18. Maddox
MADDOX
Game at home against the Providence Bruins. Season on the line by minute sixty or we're staring at a wild-card chase for the rest of the year. The crowd comes in two hours early and they come in loud. Somebody in the upper bowl has a cowbell and I want to find them after and buy them a beer.
Paul gives the pre-game speech like a man reading his own eulogy.
Tight jaw. Flat eyes. He doesn't look at me once.
He doesn't look at Theo either. He talks about discipline.
He talks about structure. He talks about playing the right way.
He says the right way four times in ninety seconds and the rookies nod along like they know what it means.
Phoenix and I and the other vets know it means don't do what Maddox does.
We sit three stalls apart in the locker room and do the warm-up taping and act like we haven't been sharing a bed for six nights.
Theo is white-faced and focused, and I watch him tape the same spot on his stick three times before he sets it down.
Park walks past me, claps my shoulder, says nothing.
Phoenix catches my eye across the room and lifts his chin a quarter inch.
That's the whole pre-game for me. Nod from Reyes.
A claim from Theo's leg pressing mine under the bench for two seconds before we stand to go.
We go.
First period. Bruins score inside four. Clean breakaway, our D caught flat-footed, nothing to be done.
We pull even on a power play at eleven when Phoenix wires one from the point through a screen.
Paul double-shifts Theo on the third line because our second-line center took a high stick in warm-ups and pulled himself.
Theo doesn't flinch. He skates. He skates like a man who has been told his whole life he doesn't belong on this ice and has decided, quietly, to disagree.
He wins his first face-off against a guy who has taken thousands of face-offs in his professional career.
I watch from my bench and my teeth come down hard on my mouthguard.
That's mine. That's my boy. I don't say it.
I don't have to. Phoenix looks at me and shakes his head like he's watching a man drown in public.
He's good. I've been telling him he's good for weeks and he didn't believe me and tonight he's making believers out of twelve other guys and a building of ten thousand.
Second period. Bruins go up two to one on a bounce off the post that had no business going in.
I take a run at their winger on the next shift, legal, hard.
Shoulder to chest, feet planted—a hit that used to get me on highlight reels before the league decided I was a problem.
The whole bench stands up on it. Paul benches me anyway for two minutes.
Fine. I sit. I watch. I breathe through my nose.
The vein in my temple is doing something.
Park slides down the bench and hands me a water bottle without looking at me.
Drink, man. I drink. Park is not my friend but he is, tonight, not my enemy, and that counts for something.
Theo gets a look shorthanded and misses the net by a finger. The crowd groans and then cheers him anyway because the crowd has decided, apparently, that Theo Laurent is one of theirs now. I whisper next time, sweetheart under my breath. He is fifty feet away, but I like to think he hears me.
Third period. We tie it at six on a rebound I jam home from the crease.
The celly is quick. Glove taps, helmet knocks, back to the bench.
The game isn't over. Bruins take the lead back at fourteen on a power play we earned by a stupid hooking call I will think about for a week.
The building is screaming. Paul is pacing the bench like a man trying to walk his own heart rate down.
Two minutes to go, Paul puts me and Theo on the same line for the first time all season. I don't know if it's strategy or desperation. I'm not going to ask.
Face-off in their zone. Theo wins it clean—I don't even know he can do that, he's never done it on camera, but he does it clean, he does it fast, and he drops the puck back to our D before the Bruins center has fully squared his feet. Shot. Save. Rebound. Scrum.
No.
I go get it. I want it more than any other human in this building. I dig it out from under two Bruins’ sticks with my left skate and I find Theo coming low across the slot and I don't even have to look; I just know he's going to be there. I slide it onto his tape.
Theo doesn't shoot. He doesn't have the angle. He snaps it back to me between his own legs, between his defender's legs, a no-look touch pass that my dead grandmother would call beautiful, and I take a one-timer shot top shelf over the glove with six seconds on the clock.
Noise.
I don't hear it. I see it. The building comes off its feet and the sound wave hits the ice and the boards vibrate under my skates.
I turn. Theo is already airborne. He leaps on me, helmet to helmet, and I catch him because catching him is reflex now, and we go down against the boards in a pile.
Glove hands. Grins through cages. The team piles on.
