Chapter 21
Our Omega
~IRIS~
The puck hits the front of my cage at roughly the same velocity at which a small fast-moving asteroid would hit the front of my cage.
There is a sharp percussive crack, the precise mechanical complaint of carbon-fibre meeting vulcanized rubber, and the entire architecture of my skull rings the small tinny ring that, in any other context, would constitute a workplace incident report.
The puck slides off the curve of my mask, hits the post, ricochets, and dies in the back of my net.
Goal.
On a puck that should not, by any sober measure, have made it to the net at all.
Goalie. Pipes. Glove. Five-hole. The wall. The wall is the entire reason there is a team to slow down.
Get up, Iris.
Coach Declan’s whistle blows from the bench.
It is sharper than the whistles he uses at the front of any normal practice session, which is, on his particular gradient, the auditory equivalent of a controlled detonation, and he calls the sector-one line off the ice with the clipped tone of a man whose patience is, for the day, suspended.
“That last sequence,” he says, in the level professional voice of a man going on the record, “was not a clean rep, sector one. We are not running personal-vendetta drills inside my practice plan. If you want to take chippy plays at the back of your own goalie’s net, you can do it on someone else’s ice. ”
I exhale through my nose. The sound is a hiss against the foam inside my mask.
Off.
Today is off. You have been off all morning. You have, on the inner ledger, lost the back-corner save you should have made at the seven-minute mark, the rebound control on the play after, and now this. That is not three flukes. That is a pattern.
And the pattern, frankly, is upstream of the ice.
I have not slept properly in three nights.
I closed my eyes at one-thirty in the morning last night, lay in my converted storage room staring at the small square of moon coming through the high transom window, and did not actually sleep at any registered point until Rémi’s alarm went off at six.
The two nights prior had been the same. A small constant tinnitus humming under my breastbone.
The kind of insomnia that does not, in any visible way, announce itself, until you take a puck to the cage on a stoppable shot.
“Oh, well,” one of them says, loud enough to carry over the gate of the bench, “clearly the catching streak is failing. The pink-haired wonder’s real colors are finally coming up.”
Two of his teammates laugh.
Not quietly. Not the small contained snickers that pretend to be inside jokes. The full open-throated laugh of a unit that has been waiting two weeks for an excuse to be unkind about me out loud and has, on this particular Tuesday afternoon, decided that one goal is the excuse.
Skate off it. Skate off it. Reset. The wall.
Then Matteo skates across the centre line.
Not fast. Not theatrically. The unhurried purposeful glide of a winger who has clocked the chirp and is going to address it the way a winger of his caliber addresses chirps, which is from a precise distance designed to make the next words available to every man on the ice.
“Guys.” Cheerful. “Cut the fucking bullshit. Stop bullying the goalie.”
“Oh.” Brennan, of course. Of fucking course. “You are going to defend her, Santori. That tracks. You two are sleeping together, right? Cute.”
Three more laughs. A small whistle from the back of the line. Someone, possibly Voss, sing-songs out, “Now he has to be the knight in shining armor,” the kind of register designed to land as a slap.
Oh, no. Oh, please, no. Santori, do not.
Matteo, in the way I am starting to suspect is the only way Matteo knows how to be in a room, brightens.
“Yeah.” Loud. Easy. The kind of voice he uses ordering coffee. “We fuck pretty often, actually. And, for the record, she gives the best fucking cuddles I have had in my entire adult life. Sound asleep on my chest like a kitten. Honestly, life-changing.”
Santori.
Santori, we have done none of those things.
Santori, do that again.
“Are you jealous,” Matteo continues, sliding to a stop in the precise middle of the ice now, “because you cannot score an actual Omega? Or are you jealous because she can in fact handle me and Jude and Rémi simultaneously, which is a tactical performance most of your line could not produce in a one-on-one. Honest question.”
Brennan’s mouth goes thin.
“Hey, listen.” Matteo lifts his stick, casual, like a teacher gesturing at a chalkboard. “If any one of you assholes wants to shun our Omega in this rink one more time, you come right at my face and you try it. Not hers. Mine. I have business hours.”
Our.
Our Omega.
He said it on the record. With three coaches listening. With Declan listening. With every body on this ice listening. The pronoun is now in the league’s ambient air, and the man with the trophy case at the bench just heard it.
