13. Enemy Territory
Chapter thirteen
Enemy Territory
Emma
“ T his place smells like ambition and floor wax,” Sloane announces, dropping her bag on the bench with the confidence of someone who has no emotional baggage whatsoever with this building. “Very Ivy League. I’m intimidated.”
“You shouldn’t be,” I tell her, removing gear in the same order I have since middle school. “We’re about to crush their dreams of another frozen four appearance.”
BC. I am back at BC. The arena that was my home for two years.
And I’m in the visitor’s locker room.
I start taping my stick. Same pattern, same tension, same number of wraps. Superstition is just discipline wearing a costume.
“You good?” Becca asks with her captain-to-player gaze that somehow communicates entire paragraphs in a single look.
“I’m good.”
She studies me for a beat. Two. “This is a big game for you.”
It’s not a question. Becca Martinez doesn’t waste syllables on things she already knows.
“It’s a big game for the team,” I redirect. “Reigning final four contenders from last year. ”
She sits, keeps her voice low. “I went back a few weeks ago, you know. To Pine Ridge. Walked into a building that used to be mine and felt like a visitor.”
I stop taping. Look at her. Really look.
Not the quick glances I’ve been defaulting to since realizing she noticed me flirting with Luke.
Becca’s eyes are steady. Not warm, exactly, but present.
Offering something I didn’t ask for but apparently need: the knowledge that someone on this team understands what today costs.
“Does it get easier?” I ask.
“No.” She’s honest. I respect the hell out of it. “But we need you, Cole. You’re part of our pack now. We’ll be here for you. On and off the ice.”
On and off the ice .
A pack .
What I never really had at BC.
Luke enters the locker room at 4:35 PM. Twenty-five minutes to puck drop. Addison flanks him, tablet in hand, already pulling up whatever last-minute data she’s compiled about BC’s tendencies.
He looks good in his Silver Pine coaching polo. Annoyingly good. Coach-who-could-ruin-your-life-and-your-career good.
Our eyes meet and I see it all: the question (did you sleep okay?) , the acknowledgment (I know what today means) , the warning (we’re coach and player right now, nothing else) , and the thing underneath all of it that he thinks he’s hiding.
He’s worried about me.
Not coach-worried. Luke-worried . The kind of worried that carried me up a flight of stairs at one in the morning and possibly, maybe, definitely kissed my forehead after tucking me in.
I give him the smallest nod. I’m okay. I’ve got this.
His jaw relaxes a fraction. One less thing for him to grip today.
“Alright.” He sets his clipboard on the whiteboard ledge and faces us. Then he’s all business. Drawing up the game plan for maintaining our conference lead.
“This team doesn’t belong to anyone else’s story,” he says as he sets down the dry erase marker. “Not BC’s story. Not Pine Ridge’s story. Not whatever narrative anyone in that arena has written for us. We belong to ourselves. Play like it.”
The room is quiet for a beat. Then Becca’s stick hits the floor. The rest follow, and the sound builds into something that vibrates into my bones.
We file out.
I’m last again. The way I always am, like some part of me needs that final moment of transition between who I am in here and who I become out there.
Luke’s by the door. Doesn’t stop me. Doesn’t touch me. Doesn’t say anything that anyone watching would flag as inappropriate or unprofessional or anything other than a coach sending his player onto the ice.
But as I pass, barely a foot between us, he murmurs: “Play your game, Em. Not theirs. Yours.”
I don’t look at him. Don’t respond. Don’t trust myself to.
I just walk toward the ice, his voice settling into my chest like armor, and prepare to burn this building down.
The arena is loud like the fans scent blood. The student section behind our bench has been chanting since warm-ups. Nothing creative, just “TRAITOR” on a loop, which would be more hurtful if it weren’t also deeply unimaginative.
At least workshop the chirps, people.
BC’s coaching staff is on the far bench.
Coach Harris glanced at me during warm-ups with some brief, unreadable look that might have been acknowledgment or disdain or simple recognition, and then looked away.
No handshake. No nod. Just the deliberate, calculated erasure of someone who stopped being useful to her program.
That stings more than the chanting.
From the opening faceoff, I’m wrong.
Not bad. Wrong . Playing like a woman who’s trying to prove something to a building full of people who’ve already decided what they think of her, instead of playing like the left winger who’s led her conference in scoring for two months.
