Chapter 29 Crew
I'm in full gear on the bench and I'm not playing.
Helmet on. Gloves on. Stick taped and ready across my knees. Every piece of equipment is exactly where it should be.
The warmups are the worst part. Rider is skating in my spot, running the drills I've run a thousand times with Brooks, and I sit here and watch him do them slightly wrong. Not badly wrong. Slightly.
The angle of his body on the defensive pivot is two degrees too open. His gap control on the neutral-zone transition is a half-step wide.
And Wallace either doesn't see it or he doesn't care.
Mom is in the box, three levels up. Remi is beside her. Knox on Remi's other side. I can see Mom leaning forward in her seat with her elbows on knees, chin forward, reading the ice the way she reads everything, with the intensity of a woman who chose her own path.
She flew from Boston to watch me play.
She took three days off work to watch me sit and watch too.
The arena fills with eighteen thousand people, and the noise builds the way it always builds at the Pinnacle. With a slow swell from the lower bowl spreading upward until the whole building hums.
The ice is fresh and white and perfect under the lights, but there's a cruelty in being close enough to the cold coming off it while your skates stay dry on the rubber mat.
Keane taps my shin guard as he climbs over the boards for the opening faceoff. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't need to.
The tap says we know.
The game is a disaster.
Seattle came out pressing hard in the first period, the way the film said they would, and their transition speed was exactly as good as we studied. Three seconds from goal line to blue line. Fast, physical and tight. And then we weren't.
We're looking at a one-goal lead.
To Seattle.
Elite. I called it.
Steele is sharper in the second period. He picks up a loose puck behind their net and feeds it to Keane, who buries it top shelf, and the Pinnacle erupts.
One-one.
I'm on my feet, stick against the boards, and for a half-second my body leans toward the ice before my brain catches up.
I sit back down.
I glance up at the box. Mom is on her feet.
Seattle scores again seven minutes later on a breakaway that Ashton should have cut off. The puck slid past Grady, clean and fast, and the arena went quiet.
Two-one. Seattle.
I hear Wallace behind me calling line changes, and there’s a change in his voice, the tone he uses when something is wrong and he doesn't want the players to know he's worried. But he's worried.
He doesn't look at me.
Steele takes a hard check into the boards and I'm three feet from him when he hits the glass. The impact is brutal.
The grimace is real, but he shrugs it off.
Rider is fast. I'll give him that. He's fast. He reads the transitions well and his positioning is competent.
But competent isn't what Steele needs beside him.
Steele needs someone who knows when to hold the blue line and when to pinch, someone who has spent six years learning the rule of the half-second delay between Steele's first look and his real intention.
Someone who doesn't just read the play but reads the player.
That's me. That's what I do.
And I'm sitting three feet from the ice with my gloves on watching Rider do a version of it that is good enough for Wallace but not good enough for Steele.
The second period ends.
Two-one, Seattle.
The third period is worse.
Seattle scores twice. The Scorpions claw one back.
Keane gets a roughing minor that puts us short-handed, and Even Steven nearly loses his mind when Nichols catches Steele with an elbow that the refs don't call.
I watch Steven's body tighten, the violence building in his shoulders, and Brooks skates to him, talking low, grabbing his jersey. Settling him.
That should be me talking Steven down. That should be me reading his body and knowing when he's about to snap.
Steven takes a breath. I'm proud of him. He skates right past me on the bench without making eye contact because looking at me would mean acknowledging that the man who should be on the ice is sitting here with clean gloves and a dry stick.
The buzzer blares minutes later.
The final score is four to three. Seattle.
The Pinnacle goes quiet with the stunned disbelief of eighteen thousand people who expected to go up one-nil in the series and are instead looking at a scoreboard that says they lost at home. And to the youngest team in the league.
I set my stick against the boards. Pull off my gloves.
The tape is still fresh.
Unused.
I’m so fucking pissed off, I leave.
Knox stands by the window, texting. Mom sits in a chair and reads the game program she took from her seat. Remi paces. And I’m still shaking as we wait in the family lounge.
The players come out in waves. Brooks first, then Keane, then Steven, who still looks as if he wants to throw a punch. Steele comes last. His hair is wet and his jaw is tight and he walks directly to me.
