15. Buzz
BUZZ
NOW
The executive conference room sat at the end of the hallway, all glass walls and polished wood and expensive chairs designed by someone who had clearly never been asked to sit in one while being told they were a disappointment to the franchise.
Sarah Yu was already there, tablet in front of her, posture straight, expression unreadable.
Coach Holloway stood by the windows with a travel mug in one hand, staring out at the practice rink below like the ice had personally offended him.
Rawlings sat halfway down the table, unusually quiet, his coffee untouched in front of him. That was new. Keith Rawlings treated coffee like a constitutional right.
Ezra sat at the head of the table, jacket off, sleeves rolled, talking quietly to Alois Müller.
Alois barely fit in a conference room chair like a normal human being. He sat there in black athletic gear, one ankle hooked over the opposite knee, massive shoulders relaxed, face carved into the same expression he wore before killing penalties and ruining opposing forwards’ evenings.
He glanced at me when I came in.
“Burns,” he said.
“Müller.”
His eyes moved over me once. “You look nervous.”
“You look like shit for someone that got engaged a minute ago.”
That earned a grunted laugh from Alois while Coach snorted into his coffee.
Then I saw her.
Lucy stood near the screen at the front of the room, sorting through a stack of folders with the kind of precision that made every other person in the building look like they were managing their lives with a shovel and a prayer.
Cream sweater. Dark slacks. Emerald glasses. Her auburn curls were pinned back today, though a few pieces had already escaped around her face like they had no respect for authority.
Unfortunately, I respected authority just fine.
Mostly.
When it was wearing glasses and pretending not to be exhausted.
God.
Months.
It had been months since New York.
Months since that hotel room.
Months since we’d crossed a line neither of us had talked about afterward.
We had survived the fallout by doing what apparently mature adults did. We avoided. We nodded in hallways. We sent emails that sounded like they had been written by two people who had never once made out in the back of a pickup behind the Northbend library.
And now there she was, standing fifteen feet away from me, looking every inch the polished front office professional.
Except I knew better. I knew the difference between Lucy focused and Lucy locked down. This was the latter. Her mouth was too still. Her shoulders were too straight. She kept squaring the edges of those folders even though they were already perfectly lined up.
She looked up when I walked in. Our eyes caught long enough for something to kick hard under my ribs.
Then her gaze snapped away. “Mr. Burns,” she said. Cool. Professional. Clean enough to cut with.
I pulled out a chair. “Ms. Thomas.”
Alois looked at me. I ignored him.
Sarah tapped her tablet. “Good. Everyone is here.”
I sat down across from Lucy because sitting beside her felt insane and sitting too far away felt worse. There was no winning with that woman in the room. There never had been.
A packet plopped in front of me.
At the top, in clean black lettering, it read:
Northbend Community Outreach Skate:
Final Operations Brief
Prepared by Lucy Thomas,
Director of Player Operations
No Acting before her title. I glared at it. Lucy was staying. Not helping temporarily. Not filling a gap. The thought moved through me slow and dangerous, the first crack in lake ice.
Sarah stood. “This is not a disciplinary meeting.”
“Feels defensive to open with that,” I said.
“It was for your benefit, Burns,” she responded.
Coach laughed once. Lucy did not. She clicked the remote in her hand, and the screen shifted to a clean title slide.
Northbend Community Outreach Skate
“Tomorrow morning,” Sarah continued, “we’re hosting a community outreach event on the secondary sheet. This was originally routed through PR, but with current departmental changes, operations is stepping in to stabilize final execution.”
Lucy stepped slightly forward. “The event is structured as a hockey clinic and fan meet-and-greet. Small group format. No formal press conference. No staged spectacle. The goal is community connection, not media extraction.”
Her voice was steady. I leaned back in my chair and watched her hands. The remote was tucked in her right palm. Her left thumb moved once over the edge of her folder.
Ezra nodded. “This is part of the larger effort to remind Northbend that these players are not just products on the ice. They’re members of the community.”
Coach glanced at me. “Average people too.”
I lifted both hands. “I have never claimed to be average.”
“Trust me,” Sarah said. “No one has accused you of that.”
A tiny ripple of amusement moved through the room. Enough to loosen the walls.
Lucy clicked to the next slide. The event schedule appeared.
Arrival.
Welcome skate.
Small-group drills.
Autographs.
Photo station.
Hot chocolate reception.
Alois made a low sound in his throat.
