Chapter 9
Chapter nine
Heath
Five games in eight days. Vegas, LA, San Jose, Anaheim, Arizona.
I'd scored in three straight, all net-front, chaotic, and replayed enough times that the broadcast teams had stopped sounding surprised and started sounding curious.
The beat writers had shifted a degree or two in their framing.
Is Donnelly crowding Mathers for ice time?
I didn't crowd anyone. I stood where Coach Markel told me to stand and let physics sort the rest.
During morning skate at the Vegas practice facility, the ice was NHL-spec but felt different—drier air and a faster surface. The building was a massive refrigerator plunked down in the Nevada desert.
Markel stood at the whiteboard behind the bench. Dry-erase marker in hand. He didn't raise his voice or call anyone over.
He wrote.
By the time I came off my third lap and grabbed water, enough guys had stopped that I figured something had changed.
I looked at the board. Markel had redrawn the lines. My name had moved.
Heath Donnelly and Kieran Mathers on the same line. Kieran on the right, me staying on the left.
Not a tryout. It was a decision made in dry-erase.
Varga bumped my shoulder going past. "Oh shit. You and Mathers—together? The internet's going to have a stroke."
"It's a line combination."
"It's content, Donnelly. Pure, uncut content."
Across the ice, Kieran was mid-drill. If he'd seen the board, nothing in his body showed it.
Markel materialized beside me. "Stay where your skates are." Same instruction as opening night. "You're arriving early. Let the plays come to you."
He walked away. Four strides later, he stopped beside Kieran at the boards. Whatever he said was brief. Kieran nodded once.
First rep together. I lined up on the left half-wall. Kieran took the right circle. Cross at center.
The puck moved low to high. I cycled behind the net and came out the other side. Kieran had already shifted, creating a passing lane I hadn't asked for but was where I needed it.
I hit him in stride. He one-timed it. Holloway kicked it out.
Second rep, Kieran carried wide. Drew two defenders with a head fake that made them both commit a half-step too far. The lane to the net opened.
I was already there. His pass arrived on my tape like he'd measured the distance with a ruler.
Goal.
Third rep, Cross won the draw back to the point. I drove the net. Kieran drove with me. He pulled their defensemen wide. I had the crease to myself.
The puck arrived. I buried it.
Kieran skated past me on the reset. We looked at each other. Two players confirming a read. Nothing anyone watching would flag.
There was a difference between playing next to someone and playing with them. The first was geography. The second was a conversation.
In Vegas that night, I scored again. Rebound chaos, Kieran's assist. Markel sent us right back out. The broadcast booth noted the chemistry. The beat writers noted the minutes.
San Jose, three days later, was where it changed.
The Shark Tank was already into it during warmups, towels waving and noise that bounced off the low ceiling. It was our third game in five days. The game was a grind, but something happened in the second period that I'd replay more times than any goal.
Kieran carried through neutral. I drove the net, then stopped. Planted. Let their defensemen commit. Then I pivoted, not to the net, but back to the half-wall.
The puck was already on its way.
Kieran had read the pivot before I'd finished making it. His pass hit my tape in the exact spot I'd arrived at a half-second earlier, which meant he'd sent it before I got there. He'd trusted where I was going to be.
I one-timed it. The rebound kicked out. Kieran was there. Tap-in.
His goal. My assist.
The commentators used the word telepathic, which wasn't right. Telepathy implied something supernatural. This was instinct.
Anaheim and Arizona blurred together, wins and the steady accumulation of evidence that the line pairing wasn't an experiment anymore. By the time we landed in LA for the last game of the swing, the beat writers had pivoted away from the rivalry.
Room 1518 at the LA hotel. King bed. Blackout curtains and a connecting door.
I took a shower and ordered room service. Settled in with a cooking competition rerun where a woman uttered words of encouragement to her soufflé. I understood the instinct.
The soufflé collapsed, but she kept going.
My phone buzzed.
Kieran: You awake?
I looked at the connecting door. Looked at my phone. Looked at the connecting door again.
Heath: Yeah.
Thirty seconds of nothing. Then a knock. Not from the hallway. From the connecting door.
I turned the lock and opened it. Kieran stood in the frame. Sweatpants and a white t-shirt. He was carrying a tablet.
"Wanted you to look at something," he said. "If that's okay."
He sat on the bed, not the edge, the middle, back against the headboard. I sat beside him. Our shoulders touched.
