Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Toni Amato
Later, when I return to the ice arena for the game, the third period begins tied.
Fatigue opens mistakes. Philly crashes the crease.
Their defenseman clips Knox high after the whistle.
Chaos detonates. Gloves drop. Bodies pile.
Crowd screaming. I search instantly for Max.
He’s already there. Of course, he is. He drags one man off Knox, shoves another away, takes a punch, and answers with two.
Linesmen swarm. Penalty arms rise across the ice.
Piper groans. “Oh boy.”
My insides churn as they escort Max toward the tunnel. His jaw is hard, and his lip is split. As he passes, his gaze finds mine. That changes everything.
Guardians kill the penalties. Final minute.
Tie game, and the coach sends Max out. Bold.
He moves differently on the ice than he does anywhere else.
Bigger. Every hit with a purpose he doesn't show anywhere else.
He wins the board battle cleanly, chips the puck low, absorbs a hit, stays upright, centers to Lucas, who gets the goal. Game winner.
The arena loses its mind. Teammates mob Lucas. Max skates away from the celebration first, sucking air, blood in his mouth, eyes already on the tunnel. I should leave.
Instead, I remain where I am. He spots me. Even across the glass and noise, he finds me. Something in his expression shifts. “You stayed,” he says.
His lip is split properly now. There’s a cut on his chin I didn’t see from the stands. Up close, he resembles exactly what he is: a man who just fought and won a hockey game and is still running hot from both.
I open my tablet. Pull up the clip of the fight. Turn it toward him. “Calloway ran Knox after the whistle,” I say. “You reacted in under two seconds.”
He watches the clip. Says nothing.
“The league is going to call it an instigator penalty.” I keep my voice level. “Price from Player Conduct is going to want a meeting. Monday.”
“I heard.” He peers up from the screen. “You got the call already?”
“I got the call while you were in the tunnel.” He reads my face. Looking for a lecture, I think. The clipboard version of me. He’s waiting for her. “You won the board battle in the sixty-third minute on a two-and-one with a split lip,” I say instead. “Exactly the way we reviewed it.”
Silence.
The tunnel is nearly empty. Equipment staff at the far end. The sound of the locker room celebration leaking under the door. “Are you telling me it was worth it?” he asks. Solemn. Genuinely asking.
“I’m telling you both things are true.” I lower the clip. “Calloway had it coming. And it’s going to cost you. Those can both be true at the same time.”
He stares at me for a long moment. His expression isn't the grin, or the performance. He’s just tired. And raw.
“Toni.”
“Max.”
“You stayed.” He repeats it. Not an accusation. Not a line. Just the fact of it, held up between us in the empty tunnel. As if he's still working out what it means. I already understand. I knew before I stayed.
That’s the part I can’t put in any file. “Post-game observations,” I say. “It’s part of the job.”
He grins. The cut on his lip pulls slightly with it and he doesn’t flinch. “Right.”
My body has never forgotten Rockford. Now it treats eye contact like foreplay.
“Monday, nine o’clock. Don’t be late for the Price call.”
“I won’t.”
I move past him. He doesn’t step aside but he shifts, just enough, which means I pass close. “Hey.” His voice catches me at the door. I look back.
“Thank you,” he says. “For staying.”
I push through the door before my face does something my professional record cannot support. I attend the disaster of a press conference next and need some time to process.
Talia is in the screening room when I duck in there for some time away from the public.
She has the good chair. She always has the good chair.
This is a fact of our friendship that I accepted in our second year of school when I arrived at the film lab at seven a.m. and found her already there, in the chair with the lumbar support, editing with the focused serenity of a woman who had clearly been there since the previous night.
"How long?" I'd asked back then.
"Define long," she'd said, without looking up.
I've stopped asking since.
The screening room carries the scent of stale coffee, it’s muted the kind that absorbs things rather than amplifying them.
Talia has a blanket over her shoulders, it’s the same gray one she's had since junior year, which has survived two dorm rooms, one terrible apartment, and is now apparently doing arena duty.
Her feet are on the desk and she has four browser tabs open and a half-eaten granola bar balanced on the monitor housing.
I drop into the other chair. The bad one. Mine by default and by accumulated history. She hands me the other half of the granola bar without looking up. I take it.
Here is a picture of what four years have been like. No performance. No explanation required for why I'm here or what I need. I showed up, and she moved over, handed me a snack, kept working.
I sit with that for exactly ten seconds before I ruin it. “Tell me you saw that,” I say.
Talia doesn’t look up from the editing monitor. “You’ll need to narrow it down. I process approximately fourteen hockey catastrophes per hour.”
“Max Stevens.”
Now she glances up. “Oh. The eye contact press conference.”
I stop walking. “The what?”
“The eye contact press conference.” She rewinds footage with one finger. “This one?”
On-screen: Max at the podium looking directly toward the back of the room with the expression of a man moments away from writing poetry against his will.
“Oh my God.”
Talia pauses the frame dramatically. “See? Here’s the exact second he forgets how language works.”
“I hate this arena.”
“No you don’t.” She zooms in farther. “Unfortunately, you want to climb him like infrastructure.”
My entire nervous system leaves my body.
“Talia.”
“I’m only saying what your face has been screaming since you saw him again. You know what’s fascinating?”
“No.”
“You say Max’s full name every time you’re emotionally compromised.”
I grab the edge of her monitor and shove it downwards.
She gasps. “Workplace violence.”
In the car, I sit for three minutes before I start the engine. I keep coming back to one thing: he watched himself in the clip. Not Calloway. Not the linesmen. The frustration aimed inward felt authentic. He felt it.
For two weeks, I’ve been reading Max Stevens. My professional reasons for knowing about him are dwindling. I start the engine.
The clip has four million views by the time I get home to change.
Half called him a hero. The other half had already drafted their takes about liability and league optics.
Someone has already made a compilation of his biggest fights set to a song I refuse to look up.
The league’s official account has posted a statement about the ongoing review process.
My father left a voicemail.
I don’t listen to it tonight.
I already know what it says.