13. Jax
Chapter thirteen
Jax
Three goals on me — two of them mine. The ghost showed up in the third period of a playoff game and I let it cost us.
The retaping between every stoppage, more deliberate each time. The ceiling stare between periods. High glove side, third goal, my hand flinches. Barely. Enough.
Nobody else sees it.
I know how to process a bad game.
Film review. Ice. Sleep. Come back. The architecture’s been built in since I was nineteen — same sequence every time, same order, same result. You run it until you understand it. You understand it and you move on.
The net doesn’t carry grudges. Neither do I.
What’s different tonight is the tunnel was empty. I didn’t know that was going to matter until it did.
I sit in the locker room after everyone’s gone.
Pads off. Jersey off. The specific quiet of a loss settling into the room around me like weather. I’ve sat in this quiet before. I know what it weighs.
Tonight it weighs more.
The game first. I run it.
The first goal — their left winger, clean shot, my positioning off by half a step. Correctable. The second — their center, redirected, nothing I could have done. Not mine.
The third.
High glove side. My hand flinched. Barely. Enough.
The retaping between periods didn’t help. The ritual held, but the ghost was louder and I knew it was louder and I played through it anyway. It cost us.
I understand what happened. I can’t get back to neutral.
That’s new.
Or maybe not new. Just louder tonight because last night is sitting right underneath everything and I can’t separate them the way I usually separate things. The game and the rest of it. What happens on the ice and what happens off it.
I’ve kept those in different rooms for ten years. Last night made that harder.
Her hands finding the knot in my shoulder.
Her in my lap at eleven PM, her weight settled against me like it belonged there.
The way she looked when I put her down on that bed — not performing anything, not running her mouth, just looking at me with those green eyes and letting me look back and something in my chest going very quiet and very certain at the same time.
The sounds she made.
The way she said my name when she couldn’t say anything else.
She stayed.
I pulled her in and she didn’t create distance and her hand found my chest in the dark and stayed there and I lay there with that for a long time before I went under.
I put it away. Go back to the game. The third goal. The hand. The ghost. I run it again.
I hear her before I see her.
Her footsteps — I know them. I’ve mapped them in every building we’ve been in together. I haven’t examined what that says about me and I’m not going to start now.
She comes through the door.
No recorder. No notebook. Just Nova in her press credentials and her jacket and that camera bag she carries everywhere, and she looks at me sitting here in the empty locker room and doesn’t say anything right away.
She sits down next to me. Not across from me. Next to me. On the bench. Close enough that I can feel the warmth of her but not touching.
She puts her bag on the floor and looks at the opposite wall and doesn’t say a word.
I wait for the question. It doesn’t come.
A minute passes. Maybe two. The locker room settles around us. I run the third goal again in my head and she sits there and says nothing and I find something in that — the specific quality of a person who knows when silence is the right tool.
Then:
“That wasn’t the goal,” she says. “That was the ghost.”
I go completely still. Not the managed kind. The real kind.
She’s still looking at the wall.
“The hand,” she says. “Two seasons ago. I see you retape the blocker before every game. Between every stoppage tonight it got more deliberate.”
Long silence.
“I’ve been watching you for two months. Not as a journalist. Just as a fact.”
I look at her. Really look.
She put the camera down for this. She came to an empty locker room after a playoff loss with no recorder and no notebook and she sat down next to me and said the thing nobody else has ever said.
I see what it cost her. I see exactly what it cost her and I don’t look away.
“Three bones,” I say.
She turns.
“Hand fracture. Three bones. High glove side, rookie defenseman in a preseason game, low-percentage shot that I misread.” I look at the floor. “I hid it. Eight days before anyone knew. I was terrified of losing my spot.”
She says nothing.
“It went in my file as a soft tissue injury. I came back six weeks later and nobody asked questions because I didn’t give them reason to.” I pause. “The old piece said the absence was disciplinary.”
Her face changes. Not much. Enough to tell me that one landed somewhere it hurt.
“I know.”
“It wasn’t.”
“I know that now.”
“I was scared,” I say. “That’s all it was. Three broken bones and a guy terrified of losing the only thing he knew how to keep.”
She looks at me then, and whatever she sees makes her go quiet in a way that feels heavier than words.
“You should have told someone,” she says finally.
“I know.”
“The team physio. The coach. Someone.”
“I know.”
“You’ve been managing a two-season-old ghost alone.”
“That’s what I do.”
She looks at me for a long moment.
“Yeah,” she says softly. “I know.”
Midnight. An empty locker room in Pittsburgh. The ghost still loud. Nova beside me on the bench, close enough to feel, not close enough to ask for anything.
Neither of us says anything for a while.
That helps more than it should.
I came through the tunnel after the buzzer and she wasn’t there.
I noticed.
That’s the part I keep coming back to.
I noticed the empty space where I expected her to be.
And then she came here instead. No recorder. No notebook. No questions I wasn’t ready to answer.
Just Nova.
Sitting next to me in the quiet like staying was the only thing that made sense.
Something shifts under my ribs.
I don’t name it.
Not yet.