2. Maddox
MADDOX
Iwake up hard and I know exactly whose fault it is.
I lie there for a second running through the whole thing again. The tile against my palm. The sound of the water. The shape of him in the next stall, not moving, which was somehow more obscene than if he'd moved. The flinch I could hear in his breathing.
I've been wanting to fuck up Paul Laurent for three months, since the announcement. I wasn't planning on his kid. The kid was a bonus item. I saw the kid yesterday and thought nepotism and thought kill me and then I thought oh, and then the day happened.
I reach down and take care of myself in about forty seconds. Efficient. The word I'd use if I were in a locker room making fun of myself.
I get up. Six-fifteen. My knee does the thing.
I put weight on it, wait for the click, wait for it to clear, and then I take my first three steps of the day the way I take my first three steps every day, hoping one of them is the morning the knee finally stops doing the thing.
It never is. I brush my teeth. I drink water straight from the tap.
I pull on a hoodie over last night's shorts and I go to the gym.
The Wolves' practice facility gym at seven a.m. smells like rubber flooring and cleaning solution and the faint residue of too many men who don't shower before they lift. I like it. It's an honest smell. It smells like work.
I do legs. Squats first, heavy, because I like hating my life early in the day and getting it over with. I put my headphones in. I don't turn any music on. The headphones are a go-away signal. Most guys honor it.
I am five sets into squats when the door opens and the kid walks in.
Sweetheart. I think it before I can stop it.
He's in training shorts and a long-sleeve under-layer and his hair is wet from a shower he took before he came in, which is a move only a guy who grew up in hockey houses does, because you never know when you'll get to shower next and a morning shower is insurance.
He sees me and his face does the thing I wanted to see it do yesterday before he caught himself and turned it off.
I take one earbud out and let it hang.
“Laurent.”
He doesn't answer right away. He sets his bag down on the rubber like it's glass.
“Creed.”
“Seat's open.” I nod at the squat rack. “I'm done in a set.”
He looks at the rack, and at me, and at the plates I've got loaded, and the math he does on the plates takes a full second longer than it should because his brain is not currently in math.
“I'm doing upper,” he says, and heads for the bench.
The word fine lives in my mouth and stays there.
I finish my last set slower than I need to.
Rerack the plates. I watch him in the mirror because that's what the mirrors in a gym are for.
He loads a bar for bench with a respectable amount of weight for his size.
Not showing off. Not under-doing it. He sets up clean.
Feet planted, shoulder blades back, grip even.
Somebody taught this kid properly. Several somebodies.
He went to the right camps, did the right programs, never allowed himself a bad habit.
He lies down and does his warmup set alone. Stupid.
I walk over.
“Spot you.”
He sits up fast. “I've got it.”
“Not with what you're about to put on there, you don't. Lie down.”
He lies down. It's automatic. He goes where he's told by a man with a deeper voice. I file that away for later.
I stand at the head of the bench with my hands loose over the bar and watch him breathe. His ribs in his long-sleeve. His pulse in the side of his neck. His eyes flick up to me and then back to the bar, and I know what that flick cost him.
“Whenever you're ready, sweetheart.”
He goes. He's strong. Not enforcer strong.
Center-strong, controlled and compact. His lifts are clean the way his skating is clean, exactly what his contract asks for and not one rep more.
I keep my hands two inches off the bar the whole time because spotting a bar means you don't touch it unless he fails, and I am not giving him a reason to accuse me of anything yet.
He racks the bar. Sits up. Doesn't look at me.
“Thanks.”
“Another?”
He wipes his hands on his shorts for longer than his hands needed wiping.
“No. Thanks. I've got it from here.”
“Up to you.”
I walk away. I walk slow. I can feel him not watching me, which is as good as watching me. I smile at the leg press machine on the far wall like the leg press is in on the joke.
Then I do my accessories: Romanian deadlifts and hamstring curls and calf raises, which are the least interesting exercises in the gym and which I did not plan on doing today, but which keep me in the same room as him for another eighteen minutes.
He does four lifts. Two of them I watch in the mirror and two of them I don't. He does not add another warm-up plate. He does not look at me once more.
When he leaves, he takes the slow route past the door, the one that puts him in the corner of my vision whether I want him there or not.
