Chapter 14
The Delta Center smelled like money.
Not literally, but that's what hit me when I walked through the players' entrance for the first time: the polish on the floors, the fresh paint on the walls, the filtered air that didn't carry a single trace of mildew or old sweat.
Everything here was new and maintained and replaced the moment it showed wear.
The hallway stretched ahead of me under lights that didn't flicker, past framed photos of players whose jerseys cost more than my truck payment.
I got lost twice trying to find the locker room.
The locker room was twice the size of the one in Rio Rancho.
My stall was at the end of the row, with PIPER on a brass nameplate that looked like it had been engraved yesterday.
The jersey hanging in front of me was heavier than my Ristras sweater, stiffer, with the Hive logo stitched into the fabric instead of printed.
I ran my thumb over the threading and thought about how many years I'd spent imagining exactly this moment.
Through the walls, I could hear the crack of pucks on sticks and the bark of a coach's whistle. Practice had started without me.
I suited up faster than I ever had in my life, muscle memory taking over while my brain kept circling back to the phone call with Derek that morning.
Dad had woken up confused, he'd said. Didn't know where he was.
The nurses had gotten him calmed down eventually, but Derek's voice had that tight quality it got when he was trying not to worry me.
I'd told him I had to go. That I'd call after practice. That everything would be fine.
The tunnel to the ice stretched longer than I expected, and then I stepped out into the light and the cold and eighteen thousand empty seats rising up around me, and my lungs forgot how to work.
Coach Barrow spotted me before I made it to the bench. He was shorter than he looked on TV, compact and weathered, with the kind of eyes that had seen every excuse a rookie had ever made.
"Piper." He didn't smile. "Nice of you to join us."
"Sorry, Coach. I got turned around in the halls."
"You'll learn the building. Get out there; we're running a scrimmage. Maroon versus gold, you're maroon."
I climbed over the boards and felt every head on the ice turn toward me.
I could read the math happening behind their eyes: new guy, call-up from the AHL, five-six and a hundred sixty pounds soaking wet, here to take someone's minutes.
Someone's paycheck. Someone's spot on a roster that only had room for so many bodies.
The whistle blew.
The first hit came twelve seconds in. I'd taken a pass at center ice and was turning to look for options when a shoulder caught me square in the chest and drove me backward into the boards.
The hit was clean and perfectly timed, the kind of check I'd absorbed a thousand times in the minors, but the speed here was different.
The force was different. I went down hard enough that my teeth rattled.
I got up.
The second hit came from behind while I was digging for a puck in the corner. My helmet bounced off the glass. The check was barely legal, walking the line between hard and dirty.
I got up again.
The third hit put me on my ass in the slot. The pain that shot through my spine was so sharp I saw white. One moment I was open for a pass. The next I was staring at the ceiling lights with my lungs burning and my hip screaming.
I got up.
By the end of the first scrimmage period, I'd been hit more times than I could count. My ribs ached. My shoulder throbbed. The bruise forming on my hip sat right over the spot that had never healed properly, and every stride sent pain radiating into my lower back.
Dad would have told me to skate through it. Back when he still remembered he'd said it. Back when he still remembered I played hockey at all.
Nobody here was trying to hurt me. They were teaching me something, the same way my father had taught me to swim by throwing me into the deep end when I was six. You either figured it out or you didn't. You either belonged here or you went home.
Somewhere around the fifth hit, the checks stopped landing quite as cleanly. Guys were pulling up a half-second early, giving me just enough room to brace before contact. It wasn't mercy. It was an acknowledgment.
The scrimmage whistle blew for a line change, and a hand caught my shoulder.
"You're dropping your left side."
I turned around. The guy behind me was big, six-three and built like he'd been designed to hurt people. He had dark hair cropped close to his skull and a day's worth of stubble on a jaw that looked like it had been broken more than once.
"When you're in the corner," he said, "you drop your left shoulder before you turn. Makes it easy to time the hit."
I stared at him. "Okay."
"Fix it."
He skated past me without waiting for a response. The name on his jersey read VEGA.
"Holy shit." Someone was behind me. "Did Vega just talk to you?"
