23. Buzz
BUZZ
NOW
The visiting locker room at Summit Point Arena smelled like damp gear, fresh tape, and the kind of industrial cleaner that only existed in places where men routinely bled on floors.
And it did what locker rooms did before games. It got stupid.
First, it stayed inside the usual pregame lane. Guys complained about the hotel pillows. About the bus ride. About the arena being too new and trying too hard. About Denver air being thin enough to qualify as a personal attack.
“I swear my room had a pillow menu,” Zee said, pulling his jersey over his pads. His head got stuck halfway through the neck hole for a second, which did not help his argument. “A menu. For pillows.”
Marco leaned back in his stall, one elbow propped on the shelf behind him. “That is called luxury.”
“That is called too many options.”
“Options are beautiful.”
“That doesn’t make it useful.”
“It made me feel expensive.”
snorted and tugged my jersey into place. “That is actually Marco’s whole training philosophy.”
“Thank you,” Marco said. “Finally, respect.”
The laugh that moved through the room was easy. Loose. The kind that did not require anything from anybody. It rubbed some of the tightness out of my chest, or maybe I just wanted it to.
The door to the hallway opened, letting in a flash of alpine-green light and a colder wash of air from the tunnel. A staffer stuck his head in, said something to Rusty, and disappeared again before the door swung shut.
The crowd outside thumped harder. Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.
Denver fans had apparently decided subtlety was not part of their founding constitution.
“Do they do that all game?” Zee asked.
Cam glanced over from near the whiteboard. “They do it until you shut them up.”
“Love that for us.”
“You wanted the league,” Liam said dryly, wrapping tape around his stick blade with slow, brutal focus. “This is the league.”
The room laughed again. I bent to check the tape on my shin pad, mostly because my hands still wanted something to do and because I could feel Alois looking without looking.
That was one of his worst talents.
You did not need to catch his eyes to know he was aware of you. The man had the emotional range of a locked bank vault and somehow still managed to make observation feel like a contact sport.
I kept my head down.
Across the room, Victor Petrov sat in team-issued sweats with his shoulders hunched, one leg bouncing beneath him. He was not dressing tonight. Depth forward. Scratch. Salty as hell on a good day, and this was not shaping up to be one.
He had been chirping since the plane landed like talking enough might make Coach reconsider the lineup.
It would not.
Coach Holloway enjoyed many things. Structure. Defensive responsibility. Coffee strong enough to restart a dead tractor.
Desperation was not on the list.
Victor leaned back against the wall near the equipment bags and nodded toward the hallway. “Hotel was better than this room.”
Milo glanced over. “That is because hotel rooms are designed for guests. Visiting locker rooms are designed for punishment.”
The door opened again. This time Dylan from communications stepped inside with a tablet tucked against his chest and a credential swinging from his neck.
He looked around the room the way civilians looked around locker rooms when they had been told not to touch anything and were terrified something would touch them first.
“Travel schedule update,” he said, already speaking too fast. “Postgame media is reduced. Coach first, then selected players. Buses will load immediately after media and medical clearance. No lobby stops. No outside food runs. Player Ops wants everyone accounted for before we leave the arena.”
A groan moved through the room.
Marco pressed a hand to his chest. “No outside food runs?”
Dylan blinked.
Cam pointed his tape roll at Dylan. “Who sent that?”
Dylan glanced at his tablet. “Operations.”
“Obviously operations,” Milo said. “Which operations?”
Dylan hesitated because he had the self-preservation instincts of a damp napkin. “It came from Sarah’s office.”
“Sarah’s office,” Zee repeated. “That means Lucy wrote it.”
My hand stopped against the tape on my glove.
“Probably,” Dylan said. “She updated the travel compliance notes this morning.”
“From Northbend?” Marco asked.
“She’s not on this trip.”
“Tragic,” Marco said immediately. “Who will professionally disappoint us in person?”
“Sarah can disappoint you remotely,” Jonah said.
“That’s not the same. Lucy does it with glasses.”
A few guys laughed.
I lowered my gaze to the tape around my stick blade and forced my fingers to keep moving.
Lucy’s name could exist in a room without becoming a problem. It had existed in rooms before me. It would exist in rooms after me. She had a job. A title. A reputation now. The guys were allowed to talk about her like she was part of the organization because she was part of the organization.
