14. Jett
JETT
Here's the thing nobody tells you about being the champs.
You'd think the ring buys you a quiet night.
You'd think nineteen thousand people who watched you hoist the trophy in March would let you off easy in November.
They do not. Every barn we walked into that season was sold out and snarling, because there's no crowd on earth more motivated than a crowd that gets to watch somebody try to take the champs down a peg, and no team more motivated than the one with the chance to do it.
We had a target on our backs the size of the jumbotron, and most nights I loved it.
Most nights the target was the best part.
Give me a building full of people who want me to lose and I'll show them, personally, one shift at a time, exactly how wrong they are.
Most nights.
This was not most nights. The reason was sitting forty feet above the glass in the auxiliary press box in a navy blazer with a laptop she wasn't typing on.
I'd clocked her during warmups, which was the first mistake, because once I clocked her I couldn't unclock her, and a hockey player who knows exactly where a specific woman is sitting is a hockey player who is, to a measurable degree, no longer entirely playing hockey.
She had a credential now. Brynn's doing, or Victoria's, the whole apparatus deciding the feature needed me in my "natural environment," a phrase somebody used in an email I'd been cc'd on and read four times.
So now she came to the games. Now she sat up there with the beat writers, the real ones, the ones who'd been covering me for years, and she watched me work and took notes on it, and somewhere in those notes was going to be a sentence about the way I played, written by the one person alive who'd known me before I was any good at anything.
The puck dropped. I lost the first faceoff clean, which I never do.
First period, I was a half-step behind the whole sheet.
Not bad. Just off. The kind of off nobody in the building would've caught except the four people whose job it was to catch it.
I went for a stretch pass in the neutral zone in the back half of the period that I'd made ten thousand times, the read so automatic I could've done it asleep, and it wasn't there.
The lane closed a half-second before my brain said it was open.
The Sabers picked it off and went the other way three-on-two and put it top corner before our D could get set.
One to nothing. Bad guys.
I skated to the bench. I did not look at the press box. Not looking at the press box took actual physical effort, which told me everything I needed to know about the size of my problem.
Coach didn't say anything. Coach saying nothing was worse than Coach saying anything.
He just looked at me the way he looked at a thing malfunctioning in a way he hadn't diagnosed yet, and then he looked back at the ice, and I sat on the bench with my gloves on my knees and tried to find the version of myself that knew how to do this.
"Hey." Stone, next to me. Captain voice, which he used about twice a season, low enough it didn't carry past the two of us. "Where are you."
"Here."
"You're not, though." He wasn't looking at me.
He was looking at the ice, tracking the play, present to the game in a way I'd spent eight years admiring and could not, tonight, manage to copy.
"You missed the Carlson read. You don't miss the Carlson read.
You've been making it since you were twenty-two.
" A pause. The play swung the other way. "She up there?"
I didn't answer that. Stone knew. Stone had known since the night I told him in this same building, in the players' lounge, the whole thing, the conference room, Ashley Hartley, all of it.
Stone was the only one who knew, and Stone did not hand out advice the way he didn't hand out laughs. Almost never. Only when it counted.
"Play the next shift," he said. "Not the last one. Not the box. The next shift. That's the whole game, the next shift, it's always been the next shift." He stood as the line changed. "You taught me that, you absolute menace. Eight years ago. Use your own material."
He went over the boards.
I'd love to tell you I locked in. I'd love to tell you I heard the captain's wisdom and found the eye of the storm and put the team on my back.
That's the version they write up later. The real version is I had an okay second period and a better third, and we clawed it back to 3-2 on a power play I wasn't even on the ice for, and we held on, and we won the way you win a game you have no business winning.
Ugly and lucky and on the backs of the guys who had their heads where their heads were supposed to be.
We won. I wasn't the reason. And that, it turned out, was the part that scared me.
Because here's the thing about eight years.
For eight years the ice was the one place nobody could touch me.
Not the people who raised me. Not the league that didn't want me.
Not the version of myself that grew up in a house where joy was a thing you apologized for.
I could walk into any barn in any city on the worst day of my life, and the second the puck dropped the rest of it went away.
All of it. Every time. No exceptions. Because the ice was the one room I'd ever been in where I got to be completely myself and nobody could take it from me.
A woman in a press box had just taken it from me. Not on purpose. She'd just sat there. She'd just been a thing I knew the location of. And it had reached me on the one sheet of ice in the world that nothing had ever reached me on before.
In the room after, I sat at my stall a long time.
Guys filtered out, loud, the way you're loud after a win you stole, and I let the noise happen around me the way I always did.
Except tonight the noise didn't fill me up the way it had for eight years.
Tonight there was a quiet under it that hadn't been there before.
A quiet with a Hartley-shaped center. I sat in it and didn't entirely hate it, which scared me worse than the bad period had.
My phone was in my bag. I looked at it.
There was a text. Not from a number I had saved, because I hadn't let myself save it, because saving it would've made it a thing.
You were a half-step behind all night. The Carlson read in the first. You don't miss that.
I stared at it. She'd clocked the exact thing Stone had clocked.
Of course she had. She'd been watching me my whole life, even the years she wasn't in the building, even the years neither of us would've admitted it.
She watched the way I played the way I watched the way she went quiet.
Completely. Which was to say it was already too late for both of us.
Three dots. Then:
I typed before she could. Don't put it in your notes.
The dots stopped. Started again.
It's not going in the notes. It's going in the box.
I didn't know yet what the box was. But I knew, sitting at my stall in a building I'd just won a game in without being any good, that she had a place she put the things she wasn't going to let anybody have, and that she'd just told me I was in it.
I put the phone away.
Stone walked past, towel around his neck, and he didn't say anything, because Stone didn't, but he reached out and tapped the back of my head with the flat of his hand, once, the way you do to a guy who's going to be fine.
I sat a minute longer in the quiet under the noise.
Then I got up and got dressed and went home to a house that had started, sometime in the last two weeks, to feel wrong without her coffee cup on the island.
Next shift, I told myself.
It had always been the next shift. I just hadn't known, until a woman in a navy blazer sat down forty feet above the glass and took my one safe room away from me, how badly I'd been counting on there always being a next one.
Two nights after the Sabers game, she drove up to the house at ten thirty-seven.
I knew the time because I'd been watching the clock since she'd hung up at nine fifty-one, sitting at the kitchen island in the same spot I'd been in twenty-four hours before when she'd been across from me.
I'd spent forty-six minutes trying very hard not to do the math on how long the drive from Brynn's penthouse to my place took on a Friday night, and the number arrived anyway, somewhere in the back of my head, and at ten thirty-four I stood up and walked to the front door and turned on the porch light and the path lights and the lights in the driveway and the entryway and one floor lamp in the living room.
Then I walked back to the island and sat down.
She'd asked if she could come over. She hadn't said why. Her voice had been steady on the phone in a way that meant it was not steady, and I hadn't asked any questions, because I knew the difference between come over and come over with a question I want to ask in person. This was the second one.
The crunch of tires on gravel came up the driveway.
I did not get up.
I'd decided, in those forty-six minutes, that I was going to let her come to me.
Let her get out of the car on her own. Let her walk up to my door on her own.
Let her ring my bell or open it herself, whichever she chose.
I was going to be in this house in a way that did not require her to perform being okay when she walked through the door.
The engine cut off.
I waited.