Chapter 4 #2
Dave Mitchell. I knew the name. Knew the reputation — old school, numbers-focused, the kind of coach who treated players like assets on a balance sheet.
I'd heard things about his time with this team.
Nothing concrete. Just the particular way certain players talked about those years, or didn't talk about them. The careful silences.
Looking at Hartley now, at the way he'd braced himself just to make this ask, I started to understand what three years under Mitchell had actually cost him.
“You actually watch,” Hartley said, quieter. “You see what's wrong before I even know it's wrong. So I'm asking you.” His jaw tightened. “I don't do that easily.”
I believed him. That was the problem.
“Why can't you work it out in front of the team?” I said, after a moment.
“Because they're watching. Waiting to see if I'm still the guy who choked or if I've finally figured my shit out.” He shook his head.
“I can't think when they're all staring. Mitchell used to do that — call out what was wrong in front of everyone. Said it built accountability.” Something dark moved through his expression.
“All it built was an audience for every mistake I made.”
“Fine. One drill.” I pointed toward the far end. “Get a bucket of pucks. Meet me down there.”
Relief crossed his face so fast he almost managed to hide it. Then the mask came back. “Thank you, Coach.”
He came back with the bucket, and I was still standing there, so apparently my self-preservation instincts were exactly as bad as I'd always suspected.
“What do you want to work on?”
“Release. My timing's off. I'm thinking too much.”
“Show me.”
He set up at the circle and I fed him a puck. Clean shot. Fast. Accurate.
“Again.”
Same result.
“What's the problem? That looked fine.”
“Watch my hands.”
I fed him another and watched. His bottom hand tightened a fraction before release, strangling the follow-through at the last second.
“You're gripping too hard.”
“I know. I can't stop.”
“Why not?”
He looked at me, and just for a second the mask dropped completely. “Because if I don't control every part of it, I'll miss. And I can't miss.”
“You're trying to force the shot,” I said, keeping my voice even. “You don't trust your body to do what it knows.”
“My body fucked it up last time.”
“No. Your brain did. Your hands remember how to do this.” I skated closer. “It's the interference that's breaking it. Let me see your stance.”
He set up, and I ran through what I was supposed to be looking at — shoulders, hips, weight distribution — but up close, without the buffer of the bench between us, the assessment kept catching on things that had nothing to do with mechanics. He was built well.
“You're not set up to shoot. You're set up to survive.” I stopped beside him. “Drop your shoulders.”
He tried but he barely moved.
“Hold still,” I said, and put my hands on his shoulders.
His breath caught.
I pressed down and his posture shifted. Looser. Better. The gear muffled most of it but not the warmth, not the way his whole frame responded to being guided rather than corrected.
I stepped back, putting distance between us that I needed more than he probably realized. “Feel the difference?”
He nodded, not looking at me. “Yeah.”
“Good. That's what relaxed feels like. Remember it.” I fed him a puck. “Now show me your grip.”
He adjusted his hands, and I skated around to his side. His bottom hand was still too tight and his knuckles were white against the tape. I could see the tendons in his wrist from here, the controlled strain in his forearm.
“Loosen up. You want control, not a death grip.”
He tried. Still too tight. It had worked itself into muscle memory — holding on because no one was coming to catch him if he didn't.
“Here.” I moved closer, reaching for his stick. “Let me—”
Our hands brushed when I adjusted his grip. His fingers were warm even through the gloves, and for half a second neither of us moved. I was aware of the specific pressure of his hand under mine, the way he didn't pull away.
I repositioned his bottom hand, forced his grip to loosen, and stepped back. “Try that.”
He took a breath and reset. Better. His hands looked more natural. Less like he was hanging off a ledge.
We fell into a rhythm — me feeding, him shooting, the mechanical simplicity of repetition.
No talking. Just the sound of skates on ice and pucks hitting the net and our breathing in the cold air.
I watched his body find the motion gradually, the way a player looks when they stop fighting their own instincts. Fluid. Dangerous.
After maybe fifteen more shots, I stopped.
“Better?”
“Yeah. Better.”
We stood there in the silence of the empty rink. He was flushed from the work, chest rising and falling, and he was looking at me with an expression I didn't have a clean category for — gratitude, maybe, but underneath it a kind of careful attention that I felt more than I could explain.
I looked away first.
“Next shift,” I said, voice coming out rougher than I intended. “Whatever happened before doesn't matter. All you have is right now.”
He nodded slowly. The mask was still down, just slightly. Just enough.
“Thanks, Coach.”
He skated away. I stood there watching him go, and the weight of what I'd just understood settled in my chest like stones that weren't moving anytime soon.