Chapter 7
seven
ROOK
The bruise on Erik Schmidt's shin looks like someone hit him with a sledgehammer—purple bleeding into green, edges yellowing like old newspaper—and the sight of it makes something tight and guilty twist in my gut, because I did this. Well, not directly, but it's still my fault.
"Jesus, Schmidtty," I say, forcing my voice into its usual boom. "This is like modern art. We could frame this, sell it to—"
He gives me that patented Schmidt look, the one that suggests he's running a cost-benefit analysis on homicide. "It's from Tuesday's drill. When you decided we needed to practice 'chaos scenarios' instead of, and I quote, 'all the usual boring shit,' remember?"
Right.
Tuesday.
Three days ago.
The day after I'd publicly humiliated Morgan and her entire team by spraying her with ice like some kind of territorial animal pissing to mark its turf. The memory of the look in her eyes hits hard, those pale gray eyes that used to look at me like I mattered going completely blank.
Not angry. Not disappointed. Just… empty.
Stop. Make noise. Fill the space.
"Chaos scenarios are essential for team-building," I announce to the room at large, my voice bouncing off the walls. "You never know when—"
"When you'll need to dodge flying pucks while hopping on one foot?" Leo Cooper's voice cuts me off, although he doesn't even look up from where he's methodically re-taping his stick, each wrap as precise as a surgeon's suture. "Revolutionary tactics, Rook."
"Cooper, you're killing me here." I press my hand against my chest dramatically, stumbling backward until I collide with Ben Kellerman's locker. The kid jumps like I've hit him with a defibrillator, his phone clattering to the floor. "Kellerman! Were you watching porn?"
"What? No! I was—" His face goes tomato-red. "I was texting my mom!"
"Even worse," I bellow, scooping up his phone and holding it high above my head. He stretches for it, all six-foot-four of gangly limbs and anxiety. "What kind of sick shit are you sending to dear old… oh… is that a picture of a casserole, or some weird fetish?"
"See?" he protests.
I glance at the screen again, and yeah, his mom definitely sent him a photo of what appears to be a casserole. "Is this tuna? Christ, Kellerman, you poor guy."
I toss the phone back to him, already moving, already searching for the next distraction, because I know that just on the other side of this wall, Morgan and her team are getting ready for their time on the ice, after our time—longer, more conveniently timed, and more frequently available—came to an end.
Since the 'Ice War' (as Cooper termed it), the women's team has been a collection of ghosts haunting the arena. Twenty sets of eyes that look through us at every possible opportunity unless forced to engage, while Morgan herself hasn't acknowledged my existence once.
Not a glare. Not a sneer.
Nothing.
And they're winning. Not on the ice, because the season hasn't started yet, but in this psychological warfare, they're absolutely destroying us.
You can see it in the way my teammates' jokes have gotten forced, their laughter pitched too high.
They're trying to bond with the women's team and getting nothing back.
Yesterday, Kellerman tried to hold the door for Mills—a sweet gesture from a kid whose mom clearly raised him right—and she walked past him like he was furniture. He stood there, still holding the door open to nothing, looking like a golden retriever whose owner just pretended he didn't exist.
"Hey, Rook!" Javier Martinez's voice cuts through. "You good, Captain?"
No. I'm dreading the first game because it might reveal I'm an impostor, while being simultaneously scared shitless and unable to stop thinking about the woman who's probably less than thirty feet and a wall away, and I'm an inch away from failing… well… every subject…
"Never better, Javi!" I grab a roll of tape and launch it at his head. He ducks, laughing. "Your reflexes are getting better. Must be all that—"
The sound starts as a whisper, then turns into a groaning rumble from somewhere deep in the building's bowels. Everyone freezes. Even my manic energy stutters to a halt as we all turn toward the shower area, where the sound is getting louder, angrier, building to something distinctly apocalyptic.
CRACK.
The noise is catastrophic, and, for one perfect second, we all stand frozen.
Then the water comes.
It doesn't trickle or leak or politely request entry. It explodes from under the utility room door in a rust-brown torrent. The stench hits first, and fuck, you know it's bad if hockey players used to sweat-filled locker rooms are gagging and running for the other side of the room.
"HOLY FUCK!"
The locker room erupts. Schmidt vaults onto a bench with his bruised leg, landing hard and releasing what sounds like extremely creative German profanity. Kellerman's doing some kind of interpretive dance to avoid the rising water. Martinez is pressing himself against his locker.
I'm grabbing gear at random—jerseys, pads, and somebody's lucky jockstrap that absolutely should have been washed six months ago—throwing them onto higher ground while the water keeps coming. It's ankle-deep now, warm in a way that makes my skin crawl, with chunks of… something… floating past.
"My laptop!" someone screams.
"My jersey!"
"Why is it chunky?"
The door slams open and Coach Pearson storms in. He's not usually an angry guy, but right now his face is cycling through colors I didn't know human skin could achieve—white, to red, to purple, to something that probably has a German name and requires immediate medical attention.
"WHAT THE ABSOLUTE—"
"Coach Pearson."