I’m scanning when I should be skating. Looking for Drew in the stands (Is he here? Is he watching?) instead of reading the defensive formation in front of me. Looking for Liz, trying to gauge whether she’ll be the one assigned to shadow me, wondering what Drew told her, what she knows…
“Cole!” Luke. Sharp. Commanding. “Eyes forward!”
I snap my head back to the play. Too late. BC’s defense has already pinched, and the puck I should have collected is heading the other way.
Thirty seconds later, it’s in our net.
1-0 BC.
The student section explodes. The chanting shifts to something more elaborate. Still not creative, but louder.
I skate to the bench with my jaw tight and drop onto the boards. Sloane slides in beside me.
“That was rough,” she offers.
“I’m aware.”
“Also, the girl on their second line keeps looking at you like you owe her money.”
I follow Sloane’s gaze. Number sixteen. Liz Brennan. My former roommate. Drew’s maybe-still-girlfriend. The woman who moved into my room and my relationship with equal enthusiasm.
She’s watching me from the faceoff circle with an expression I recognize because I’ve worn it myself: territorial satisfaction. The look of someone who won the thing you discarded and wants to make sure you know it.
The whistle blows. My line’s up.
“Cole.” Luke’s beside me at the boards, and his proximity does that rewiring thing. Takes me from scattered to focused. “Forget the scoreboard. Forget the stands. You know their weak-side gap. Use it.”
I nod. Step over the boards.
The next shift is better. I manage a shot that their goalie swallows and a clean zone entry that at least proves I remember how to skate in a straight line .
Small victories.
The first period ends 1-0. We’re losing, but it’s not a disaster. Emery’s been solid. Becca’s defense is holding. The gap is fixable if I can get out of my own head.
The problem is that my head is a crowded room right now, and everyone in it is shouting.
Luke finds me during the intermission.
Not in front of the team. After.
We step into the corridor just outside the locker room. Concrete walls. Fluorescent lights. A janitor’s cart parked against the far wall. The most unromantic setting in the history of human interaction.
Which is appropriate, because this is not a romantic conversation.
“Talk to me.” Three words. And Luke looking at me with eyes that see too much, asking for the truth.
“I’m playing like shit.”
“You’re playing distracted.”
“I’m playing like I’m choking.”
“You’re a player who’s processing a lot of emotion in a building that has history.” His voice is steady. Patient. “Like someone who hasn’t let herself be angry yet.”
I blink. “What?”
“You’re playing scared, Emma. Cautious. Checking over your shoulder for people who don’t matter. That’s not you. You’re aggressive, yet you’re playing like someone asking permission to be on this ice.”
No sugar coating. Facts.
“You left this place for a reason,” he continues. “You chose us. You chose Silver Pine. You chose to build something new instead of staying somewhere that was killing you.” He takes a breath. “So stop apologizing for leaving and start playing like the woman who had the courage to go.”
I stare at him. At the man who told me to move on last Christmas and is now telling me to own my choices. Who pushed me away for years and is standing in a concrete corridor telling me to stop being afraid.
The irony isn’t lost on me.
“That’s rich coming from you, Coach.”
He catches the subtext. The implication that he’s telling me to be brave while being the biggest coward I’ve ever loved.
“Yeah. It is.” A pause. Then: “Maybe I’m learning too.”
We stand there, silent.
He breaks it. “Play angry, Em. Not reckless. Not emotional. Angry. The way you were playing yesterday when you were firing pucks like they were aimed at Drew’s head. Maybe at mine.”
They were not aimed at his… Okay, maybe a few of them were.
“You saw that? ”
“I always see you.” He says it like it’s nothing. Like it’s not the most devastating sentence in the English language. Then he nods toward the locker room. “Second period. Go show them what they lost.”
I come out for the second period with something rewired behind my ribs.
Not calm. Not settled. Something more useful than either: the channeled fury of a woman who’s been making herself small in a building that used to celebrate her, and has decided between one period and the next, between a concrete corridor and the ice, to stop.
I do.
Get the puck with ten to go and go high. The puck leaves my stick with every ounce of the anger I’ve been swallowing since I walked into this building.
1-1.
Sloane’s screaming something I can’t hear over the crowd. Becca raises her stick in acknowledgment which is the highest form of Martinez praise.
I don’t look at BC’s bench. Don’t look for Drew or Liz or Coach Harris.
I look at our bench.
At Luke.
He’s standing, clipboard forgotten at his side, and the expression on his face is the one I’ve been chasing since I was sixteen years old. Not the controlled coach-pride from the opener. Not the careful approval he meters out during practice. The look of a man watching someone he loves—