19. Jax
Chapter nineteen
Jax
I’m on my second coffee when Aurora’s text comes through. A screenshot. The photo she posted last night — me turning in the chaos of the locker room, Nova across the room, the whole arena behind us and neither of us performing anything about it.
Aurora:
She saved it to her camera roll. Aiden found out from Riley who heard it from Katarina. Just so you know.
I look at the photo for a while.
Set it on my chest.
Hold it up over my face.
Look at it again.
I’m not mad about it. I want to be clear about that — not to anyone, just to myself, standing in my kitchen at seven AM with my coffee going cold and Brick on the counter watching me do nothing about it.
The photo doesn’t lie.
That’s the thing about Aurora’s shots — she catches what’s there, not what you want there. And what’s there is a man who turned in the middle of everything and found that one woman across the room without trying.
I put the phone face down.
Brick looks at it.
Looks at me.
“Don’t,” I say.
He blinks.
The Conference Final opponent gets announced at nine.
Three-time champions. Five names on every All-Star ballot. I pull up the expert panels on my tablet while I finish breakfast — standing at the counter, same as always — and I read every single one.
Unanimous.
Nobody picking the Cyclones.
Too young. Too new. Expansion team in year three, great story, not ready for this stage.
I read the whole spread twice.
Something lights up in my chest that has nothing to do with anger and everything to do with three years of being exactly this — the team nobody takes seriously, the goalie nobody talks about until they have to, the franchise that shouldn’t be here yet according to everyone who doesn’t play in it.
I’ve been written off my whole career.
I know exactly what to do with it.
I fold the tablet. Rinse my cup. Go get my gear.
Liam calls the team in before practice.
Doesn’t announce it. Doesn’t ask. Just walks to the center of the room and stands there and when Liam Steele stands somewhere and waits the room goes quiet fast — even Brody, which is saying something.
Five sentences.
Same thing they said when this franchise started. Same thing in Round 1. Same thing in Round 2. Write the spread on your tape. Bring it on the ice.
Four seconds of quiet.
Brody’s stick hits the boards.
Then Aiden’s. Then Caleb’s. Then Sebastian and Marcus and the whole room one after another until it sounds like the building is shaking from the inside out.
I go to my locker.
Pull the expert panel printout from my bag — I printed it this morning, same as I always do when nobody’s picking us — and tape it inside the door.
Four seasons this building, this team, this specific group of men who decided to believe in something the league didn’t take seriously until we made them.
Thirteen wraps. Left to right.
I pull my jersey on.
Go to work.
Practice is sharp.
Everything clicking the way it clicks when a team has been through enough together that thinking drops out of it.
I know where Aiden is before he gets there.
Liam’s shot patterns are in my bones at this point — I’ve faced them ten thousand times in practice and I know the hesitation before the release, know the micro-shift in his shoulder that tells me high or low before he’s decided.
Even Brody, who operates on pure chaos energy and has never once done the expected thing in three seasons — I know Brody now.
I know what he’s going to do before he knows.
That’s what three years builds.
You can’t buy that. You can’t show up to a team that already has it and step into it like it was always yours.
It has to get built in the specific way this got built — badly, slowly, through losing seasons and roster changes and one bad loss in the playoffs two years ago that we sat with all summer and came back from.
I stop everything they throw at me.
Nova is at the glass.
She’s got the Nikon up. Working. I know where she is the same way I know where Aiden is — in the bone, before I look. I don’t look. I face the net and do my job and she does hers and that’s how this works and it works because we both understand it.
My phone buzzes in my bag during the break.
I almost don’t look.
Almost.
The Enforcers.
Not a call — a message. Short. Measured.
Jax — when you have a moment. We’d like to talk. No rush.
No rush means there is absolutely a rush.
I put the phone back in my bag.
Zip it.
Go back to the ice.
The message comes with me.
Every drill. Every shot. Every clean glove save and blocker deflection and rebound kicked exactly where I want it. It stays there, behind everything, like a puck I lost sight of for half a second and can’t stop tracking after the whistle.
The Enforcers.
No rush.
There is always a rush when someone says that.
I don’t tell anyone.
Not Aiden warming up beside me. Not Liam, who would say exactly the right five words and skate away. Not Brody, who would offer to solve a career decision with violence and a group text.
I don’t say it out loud because out loud makes it real. Out loud turns a message into a choice.
And I’m not there yet.
So I do the thing I know how to do.
I stop everything they throw at me.
She interviews Liam after.
I’m running cooldown when I see it — her recorder out, notebook open, asking him something that makes him actually turn toward her and answer instead of giving the profile. Whatever she asked landed. Liam doesn’t turn toward people unless they’ve earned something.
She’s earned things here.
I think about that while I run my skates.
My phone buzzes.
Nova:
Your captain is terrifying.
Me:
He has his moments.
Nova:
That’s the understatement of the Conference Final. He looked at me like he was reading my soul and filing it.
Me:
He does that. Don’t take it personally.
Nova:
Does he do it to you?
Me:
First season. Figured out real quick it was easier to just let him.
Nova:
Smart man.
Me:
Occasionally.
I put the phone in my pocket and go back to my cooldown and I’m aware — in the specific way I’m always aware of things I don’t examine directly — that this is the easiest conversation I’ve had all day. Maybe all week.
Aurora comes over.
She brings food — something Katarina probably approved, something that smells like actual cooking — and she holds Brick, who allows it like he’s straight royalty. She doesn’t ask about the photo. Doesn’t mention the Enforcers — she doesn’t know about the Enforcers. Nobody knows about the Enforcers.
She talks about the baby. About Aiden’s pre-playoff rituals that she refuses to describe specifically but that apparently involve a specific playlist and a very particular breakfast. About Canyon Bay and the businesses with Cyclones banners in the windows and the kids in jerseys she sees on her morning walks.
“Remember Year 1,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“The crowd noise in that first home game.”
“Four thousand people.”
“Brody cried.”
“Brody cries at everything.”
“He told me it was allergies.”
“He doesn’t have allergies.”
She laughs. I eat whatever she brought and it’s good and the house feels less like a house I’m rattling around in alone when Aurora is in it — it always has, since before she lived here, since we were kids and she’d show up somewhere I was and just make the room better without trying.
She leaves at eight.
Kisses my cheek. Tells me to sleep. Takes the empty containers.
The door closes.
Brick finds me on the couch.
Jumps up. Sits next to my arm the way he does when he’s got something to say and he’s waiting for me to be ready to hear it.
I pick up my phone.
The Enforcers message.
I look at it for a long time.
More money. Established roster. Perennial contender. An organization that’s been to the Final four times in six years offering me a spot in something already built.
Everything the Cyclones aren’t yet.
Brick stares at the phone.
“What,” I say.
He looks at me.
“I know what you’re going to say.”
He keeps looking.
“Don’t.”
He blinks once. Slow. Then looks back at the phone like the point needs emphasizing.
“What am I gonna do,” I say. Out loud. To the room. Just to put it somewhere outside my chest. “What the hell am I gonna do with this.”
Brick doesn’t answer.
The room doesn’t either.
I put the phone face down.
Sit there with the expert panel still taped inside my locker room door three miles away. Aiden’s voice from practice. Liam’s five sentences. Brody’s stick hitting the boards first.
Thirty-one on my back for four seasons. I helped build this building.
I don’t know what it looks like anywhere else.
I’m not sure I want to find out.