I turned around again. The guy skating toward me was grinning, his helmet pushed back and his stick tucked under one arm.
"I'm Murphy. Murph. You're Piper, right?" He didn't wait for me to answer. "Vega talked to you. I've been his linemate for years and I've heard him say maybe two hundred words total. Half of those were 'shut up, Murphy.'"
"He told me I was dropping my shoulder."
"That's a lot coming from him."
I glanced back at Vega, who was already sitting at the far end of the bench by himself, his elbows on his knees and his eyes fixed on something in the middle distance.
Practice resumed. I stayed on the ice for another forty minutes, running drills and learning systems and trying to keep up with players who'd been doing this at the highest level for years.
My hip ground with every crossover, bone scraping against bone.
Murphy talked the entire time, a constant stream of commentary that made it hard to spiral about a missed pass or a slow reaction.
By the time we hit the locker room, I was shaking with exhaustion. I sat at my stall and let my body catch up with what had just happened. Everything hurt.
But I'd survived.
Vega's stall was three down from mine. He was unlacing his skates in silence while Murphy, beside him, told an elaborate story about a restaurant in Denver.
Vega didn't respond and didn't look up. His hands kept moving, like Murphy's voice was just ambient noise.
Someone's phone buzzed across the room. Briggs, one of the defensemen who'd put me on my ass during the scrimmage, checked the screen and groaned.
"My sister keeps sending me shit about that pop star. Milo something. She's obsessed with the guy."
"The one dating the figure skater?" Henderson was pulling off his pads a few stalls down. "My girlfriend won't shut up about them. Apparently it's like a whole thing online."
"Two dudes." Briggs made a face, the kind of exaggerated disgust that guys put on when they wanted everyone in the room to know exactly where they stood. "Making out on the red carpet like anyone wants to see that shit. Couple of fucking—"
He said the word.
I laughed.
The sound came out of me before I could stop it, automatic, pulled up from some deep place where I'd stored every survival instinct I'd developed since I was fourteen years old.
My body knew what to do even when the rest of me had checked out.
It knew how to perform, how to blend, how to be exactly the kind of guy who belonged in rooms like this one.
Henderson laughed too. So did the guy next to him. The sound rippled through the room like a wave, and I'd helped start it, and the taste in my mouth was like I'd swallowed something rotten.
Vega didn't laugh.
He was still at his stall, still unlacing his skates. His hands kept moving in that same steady rhythm.
But his jaw tightened. I saw it, just for a second, before his face went flat again.
Murphy had gone quiet too. He was looking at Briggs with an expression I couldn't quite read. Then he shrugged and started talking again, louder than before, something about the restaurant.
The moment passed. Everyone moved on.
I sat at my stall and didn't move.
The laugh was still sitting in my throat like something I'd swallowed wrong.
I could feel it there, lodged behind my sternum, and I thought about my father asking me twice in one morning where he was, and I thought about Derek's voice going tight on the phone, and I thought about how I'd moved a thousand miles to play hockey and I was still the same person I'd always been.
Still laughing at the same jokes. Still hiding in the same ways.
I changed out of my gear and headed for the showers without looking at anyone.
The first week passed in a blur of ice and bruises and phone calls that left me staring at the ceiling until my alarm went off.
I called Derek every night after practice. Dad was adjusting, he said. There were good days and bad days.
I listened and said the right things and hung up and lay in the dark thinking about all the dinners I wasn't making him, all the pills I wasn't counting out, all the mornings I wasn't there to tell him who I was when he forgot.
The apartment the team had set me up with was nice in a way that made me uncomfortable. New appliances, fresh paint, thick walls, and absolute silence. Some nights I woke up in a panic because I couldn't hear him, because I'd forgotten for a second that he wasn't in the next room anymore.
Vega didn't say much, but he kept showing up.
He left coffee at my stall before morning practice, black with two sugars, which was exactly how I'd ordered it once at the hotel restaurant the night I'd arrived.
He had a quiet word with the equipment manager when my skates weren't fitting right, and the next morning there was a new pair in my stall, already broken in to my specifications.
He never explained any of it.