Art Galloway's voice cuts through the chaos. He stands in the doorway, immaculate in his tailored suit, somehow projecting calm while standing at the edge of our biblical plague.
Pearson's mouth snaps shut so fast I hear his teeth click, and the power dynamic shifts instantly. And when Galloway raises a hand, the room goes silent except for the steady gurgle of our new indoor swamp.
"Gentlemen," he says, his voice carrying that particular quality that makes you lean in even when every instinct screams to run. "It appears we have a situation."
A situation. We're standing ankle-deep in whatever came out of the building's colon, and he calls it a situation. We're a week away from the opener and we suddenly don't know whether we have a locker room or any gear that's not soggy.
He steps forward. "This is unfortunate timing, indeed. But adversity, gentlemen, is opportunity."
I see it coming before he says it. The slight upturn of his mouth, the way his eyes are already calculating something that has nothing to do with plumbing.
My stomach drops somewhere below the sewage line, while at the same time I wonder if Galloway has seen even a bit of adversity in his entire life.
"We'll need to get this fixed. It could take weeks." He pauses, letting that sink in. "However, we are fortunate to have alternative facilities available."
No. No, no, no—
"Effective immediately, you'll be temporarily sharing the women's hockey locker room."
The reaction is instantaneous and deafening. Whoops and hollers bounce off the walls. Kellerman actually chest-bumps Martinez, immediately slips in the sewage water, goes down hard enough to create a splash that hits three people, and then comes up grinning.
They have no idea we're about to invade the lion's den.
Galloway's eyes find mine across the chaos, his expectation clear. "Captain Fitzgerald," he says. "I trust you'll help coordinate this transition?"
Every instinct I have screams at me to deflect. Martinez would smile and charm. Cooper would approach it with the emotional range of a spreadsheet. Hell, Kellerman would probably apologize our way into peaceful coexistence, one stammered "sorry" at a time.
But twenty-something pairs of eyes are on me now, expecting their captain to lead the charge into this glorious new opportunity. Galloway's watching with that paternal expectation. Pearson's watching with the barely concealed frustration of a coach who just got benched in his own locker room.
And somewhere nearby, Morgan doesn't yet know that her sanctuary is about to be violated by the exact person she's worked so hard to delete from existence. But as the silence stretches, the water continues to gurgle, brown and chunky, and I realize there's no real choice.
We need somewhere decent to get ready for practice, right?
My face splits into a grin. "Co-ed locker room? Well, boys, looks like Christmas came early!"
The cheer that goes up could probably shatter windows. I'm already moving, already performing. A glance at Galloway reveals he's smiling the moment before he turns and leaves, his work done. For his part, Coach Pearson just shakes his head and retreats to the office. And the guys?
Well, they're my army to command.
"Schmidtty, you're in charge of making sure nobody's junk touches anybody else's junk. Equipment, I mean. Get your mind out of the gutter." The laugh is automatic. "Cooper, you're on logistics because you're the only one here who knows what that word means."
"I know what logistics means," Kellerman protests, his voice cracking slightly as he realizes he should have just kept quiet.
"You thought it was a type of yogurt until last week, buddy," I say, patting him on the back. "Remember? You asked if it came in strawberry?"
"That was lojistics! With a J!"
More laughter. More noise. All gas. No brakes.
"Now, ground rules for the invasion—I mean, the temporary relocation.
" I'm pacing now, splashing through the water with enough force to create small tsunamis.
"We're going to be gentlemen. We're going to show the ladies that we can share space like mature adults who definitely didn't just slip in sewage. "
"But what if they're changing when we—" someone starts.
"Then you close your eyes and think of your mother!" I bellow. "Or Cooper's mother. Actually, no, Cooper's mom is kind of hot—"
"Can confirm," someone shouts, and Cooper just shakes his head with the resignation of someone who's heard this joke exactly 247 times.
"Point is," I continue, needing to keep talking, "you keep your eyes to yourself, or at least don't get caught staring…"
Another cheer.
"Now grab your gear, boys! We're going on an adventure! Probably already having caught dysentery, but still!"
The movement is instantaneous, a few dozen hockey players sloshing through sewage water, grabbing equipment, and packing bags. The excitement level is palpable, and we all move with the confidence of people who've never lost anything that mattered, and never been told 'no' in our lives.
I'm at the front of the pack as we start hauling our gear across the complex, the clang of sticks against concrete echoing through the corridors. Behind me, my teammates are loud and boisterous, their voices filling every inch of available space.
They think I'm their conquering hero, leading them to paradise.
The women's locker room door looms ahead, and I can already feel the way the air will change when we cross that threshold.
The way twenty pairs of eyes will look through us right up until they realize what's happening.
The way Morgan might actually stab me with the nearest sharp implement when I tell her.
But here's the thing about being the family's emotional janitor, you never actually learn when to stop cleaning. Even when the mess is yours, even when the mop is on fire and the bucket's full of gasoline, you just keep grinning and performing as the disaster unfolds around you.
Because this is what I do.
I make noise to drown out the silence.
Even when the silence is about to swallow me whole.
Even when I deserve to drown in it.