I towel my face off and I check my phone and I do not look at the door.
“All yours, Mad Dog.” The front desk guy has come in to wipe down the benches. He's been watching me too, probably. Everyone watches the enforcer in a pro gym. It's part of the job.
“Thanks, bud.” I rack my dumbbells. I grab my bag. I leave.
Ice at eleven.
New coach is angry. You can see it in the line of his shoulders through the glass before he comes out the bench door, and the room feels it a half-second before he's on the ice.
Yesterday was day one. Today is day two, and day two is when he makes day one mean something, and the thing he wants day one to mean is Creed.
Fine.
I am on the second line for the system work.
That's already punitive. I belong on the first line and everyone in this building knows it.
I line up where I'm told. Coach runs us through breakout options.
He names the system. It's not a bad system.
It's his system. It's the system I refuse to play inside, which is the point of the exercise, and he knows it, and I know he knows it.
I run it wrong.
Not wrong enough to get cut. Wrong enough that he notices. I take the weakside option when the system calls for the strongside option. I cut back behind the net when the system says to go up the wall.
“Creed.”
I stop. I turn. I look at him.
“The system,” he says, “is the strongside option.”
“Yeah, Coach. My bad.”
“Run it again.”
I run it again. I take the weakside option.
He blows the whistle so hard the bench flinches.
“Off.”
I skate to the bench. I don't hurry. I don't drag. I sit where I'm told. My teammates do not look at me, which is its own form of looking at me. Phoenix leans over once from a stall down and says, under his breath, “Bud.”
“I'm good.”
He watches my face with his captain's patience.
“You're not good. Chill.”
I spit on the ice between the bench and the boards, which is a thing I do to indicate I've heard him. I do not indicate whether I've heard him correctly.
“I said I'm good.”
He drops it. Phoenix is a good captain. He has to try and he has to know when to stop.
Coach runs the rest of the first line through the system three times without me, and then he starts putting the second line through it, and I sit on the bench and watch the kid.
Theo plays well. He plays exactly the way his father raised him to play.
Every breakout the kid runs is the breakout on the diagram.
Every time he gets the puck he looks up and finds the right option and hits it.
There is no flair in his game. There is also no mistake in it.
He is a very good player who doesn't know he's good because he was raised to think “good” was the floor.
I watch him skate the weakside curl on the third rep and I notice the thing nobody has ever pointed at in his game because nobody has ever had to.
He takes a half-stride before he hits the line.
A half-stride to set up his release. It's a tell.
It's also what gives him the release. A real coach would see it and call it out and ruin it and get him a new one.
Paul Laurent hasn't. Paul Laurent is too busy watching whether Theo's feet are where the chalkboard said they should be. Paul Laurent does not see his own son.
I file that too. That one's for later.
I watch him and think, I'm going to ruin you.
I think about it with a clarity I haven't thought about anything with in a year.
Coach calls a water break. The room clusters at the bench. I get my bottle. Theo gets his. We are close enough that I can hear him breathe.
He's not looking at me. I step one skate closer and turn so my mouth is near his ear, and I say, soft, like I'm telling him a play, “I keep thinking about your mouth.”
He freezes. He does not turn. He does not breathe for one full second. He takes his bottle away from his face and he takes a step toward his father down the bench line without acknowledging that I've spoken.
“Water's over,” Coach says, and we all pile back on.
Phoenix looks at me from the faceoff circle. He knows I said something. He doesn't know what. He has the wrong idea, which is the right idea for what I want.
The locker room after. I peel my jersey off with the rage I've been sitting on for ninety minutes and I chuck it at the laundry bin and miss. I don't pick it up.
“Boys.” I say it loud, to the room. “Boys. That system.”
Jax is laughing already. Jax laughs in anticipation of chirps he hasn't heard yet.
“What about it, Mad Dog?”
I drop into my stall and stretch my arms over my head until my shoulder pops.
“Coach Laurent has a system. Coach Laurent's system is the strongside option. Coach Laurent's system was also invented in nineteen ninety-four.”
“Bud, come on.” Phoenix is sitting across from me in the captain's stall with his elbows on his knees. Tired. He's been tired since yesterday.