Chapter 14
fourteen
ROOK
The corridor walls are crushing me, cold concrete biting through my shirt as I lean back, my lungs forgetting their only job. Morgan has gone, but her words hang in the dead air like a diagnosis—terminal cowardice, no known cure—written in neon right on my forehead.
You did it then, and you're still doing it now.
She called me a court jester for a creep.
And she's not wrong.
The words burrow deeper with each replay, past muscle and bone, straight into that soft, rotten place I've spent years pretending doesn't exist. Because it wasn't just an insult, it was a complete psychological autopsy performed while I was still breathing.
The guy who keeps things light. The captain who makes everyone laugh and doesn't enforce standards because it's too hard.
The seven-year-old who learned that falling over and crying, even if faking it, could stop Mom's hand midway to Dad's face, and that a perfectly timed joke could defuse the bomb before the neighbors called the cops again.
My knees buckle. I slide down the wall until my ass hits the cold linoleum, and suddenly I'm twelve again, locked in my bedroom closet with my hands pressed over my ears, trying to muffle the sound of my mother's favorite vase exploding against the kitchen wall.
That was the night Dad moved out for three weeks, the same night I thought that if I could make them both laugh at breakfast, pretend everything was normal, maybe he'd come back. And, eventually, he did, and the cycle started all over again.
And now my chest is tighter than it's been since that night, crouched in my closet while downstairs exploded in the kind of screaming that made the dog hide under the porch. My hands are shaking, like I'm going through withdrawal from something I didn't know I was addicted to.
The something being denial, apparently.
You're having a panic attack in a hallway. How's that for leadership?
I push off the floor, using the wall like a crutch, and suddenly I feel the need to find someone—Schmidt, Cooper, literally anyone with a functioning brain stem and working vocal cords—who can tell me Morgan's wrong and that she's just being bitter about… what exactly?
About me freezing while Galloway eye-fucked her.
About my teammates treating her locker room like their personal comedy club?
About me demonstrating the emotional maturity of a goldfish?
The defensive anger lasts exactly three heartbeats before curdling into something worse. Because underneath it, her words have already metastasized, spreading through my system like truth tends to do when you've been avoiding it for two decades.
Three summers ago, the last time we were alone together.
My feet carry me back to the team study room on autopilot, muscle memory navigating while my brain tries to compute the damage assessment. Schmidt looks up from his color-coded notes when I stumble in, no doubt looking like I've returned from four years of war.
Schmidt is the kind of guy who meal-preps on Sundays, has a meditation app with a forty-seven-day streak, and actually reads the terms and conditions. And his expression shifts from concentration to something I've never seen directed at me before: disappointment.
Not the angry kind.
The tired kind.
The kind that says he's been waiting for this and wishes he'd been wrong.
"You look like death," he says, voice flat as roadkill.
I need him to tell me Morgan's crazy.
I need validation wrapped in bro-code loyalty.
"Had a spirited chat with Captain Riley," I announce, my voice ricocheting off the walls like I'm trying to fill Madison Square Garden. "Everything's so fucking serious with her. Nobody's allowed to crack a smile. It's like—fuck, we're playing a game, not performing open-heart surgery."
Schmidt's pen stops its meticulous journey across his study notes. He's watching me with those eyes that never seem to blink at regular human intervals, and I can feel the gears turning in his head as he tries to figure out how much he wants to say.
"It's like yesterday," I barrel on, not comfortable with silence. "Yeah, we lost, but everyone's acting like someone died. We need to loosen up. Stop overthinking every little thing. Have some fun out there. Remember why we started playing in the first place, before it all got so fucking serious."
A few seconds of silence follows, then Schmidt sighs. "I don't think she's wrong…"
Five words that hit like a combination I never saw coming—jab, jab, cross, uppercut, goodnight.
"What?" My voice cracks like I'm thirteen.
"We need a captain, Rook." Schmidt starts packing his bag, meticulously sliding each color-coded notebook into its designated pocket like he's performing surgery. "Mike would've benched Kellerman for that shit he pulled in the second period."
"That's not true—" I start, but he's already standing.
"It is," he says, and for the first time since I've known him, Erik Schmidt sounds genuinely sad. "And we both know it."
"I—"
He pauses at the door, one hand on the frame, and cuts me short.
"You know what the worst part is? You're actually a great goalie.
Elite, even. But you're a shitty captain, because you're so busy being everyone's friend that you forgot we already have friends.
What we need is someone to make us better. "
Then he shoulders his bag and leaves.
I sit there, staring at the door like it might apologize for what just happened. And, as I close my eyes, Schmidt's statement spreads through my brain like spilled ink on carpet, staining everything it touches, unable to be washed away.
I don't think she's wrong…
Last night's game floods back in IMAX clarity. Being in the locker room twenty minutes after Kellerman's fuck-up cost us the game, Kellerman slumped in his stall, practically vibrating with anxiety, waiting for the axe to fall, and twenty pairs of eyes waiting for me to address it.