I looked over. “You objecting to hot chocolate?”
“I object to having to be approachable before nine in the morning.”
“You’re charming,” Ezra deadpanned.
Alois’s face did not change. “That is classified information.”
That time even Lucy’s mouth moved. Barely.
It was gone almost immediately, but I saw it. I had once spent an entire biology test watching the corner of her mouth because I was sixteen and stupid and halfway in love before I had the vocabulary for it.
Sarah continued like we were not all sitting around pretending Müller hadn’t just admitted he liked people. “Alois and Buzz are the player representatives currently attached to the event.”
“You say currently like there’s a trapdoor under my chair.” I looked at the packet. Then at Sarah. Then at Lucy.
“There can be,” Sarah said. “Budget permitting.”
Coach took another drink of coffee. “Burns, this takes your free morning tomorrow.”
“I heard.”
He waited. So did everyone else. I knew why.
Free mornings during the season were rare. Sacred, practically. Recovery. Sleep. Physical therapy. Errands. Sitting in your house staring at nothing because your body hurt and your brain needed quiet.
The old me would have complained on principle. Not because I actually cared, but because being difficult gave people something easy to expect from me.
I looked at Lucy. She was not looking at me. She was looking at the schedule on the screen like she thought staring hard enough might make the entire thing finally cooperate.
“I’m in,” I blurted out.
Coach blinked. Sarah’s pen stopped moving. Alois slowly turned his head toward me.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Coach chuckled. “I was waiting for the tantrum.”
“I can complain if it would help your morning feel normal.”
“No, I’m good.”
Alois studied me for one long second. “You are ill.”
“I’m community-minded.”
“You are annoying.”
“Both things can be true.”
Lucy clicked to the next slide, but the movement was sharper than before.
“Bea originally developed the concept and has already built most of the outreach framework,” she said.
“She’ll be handling Alois’s schedule and guest interaction points tomorrow.
I’ll be coordinating overall operations and working directly with Buzz. ”
Working directly with Buzz. The sentence landed in the room politely. It knocked into my chest like a puck to the sternum.
Lucy kept going before anyone could react. “Because the event is tomorrow, we’re condensing what should have been a longer player preparation process into one day. Buzz, I’ll need you available this afternoon for a separate briefing and walkthrough.”
“Okay.”
She looked at me. Just long enough for suspicion to flicker across her face. I almost smiled. Lucy Thomas did not trust compliance when it came from me. Fair. Historically, I had not made that easy.
Sarah leaned back slightly. “That was very painless.”
“Should I make it weird?” I asked. “I can circle back.”
“Please don’t,” Lucy sighed.
And there she was. Not all the way. Not even close. But that dry little edge in her voice slipped out before she could stop it.
My mind tightened around it. The real Lucy lived in those edges.
Rawlings cleared his throat. “I thought Charlotte had completed the player-facing prep for this.”
Lucy’s hand went still on the remote.
Sarah turned her head toward Rawlings. “Charlotte withheld several communications and did not upload them to the shared event folder.”
Rawlings’s mouth flattened.
Ezra’s gaze cooled, not angry exactly, but close enough that I was glad I was not sitting in Rawlings’s chair.
Lucy spoke before the silence could sharpen too far. “We have enough to execute the event. Bea has the original planning documents, and I’ve reconstructed the run-of-show from the pieces available.”
She sounded perfect. And Lucy only sounded that perfect when there was blood under the floorboards.
Coach frowned. “So we’re missing information?”
“We are missing some historical context,” Lucy said. “Not operational capability.”
Damn. Even I wanted to sit up straighter.
Sarah’s mouth twitched like she approved and didn’t want anyone getting too comfortable about it.
Rawlings looked down at his coffee.
I looked at Lucy’s hand. Her knuckles had gone pale around the remote.
I hated that she was standing there in front of a room full of powerful people, absorbing the mess someone else had left behind and making it sound like a scheduling adjustment.
I hated more that my first instinct was still to make a joke. Not because it was funny. Because I wanted the room off her throat.
“So,” I said, looking down at the packet, “just to confirm, tomorrow I need to show up on time, act like a functional adult, not scare the fans, not make Bea regret believing in me, and let Lucy tell me what to do.”
Coach gave me a look. “Can you handle that?”
“Individually? Yes. All together? Historic challenge.”
Alois muttered, “The children will be fine. It is the adults I worry about.”
The room cracked.