Director of Player Operations and Organizational Logistics.
Lucy Thomas.
Not Shortcake.
Not mine.
Not anything the room knew how to name.
“She’d have us lined up by sock color if she was here,” Zee said.
“She would be correct,” Jonah replied. “The sock situation in this room is chaos.”
“My socks are fine,” Zee said.
“You are wearing two different compression sleeves.”
“They’re both black.”
“One is navy.”
Zee looked down. “Son of a bitch.”
The room cracked again.
I made myself smile because it was expected. Because smiling was easy. Because if I smiled, no one would look at my hands too closely.
Victor snorted from the wall. “Too bad the boss’s daughter missed this one.”
Something cold moved down my spine before he finished the sentence.
I kept my eyes on my stick. Just tape. Just composite. Just the rough drag of my thumb over the edge where I had smoothed the seam too hard.
Victor kept going, careless and bored and pissed off because everyone else in the room had something to do except him. “Sure would love the opportunity to show her my hotel suite.”
A couple guys barked out laughs. Not big. Not mean, exactly. Reflexive. Locker-room stupid. Sound filling space before anyone thought about what had actually been said.
I felt my jaw lock.
Then Victor added, “Wouldn’t mind seeing what’s under that blazer.”
The words landed wrong. The whole room kept moving around them for one second like nothing had happened.
Tape ripping. Music pulsing. Somebody laughing under his breath.
Dylan shuffling backward toward the door because he had delivered his update and wanted to survive long enough to file whatever form came next.
One second I was at my stall with my stick in my hand. The next, my skate hit the rubber mat. Not hard. Not a stomp. Not enough to snap the room’s attention toward me. Every bit of oxygen in Denver disappeared.
My vision narrowed to Victor leaning against the wall in sweats he had not earned his way out of, mouth still shaped around a joke that had reduced Lucy to fabric and fantasy and nothing else.
Lucy, who had stood in a room full of executives with her knuckles white around a remote and still made the whole event sound possible.
Lucy, who had rebuilt someone else’s mess into a morning that made parents cry behind the boards.
Lucy, who had sat beside my family at Matt’s and laughed like she had not been missing from that table for eight years.
Lucy, who had said no to me in the snow and trusted me to hear it.
My hand tightened around the shaft of my stick.
Words crowded behind my teeth.
Don’t talk about her.
Don’t say her name like that.
Don’t fucking look in her direction unless you understand she is not something you get to turn into a joke.
I swallowed all of them. Hard enough it hurt. Because the second I said any of it, the room would hear too much.
Not the words. The voice underneath them. The old history. The raw place in me that had no business showing itself under fluorescent lights in a visiting locker room thirty minutes before puck drop.
I did not have a clean claim to anger.
She had made that perfectly clear under the red awning while snow melted in her hair and her eyes told the truth her mouth was smart enough to protect.
And still, my body had already stepped toward Victor like the past eight years meant nothing, like the whole room would not put it together if I crossed one more inch.
A hand closed around my shoulder. Heavy. Firm. Silent.
Alois did not yank me back. Did not make a scene. Did not even look like he had moved fast, though he must have, because one second there had been empty air behind me and the next his grip was locked over the top of my shoulder pad with enough pressure to stop my forward motion completely.
My pulse hammered in my throat. For one insane second, I wanted to shrug him off. Not because it was Alois. Because anger needed somewhere to go and his hand had become the door it could not get through.
Then his fingers tightened once.
I breathed in through my nose. Thin air scraped my lungs.
Across the room, Victor was still smirking faintly, unaware he had almost become a very expensive problem. The laughter around him had already started to die, not because anyone understood me, but because locker rooms were animals. They sensed shifts before they named them.
Alois released my shoulder. Then he looked at Victor. The room quieted in pieces. Alois did not raise his voice. He did not need to. “Petrov,” he said.
Victor’s smirk twitched. “What?”
“You talk a lot for someone dressed for watching.”
Marco made a sound like he had been punched directly in the joy.
Zee’s mouth dropped open. “Oh my God.”
Victor straightened, face flushing. “I’m ready if they need me.”
“No,” Alois said flatly. “You are available if everyone better gets too injured.”
The room erupted.