And what did Captain Fitzgerald do?
Made a joke. Avoided the tense moment. Ignored the teaching moment.
This isn't an isolated incident.
This is my entire leadership philosophy.
I rifle through my mental filing cabinet of recent practices, team meetings, and crucial moments where actual captaincy was required. Moments where fixing shit that's broken would require actual confrontation, some tense moments, or some moments of silence that make everyone uncomfortable.
And every single time, I chose the easy laugh over the hard conversation.
Every time, I decided to be the team mascot instead of their captain.
I contrast those memories with those of watching Morgan's team. Every player knowing exactly where to be, when to rotate, and how to support others. No confusion and no hero-ball. Just pure, distilled hockey born from a captain who demands excellence and accepts nothing less.
They follow her into battle because she's earned it through competence, not comedy. They trust her because she holds them accountable, not because she lets them off the hook with a wink and a smile. They're winning because of her leadership, not in spite of it.
My team has equipment that costs more than most people's cars. Custom everything, from skates that were molded to our feet using some NASA-grade process to sticks that are basically carbon fiber magic wands. Our rec room has leather chairs and a sound system that could make your ears bleed.
When it's not flooded, anyway.
Her team has jerseys with iron-on numbers that peel at the corners, equipment held together with prayer, duct tape, and spite, and a locker room that used to be a storage closet and still smells like it. And they're playing better hockey than we are, because she's a better captain than I am.
No—because she's an actual captain and I'm just a walking punchline wearing a letter I don't deserve.
The worst part is that I can't even pretend she's wrong.
She saw through my whole act in about thirty seconds, peeled back the layers of deflection and misdirection to find the terrified kid underneath who's so scared of conflict he'd rather watch everything burn than have one uncomfortable conversation.
But this isn't just about being a shitty captain or losing games or disappointing Coach Pearson or taking a steaming dump on Maine and Mike's legacy.
This is about the fundamental failure at my core, because I realize now that my failure with Morgan three years ago and my failure as a captain aren't separate issues.
They're the same fucking wound, festering for two decades.
I force myself to actually look at that night. Not the director's-cut I've been screening in my head for three years—the one where I'm the charming rogue keeping things casual and she's the girl who couldn't handle it—but the documentary version nobody wants to see.
Stars scattered across a black velvet sky. Sand still warm from the day's sun. Morgan's face, lit by the moon and the distant boardwalk lights, looking at me with an expression so open it should have come with a warning label to handle with extreme care.
"So what happens when camp ends?" she'd asked, voice soft. "With us?"
The silence that followed couldn't have lasted more than three seconds, but in my memory it stretches like taffy. It's three seconds of potential where I could have said something real, like that I was scared too and that I didn't know what would come next but that I wanted to find out.
Instead, I panicked like the house was on fire and I was the only one who could hear the smoke alarm.
The jokes poured out, each word a tiny knife, and I kept throwing them, watching her face close up shop in real-time, watching something precious and irreplaceable pack its bags and leave forever.
Because that's what I do. I'm an emotional hazmat crew, containing dangerous feelings before they can spread.
Each word a bullet.
Each joke a betrayal.
Her face changing from open to guarded to gone.
Like watching time-lapse footage of a flower dying.
She didn't overreact. She didn't misunderstand.
She saw exactly what I was: a coward in a clown suit.
Jesus Christ, I didn't just lose her. I taught her that trusting people—trusting me—was the worst mistake she could make.
The study room's silence doesn't feel empty anymore. It feels full of every serious conversation I've ever dodged, every teaching moment I've deflected with humor, and every opportunity for real connection I've murdered with a well-timed punchline.
My phone buzzes. It's probably one of the guys wondering where I am, why I'm not at whatever party someone's throwing to pretend we didn't just embarrass ourselves on home ice.
The party where I should be right now, center stage, three beers deep and five jokes into making everyone forget we're imploding.
But I can't bring myself to stand up and walk out there and perform the role of Rook the Jester, everything's-fine-we'll-get-'em-next-time Rook, the human embodiment of toxic positivity. Because Morgan just detonated twenty years of carefully constructed bullshit, and I'm sitting in the mess.
The worst part is that she was right about everything.
I am a jester dancing for a predator's amusement.
I do lead a team of entitled assholes who've never faced a consequence I didn't turn into a punchline.
I did destroy what we had because I was too scared to be real for five fucking minutes.
And I'm still doing it now, totally allergic to being genuine as a captain and a man.
So what the fuck do I do now?
The question hangs in the empty room like a challenge I'm not ready to accept.
Because how do you fix something that broke when you were seven years old, listening to plates shatter downstairs?
How do you learn to be serious when your entire survival strategy is built on making sure nothing ever gets serious or quiet?
I don't have answers.
But I do have silence, for the first time in years, heavy and suffocating and exactly what I deserve. Outside, campus life continues—laughter, music, the normal sounds of people who haven't just had their entire identity exposed—but suddenly I feel cut adrift from it.
As if I've been playing the wrong position my whole fucking life.