Brennan laughs.
It is, as bad-decision laughs go, a textbook example.
He coasts across the centre line. He stops two feet in front of Matteo’s face.
He hooks his stick under his arm. He says, with the bright cheerful confidence of a man about to make the worst seventeen seconds of his afternoon, “Oh yeah? And what are you actually going to fucking do, Santori? Fight me on the ice?”
Matteo smiles.
Then Matteo, with the unhurried elegance of a winger who has been waiting all season for a permission slip, drops his glove and punches Brennan square in the mouth.
The crack of knuckle against teeth carries down the rink.
Brennan’s head snaps to the side. The other three sector-one bodies in the immediate radius register, very slowly, that they have just watched the second-line winger of the better half of their roster start a fight in a Tuesday practice over a chirp.
And then, from the blue line, where I had expected the captain to be skating in to break it up, there is a precise, almost lazy clack of stick against puck, and a puck flies down the ice at a low fast trajectory and connects with the back of Brennan’s helmet with the small undignified thunk of a man being scored on by his own captain.
“Oops,” Jude says, expressionless, from the line. “My bad.”
Brennan turns his head, mouth bloody, eyes wild. “You mother—”
“ENOUGH.”
Coach Declan’s whistle is in his mouth and then it is back out again.
He is not raising his voice. He does not have to.
The single bark of enough lands at center ice with the precise weight of a man who has, in the past nine seconds, calculated exactly how much further this is allowed to escalate and decided the figure is zero.
Brennan, mouth still bloody, fights the urge to spit and loses. He spits. There is a small pink fleck on the white of the ice between his skates. Voss skates up behind him and grabs the back of his elbow, the small physical signal of a teammate intervening before something else gets said.
Coach Whitlock skates out from the visitors’ bench. His helmet is off. His clipboard is tucked under his arm in the small dramatic way of a man preparing a speech.
“See?” He addresses Declan, but his voice carries because he means it to. “This is exactly what happens when you put an Omega on a roster.”
Rémi has been, until this moment, on the far blue line at his usual defensive post. He has, as far as I am aware, said one word in the past forty-five minutes of practice, which was the word clean called to a winger after a back-check.
He skates into the centre of the ice.
He does not hurry. He does not raise his stick. He stops a polite professional distance from Coach Whitlock, plants the toe of his blade in the ice, and lifts the front of his helmet cage a fraction so the man across from him can see his eyes clearly.
“Oh,” Rémi says.
Quiet. Spare. The cadence of a sentence being driven, like a long flat-headed screw, into a piece of clean hardwood.
“You are one of those, Coach Whitlock. The type who decides it is acceptable to rape a girl because she was wearing a short dress and asking for it. Did I get that right.”
The rink shuts up.
Not a polite quieting. The total binary on-off shut-up of forty bodies who have, in unison, registered that the defenseman who has not spoken since lunch has just used the verb rape at center ice in a professional practice and is, with the equanimity of a man laying out a chessboard, waiting for an answer.
Coach Whitlock’s entire face does a thing. “I did not — that was not what I —”
“Because that was the structure of the statement, sir,” Rémi continues, unhurried.
“That is exactly what happens when you put an Omega on a roster. An Omega is, in your formulation, the variable responsible for outcomes she has not produced. You moved the blame, in real time, from four sector-one bodies talking shit at a goalie to the goalie’s presence in the building.
Which is, in my professional reading of the sentence, the bedrock of the exact framework I named. ”
Nobody answers.
“For the record,” Rémi adds, looking past Whitlock now, at the whole assembled gallery of the sector-one line and the other two assistant coaches and the small wide-eyed equipment kid at the gate, “every man on this roster has off days. We have been drilling at six in the morning and seven in the afternoon for the next outbound game for two solid weeks. Sector one, please raise your hand if you have personally done a four-a.m. extra session on top of the official ones. Anyone. No hands. Got it.”
Brennan, still bleeding, lowers his eyes.
“So, instead of being supportive of an athlete who is putting in the extra rotations none of you are putting in,” Rémi continues, in the same flat even tone, “you decided to publicly humiliate her for one missed puck on a day she was off, on the back of zero comparable workload of your own. Which is, frankly, embarrassing to watch.”