Phoenix gets there first and cracks me in the back of the helmet with fucking vintage, Creed.
Theo is under me. His eyes are huge. His mouth is open. His face is all teeth.
“Hi,” I say, low enough that only the mesh of his cage gets it.
His whole face does a thing.
“Hi.”
“You wanna go home with me?”
“Yes.”
The weight of Phoenix lands on both our backs.
“Good.”
I peel off. The pile peels off. The arena is still screaming.
The clock runs out. We win. The hand-shakes.
The fist-bumps. The head-pat from the trainer.
The salute to the crowd at center ice. Paul is the last thing I see before we go down the tunnel.
Paul standing at the end of the bench with his arms crossed, not clapping, watching Theo skate past him.
His mouth is small. Very small. Smaller than I've ever seen it.
Fine, coach. Tell me how it was sloppy.
The locker room is loud. Phoenix is doing something obscene with a stick.
Park is pouring a water bottle down his own back.
Two of the rookies are actually dancing.
Somebody has a speaker going with a song I don't know and don't want to know.
The smell is sweat and tape and the sharp cold of an ice-sheet body coming in from twenty degrees.
I pull my helmet off. Theo is across the room pulling his off and his hair is stuck to his forehead.
His face is red, he's still grinning, and he looks at me across the room; the grin drops to something private for half a second, and I feel it in my gear.
Paul walks in.
The room quiets a degree. Not all the way, the rookies don't know yet, but the veterans know.
“Good win.” Flat. “Creed, my office. Now.”
He walks out. The rookies look at each other. Phoenix makes a face at me.
I peel out of half my gear. Keep the base layers on. Keep the cup on, which is going to matter in about ten minutes though I don't know it yet. Pull on a team quarter-zip over the shoulder pads because I can't be bothered. Walk down the corridor.
Paul's office is off the locker-room hallway, second door on the right. Coach's name on a brass plate. Bare walls. One bookshelf. Desk. Two chairs.
I stand. I don't sit. He doesn't offer.
“Sloppy,” he says, not looking up from the stat sheet. “Undisciplined. You ran that Bruins winger in the second, legal, I know, I know. You took yourself out of position on the goal I won't complain about, but the rest of your game was trash.”
“Okay, Coach.”
“You want to throw your shifts away being a goon, fine. But my son doesn't play with you again. Not on my bench.”
There it is. He's not even pretending this is about hockey.
My jaw doesn't move.
“Okay, Coach.”
He looks up. His eyes are bad. “You think this is funny.”
“No, Coach.”
He sets the stat sheet down too carefully.
“You think I don't know what you're doing?”
I don't answer that.
“Get out of my office.”
I get out. Quiet. Controlled. I don't slam the door. I close it like a man closing a door he plans to come back through.
The locker room is still loud when I pass it. Phoenix is standing in the doorway with a towel around his neck watching for me. I catch his eye and he reads my face in a second flat.
“He yelled?”
“In his way.”
Phoenix adjusts the towel.
“About?”
“Guess.”
Phoenix's jaw does the thing.
“Tonight's the night, huh?”
“Looks like it.”
He exhales, long and slow.
“Creed.”
“Yeah.”
His hand lands on my shoulder pad, grips once.
“Be smart.”
“Always.”
He snorts. It's almost a laugh. Phoenix Reyes knows I'm many things and smart-under-pressure is exactly one of them.
Theo comes out of the room behind Phoenix in his base layers and his undershirt damp and his skates off and his stockinged feet slipping on the tile. He sees my face. He stops.
“What?” he says.
I keep my face blank for the guys still in the room.
“Not here.”
“Is it bad?”
I hook my finger into the hem of his base layer and tug once.
“Come with me.”
He comes.
I don't take him out of the building. I don't walk him past media.
I don't walk him past the owner's box. I walk him ten feet down the corridor and through the unmarked door that says STAFF ONLY that leads to the admin suite none of us use.
The cluster of small offices the front office keeps empty during home games.
I tried the handles on them all in October when I was bored and looking for privacy.
The middle one is unlocked. It has always been unlocked.
Someone at this organization is either trusting or stupid and tonight I am going to kiss their lazy soul.
I pull Theo in. Close the door. Turn the lock on the inside. It's a thumb-turn. It clicks.