He tapped the screen. Game footage loaded. Vegas. Second period.
"Watch the D-man," he said. "Number four."
I watched.
"Now watch you."
On screen, I planted in the crease. Crosscheck. Shot. Deflection. Goal.
"You arrive at the net front a full second before the puck gets to the point," Kieran said. "Their D-man hasn't registered you yet because you came from behind the net. By the time he picks you up, you're already established."
"I went to the net. That's what Markel told me to do."
"Markel told you to go to the net. He didn't tell you when to go. You picked the timing yourself."
He swiped to an older game against Nashville. "Same thing. Watch your feet."
I watched. Micro-movements. Half-steps I didn't remember making because they'd happened below the level of conscious thought.
"You're reading the goalie's weight transfer. Before the shot. Not after. You're processing faster than you think you are."
He said it the way he said everything: evenly, calmly. It was like a trainer delivering test results. Oxygen capacity. Electrolyte levels. Heath Donnelly is processing faster than he thinks he is.
Another clip. A scramble goal in Boston. He paused the frame.
"Look at where everyone else is." I saw bodies everywhere. Sticks tangled. Utter chaos. "Now look at where you are."
I was in the only clear lane. A pocket of space six inches wide that existed for maybe half a second before the other bodies closed it.
"The commentators call it luck because it doesn't look like skill," Kieran said. "Skill is supposed to look clean. What you do is messier. But the read underneath it is elite."
Elite.
Nobody had used that word about me. Not my coaches in juniors. Not Pickle. Not Markel. Not the beat writers still debating whether I was a statistical anomaly with good timing.
Kieran Mathers, a first-round draft pick, called my reads elite. Without a single qualifier.
My immediate instinct was to deflect. Instead, I kept my mouth shut and let the word exist without trying to shrink it.
"You sound like Pickle," I said.
"Is that good or bad?"
"Means you're right."
The corners of his mouth curled into a small smile.
"Your reads are real," he said. "I need you to hear that from someone who isn't a pipe cleaner enthusiast in Ontario."
I smiled back. "Okay," I said. "I hear it."
Goosebumps rose on my arms in the same half-second I noticed Kieran's hand on his thigh, tendons shifting as he flexed and released his fingers.
"Kieran."
He turned his head and reached out. Two fingers touched my jaw.
I leaned into his hand.
The fingers moved to the back of my neck.
Our kiss differed from every other time.
In the elevator, we'd been desperate. In my apartment, I'd led because Kieran's body didn't have a map yet.
This time, he knew where he was going. He kissed me like he'd been thinking about it through all five cities.
I let him lead. It wasn't easy to hold back. I wanted to peel off his shirt and touch his ribs, his chest, but I followed instead of taking charge. That was important.
His grip tightened on the back of my neck. The tablet slid off the bed and hit the carpet with a dull thunk that neither of us acknowledged.
He pulled his shirt over his head. I pulled off mine.
He spread the fingers of his free hand over my chest, measuring my heartbeat.
"Fast," he said.
"Been fast since you walked through that door."
"Half-truth there. I know it sped up during the Winnipeg footage."
"I was reliving trauma."
He laughed. The laughter traveled through his palm and into my ribs.
I put my hand over his. "Tell me what feels good."
"This," he said. "Being the one who starts."
I understood what he was telling me. Every version of Kieran that existed in the world was a version someone else had initiated. He had been started by other people his entire life.
Not tonight.
I kissed a spot below his jaw, feeling his pulse against my lips. I let him decide what came next.
He tugged at the waistband of my jeans.
We dealt with the logistics of two large bodies on a hotel bed that was generous by civilian standards and geometrically challenging by hockey player standards. His knee caught in the duvet. My elbow cracked against the headboard.
"Your hotel is also trying to kill me."
"It's a pattern. Furniture hates us."
He kissed me harder, and the joke dissolved. His body pressed against mine, full length, skin on skin. We were in motion, the two of us, rearranging ourselves around each other without a plan as we shed the rest of our clothes.
He learned fast. Once Kieran mapped something, he memorized it. He knew what I responded to. He was using it. Teeth on my collarbone. Precise.
I changed our position. It wasn't a takeover. It was a play cycling from his side to mine.
Kieran ended up on his back, and I ended up braced above him.
"Don't stop," he whispered.
I reached between us. I wrapped my fingers around his cock, a firm grip and a slow start.
"Look at me," I said.
He did.