thirty-something years for people with expectations of who that version should be.
I could see that he understood.
"I owe them one more shift."
Nathan watched me closely.
I held his gaze. Not performing. Not the Morrison smile or the crowd face or any of the systems. Just me, brown eyes, the real version.
The tunnel was very quiet.
Nathan was doing the calculations, measuring the gap between what the numbers said and what the person in front of him was asking for.
He was also the man who had grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me inside a hotel room three doors down. Who had said okay in the dark. Who had held my hand when the city was quiet and his mother's voice was still in the room.
Both things were true at the same time.
I watched them fight it out on his face and I didn't say anything else because I'd said the thing and it was said and the rest was Nathan's.
"One shift," Nathan said.
Coach said something. Nathan looked at him.
"He can do one shift," Nathan said again, in the voice that meant the medical decision had been made. "And then he's done. He comes straight back."
He looked at me.
Something in his face. Under the wall, under the professional nothing, briefly and completely visible—the thing that wasn't a medical decision and he knew it and I knew it and we were both going to have to live in the world where he'd made it anyway.
"Come straight back," he said.
I went.
I played the shift.
It was bad. Not dramatically. I didn't fall, I didn't turn the puck over again— but wrong in the ways that only someone watching closely would catch. Edges slightly off. Timing a beat slow. The lights still doing the thing, the crowd noise still coming from slightly farther away than it should.
I was running on muscle memory and the thing that had been driving me since I was sixteen and nothing else.
Ninety seconds.
I thought about Rob Morrison driving four hours each way in February. I thought about Linda working extra shifts. I thought about Dylan on the ice thirty seconds ago, wrist shot from the circle, clean and fast and exactly right, and section 112 and the people in it.
Dylan scored while I was still getting my bearings at the bench. Wrist shot from the circle, clean and fast, no assist. The Wardens bench came alive, and I was on my feet with everyone else.
Dylan didn't look at me.
He didn't have to.
Wardens won.
The locker room was loud.
Road win energy, contained and private, the celebration belonging only to the people in the room.
Chappell somewhere doing his post-win cry.
Knox in the corner being Knox, which tonight had a slightly sharper edge to it because Knox had spent the third period being physically restrained and had opinions about that.
I was at the center of it.
I was good at that. I could give the room what it needs, absorb the contact, send the energy back at a markup. I could do it unconscious at this point, which was almost what this was, my head at an eight and climbing and the lights in the locker room too bright and the noise doing the thing.
I performed it anyway.
Foster appeared at my elbow.
"You look cooked," he said.
"I'm fine," I said.
He looked at me with the flat assessment of someone who had seen a lot of shit. "Like, genuinely. You look like you got hit by something."
"I did get hit by something," I said. "That's hockey."
"Right." He looked at me for another second. "They giving you the good drugs or the bad drugs?"
"Nobody's giving me any drugs."
"Huh." He considered this. "Might want to fix that."
He moved away with an unhurried energy.
Then Dylan was there.
He didn't say anything. Just stood next to me the way Dylan stood next to things, solid and quiet and completely certain about his location.
After a moment his hand came to the back of my neck and held it there.
The way you did with someone who needed steadying.
Steady and warm and not making a thing of it.
I closed my eyes.
Just for a second.
"Idiot," Dylan said. Very quiet. Not angry anymore.
"Yeah," I said.
"Complete idiot."
"I know."
His hand didn't move.
We stood there in the loud locker room, and Dylan's hand was on the back of my neck. My head was an eight and Rob and Linda were somewhere in this building. I had played the shift and the Wardens had won and I didn't have the words right then for what any of that meant.
Then my stomach made a decision.
I found the nearest bin.
Shit.
I vaguely knew that locker room went quiet while I was throwing up. Not the crowd quiet, not the hockey quiet, the human quiet, the kind where everyone in the room simultaneously decided to look somewhere else and pretend they hadn't seen.
Nathan was there before I'd finished.
Of course he was. Nathan was already there, next to me, one hand at my back.
He looked up at the room.
"Out," he said. Not loud. Just certain.
They went.
Knox was one of the last to go, giving Nathan a look on the way that had several things in it, none of which Nathan acknowledged. Dylan last after Knox, stopping in the doorway.
He stood there for a second.
I knew that pause. I had been reading Dylan Morrison's pauses since I was a kid and this one said: I have something to say and I am not going to say it and someday we are going to have to talk about this.
I had been filing that particular pause under someday for years.
Dylan looked at Nathan. Something passing between them—brief, weighted, the communication of two people who had just been through something together and were acknowledging it without naming it.
Then the door closed.
Nathan stood in front of me.
His face was doing the thing that wasn't the wall and wasn't the professional nothing. The real thing. The one I'd been collecting in pieces for two years and was now seeing fully, up close, in the worst possible circumstances.
"I know," I said. Before he could say anything.
"Wes—"
"I know what you're going to say."
"Then stop talking and let me do the assessment."
I let him do the assessment.
It confirmed what both of us already knew.
Nathan sat back on his heels. Looked at me. Looked at his tablet. Looked at me again.
The locker room was very still.
"You knew," I said. "In the tunnel. You knew and you sent me back out."
He didn't answer.
"Nathan."
"Yes," he said. Quiet. To his own hands. "I knew."
Something in the room shifted. Not the air exactly. Just the quality of the quiet changed.
"Why?" I asked.
Nathan looked up.
His eyes were very blue in the locker room light. Nathan Cross in a Toronto locker room at midnight with a tablet that said wrong call and the person he'd made the wrong call for sitting in front of him.