"You should have been out there," he says.
"I know."
"I mean it, Crew.”
I know.
“The defensive shape was wrong. The gap control was wrong. Rider is fast but he doesn't read the play, he reacts to it, and by the time he's reacting it's a half-second late."
"I know." How many fucking times.
We’ve had six years of knowing each other so well the conversation is the decoration on top of what our bodies already say.
"I'll talk to Wallace," he says.
"Don't."
"Crew."
"Don't talk to Wallace. If he wants me back in, he'll put me back in. I'm not going to campaign for my own spot."
Steele's jaw works. He wants to argue. He doesn't.
Mom stands. "That was a good game, Steele."
"We lost, Mrs. Banks."
"You lost because your coaching staff didn't choose my son."
"Mom!"
Steele's expression softens. "She's right."
Knox appears beside Remi. His hand finds the small of her back and she leans into him. For a moment we stand there in the family lounge and nobody says anything.
"Mrs. Banks, if you want, I can drive you to your hotel," Knox says.
"That would be lovely, sweetheart."
Knox's face does something involuntary at the word sweetheart. It’s the smallest movement, a twitch at the corner of his mouth but I’ll remember it, just as I’m remembering the growing list of things that make Knox Olivetti human against his best efforts.
Mom kisses my cheek. Hugs Remi. Pats Steele's arm. Knox holds the door after he kisses Remi.
And I'm standing in an arena where I sat on the bench in full gear for three periods and never touched the ice, after a game we lost, watching my mother leave with a man who three weeks ago was a stranger.
And then they're gone.
The four of us become three.
Remi turns to me the second the door closes.
"I need to tell you something."
She's vibrating. Not with heat but with something else. Anger, maybe. Or hurt.
"Knox asked me to move in with him," she says.
Steele goes still.
"When?" I ask.
"Before the game. While you were talking to your mom." She crosses her arms. "He said he wants me to come live with him. Just me. And I could visit you and Steele when I wanted to."
The words land and I let them land. I don't flinch. I don't react. I stand in the middle of the detonation and I hold my ground because someone has to, and that someone is always me.
That’s why he left. He wanted her to think about it.
"What did you say?" Steele asks, his voice carefully flat.
"I didn't say anything. I was too shocked.
" She starts pacing. "One minute he's sitting at our dinner table calling you his packmates and the next he's asking me to move in with him alone.
How would that even work? I'd just, what, schedule time with you?
Drop by on weekends? Like you're some kind of obligation I squeeze in between Knox's life? "
"Remi."
She stops. Her eyes are bright and hot and her scent is thick in the room, bourbon and chocolate and orange flooding the air with the kind of intensity that tells me her body is working overtime to process the emotion.
"He doesn't get to do that. He doesn't get to sit at that table and eat Steele's food and laugh at your jokes and hold my hand and then turn around and pretend you don't exist."
"He's not pretending we don't exist," I say.
"Then what is he doing?"
"He's being Knox," I say. "He wants you.
He wants all of you. And sharing is something he doesn't know how to do.
" I sit on a chair along the wall. My legs are tired, which is absurd because I haven't done anything all night except watch other people do the thing I'm supposed to be doing. "He'll figure it out."
"Will he?"
"He came to dinner. He met my mom. He let Steele call him a packmate. Three weeks ago he wouldn't have sat in the same room as us." I lean back. "He's slow. But he's moving."
Remi stares at me.
"How are you so calm about this?"
I'm not calm about this. I'm so far from calm that my chest feels as if it's been hollowed out with a spoon.
My team lost. My coach left me on the bench in full gear for three periods.
My mother flew to Nashville to watch me sit.
Knox Olivetti, who carries the full scent of my omega, making him Remi's biological match in a way I will never be, just asked her to leave us.
And I'm sitting on a chair in the family lounge being calm because that is what Crew Banks does.
I don't say any of that.
"I trust you," I say instead.
She sits beside me on the bench. Takes my face in her hands the way she did when she kissed me first, the night she chose me before choosing anyone else, and I close my eyes because her palms are warm and her thumbs trace my jaw and her scent is so close it's the only thing I can smell.
"You're not okay," she says. Quiet.
"I'm fine."