Chapter 25 #2
The arena was loud in that particular way it got when something was about to happen. Seventeen thousand people held their breath, waiting to see what we'd do with the chance Ro had given us.
I took the faceoff and won it clean, the puck sliding back to our defenseman at the point. The play started moving, passing lanes opening and closing, Calgary's penalty kill collapsing toward the net.
I found the soft spot in their coverage and drifted into it.
The puck moved around the perimeter. Point to the half-wall. Half-wall to the circle. Calgary's penalty killers shifted with it, reading the play, trying to anticipate where we'd attack.
They were watching the puck. I was watching the space.
Their defenseman cheated toward Bouchard, expecting the one-timer. It left a lane to the net, just a sliver, there and gone in half a second. I was already moving before my brain caught up, cutting toward the crease, my stick on the ice.
The pass came low and hard. I got my blade on it and redirected it toward the net, but their goalie was there, sliding across, and the puck caught his pad and bounced into the chaos in front of the crease.
Bodies crashed together. Sticks hacked at the loose puck. Someone's elbow caught my ribs and someone's skate tangled with mine, but I dug for the rebound anyway, reaching, stretching, my balance gone but my stick still working.
The puck slid free. I lunged for it.
And then I was falling.
I don't know who tripped me. Could have been anyone in that tangle of bodies, friend or enemy, accident or intention. It didn't matter. My feet went out from under me and I went down hard, my hand shooting out to break the fall, and something happened that my brain couldn't make sense of at first.
There was pressure. Then heat. Then a strange wet warmth spread through my glove.
I pushed myself up to my knees and looked at my hand.
The glove was filling with blood. It seeped through the leather, and when I tried to flex my fingers, something screamed up my arm and into my shoulder, pain so sharp it locked the breath in my chest.
The noise in the arena changed. I couldn't have said how, only that it was different now, the cheering replaced by something else, something that sounded like a held breath multiplied by seventeen thousand. The whistle was blowing, and voices were shouting words I couldn't quite catch.
I looked up.
Ro was in the penalty box. He was on his feet, his palms pressed flat against the glass, his mouth moving. I couldn't hear what he was saying. Everything had gone thick and slow, my heartbeat loud in my ears, drowning out the rest of it.
The trainers were coming, running across the ice, their feet slipping, towels in their hands. Someone was kneeling beside me, asking questions I couldn't focus on long enough to answer.
I looked back at Ro.
He was trapped behind that glass, thirty feet away and completely helpless. He'd fought for me and now he couldn't get to me, couldn't do anything but watch as the blood spread across the white ice in a pattern that kept growing.
Then Bouchard was there.
He dropped to his knees beside me, still in full gear, his face tight in a way I'd never seen before. He put his hand on my shoulder and said something, words that took too long to reach me, and when they finally arrived, they were simple.
"Stay with me, Piper. Eyes on me."
I tried to focus on his face. The lines around his eyes. The gray at his temples. He was kneeling on the ice holding me together while the trainers worked on my hand.
"JL." My voice sounded strange, like it was coming from somewhere else.
"I'm here." His grip on my shoulder tightened. "You're gonna be fine. Just keep looking at me."
Behind him, through the glass, Ro was still standing with his palms pressed flat against the barrier. His mouth had stopped moving. He was just watching now, his face stripped of everything except something raw and open that he wasn't bothering to hide.
I thought about Joel. About the beach house and the fire burning down to embers and his hand in mine while the tide came in. About the way he'd said I want more than this.
I wouldn’t get to tell him this had happened. He'd find out from a notification on his phone, some sports alert with my name in it, and he wouldn't be able to call because we didn't do that, we texted, we stayed careful, we kept ourselves small enough to hide.
"Red." Bouchard's voice cut through. "Stay with me."
I tried. I really tried.
The trainers were wrapping something around my hand.
The pressure was enormous, a tightness that radiated up through my wrist and into my forearm, but the pain had started to drift, replaced by a cold that crept from my fingers toward my elbow.
Someone was calling for a stretcher. Someone else was clearing people back, making space.
Bouchard stayed where he was, his hand on my shoulder.
"You're okay," he said. "You hear me? You're okay."
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to nod, to say something, to be the guy who got up and kept skating. That was what I did. That was who I was.
But the cold kept spreading, and the edges of my vision were going soft, and Bouchard's face above me was starting to blur at the edges no matter how hard I tried to hold on to it.
Then I was looking at the ceiling of the arena, the lights too bright, the noise fading into something that sounded almost like silence.
Then there was nothing left to hold on to.