Chapter 3
Matt
I was halfway downtown, both hands on the wheel, doing the thing I do when something's gone wrong with my game. Running the tape.
Except the tape wasn't the miss this time.
It was a hallway. A woman who'd come in swinging over a dog that wasn't even hers, and then kissed me like the argument had been foreplay the whole time.
I'd left before she could get a name out of me, which had felt like the disciplined call in the moment and was now just another loop I couldn't skate out of.
My phone rang. Mason. Fifth time today, and the man had never once taken a hint in his life.
I let it ring twice, doing the math. Go home, and I'd sit on my couch and run that hallway frame by frame until I'd worn a groove in it. Pick up, and at least the loop would have a soundtrack.
I picked up.
"Tell me you're not sitting at home feeling sorry for yourself."
"I'm driving."
"Even better. Sullivan's. I need a beer and you look like you need the whole tap."
"You can't even see me."
"Don't have to. Thirty minutes, Baker. Don't make me drink alone."
He hung up before I could load an argument.
I should have called back and killed it.
Gone home, let the day end, pretended the rain and the dog and the woman and the kiss had happened to some other guy.
But Mason had a point buried in there somewhere.
There was no version of tonight where being alone in my apartment went well.
At least at a bar I'd have something to do with my hands.
Sullivan's was the right call. Dark wood, low light, the flat smell of old beer and fryer oil.
A room built for people who came in to not be looked at.
The bartender there had the one skill that mattered, which was knowing the difference between a guy who wanted to talk and a guy who wanted his glass kept full.
Mason had a booth in the back. Two beers already on the table, because Mason planned ahead exactly once a day and it was always about beer.
"You look like hell," he said as I slid in.
"Thanks."
"Rough day?"
The rain. The dog. Her hands fisted in my hair. The sound she'd made into my mouth, like she'd been planning to swallow me whole and was annoyed the thunder got a vote.
"You could say that."
He pushed a beer at me. I took a long pull, and the cold of it landed clean and simple, the first thing all day that had done exactly what it was supposed to.
"Want to talk about it?"
"Not really."
"Good. Because I want to talk about the game."
I set the glass down. "Mason."
"Four days, man. Four days of you not picking up. Four days of Coach leaving you voicemails into the void. We're doing this."
So we did it.
It took two beers to get there. By the third I was actually saying things out loud instead of just re-skating them in the dark, and most of what came out was the stuff I'd been carrying since the final buzzer. The anger. The what-ifs. The ugly highlight reel, start to finish.
"We're cursed." Mason's words had started leaning on each other. "Three years, Matt. Same team, same round, three years running. That's not variance. That's a curse."
I laughed. Couldn't help it. It was the first real one in four days, and it surprised me coming out.
"We're not cursed."
"Then explain it."
"We don't need an explanation. We need better tactics." I turned the glass a quarter-turn on the table. "They've got our tape memorized. The White Hearts know our breakouts, our zone entries, who's going where before we've decided to go there. We're predictable. Predictable loses in May."
Mason squinted at me, drunk enough to slur and sober enough to still read me. "You blaming Coach?"
"No."
"Sounded like blaming Coach."
"I'm not blaming anyone. I'm saying the system worked until it got solved, and now it's solved, and we keep running it anyway." I shrugged. "We evolve or we keep booking tee times in May. Those are the options."
"You should say that to Coach."
"He knows. Changing a system that won sixty games is a hard sell, even when it stops winning the games that count." I stopped. Drank. "I don't have the full answer, man. I just know the question."
"You're gonna be captain next year. Captain's supposed to have the answer."
The word landed on the table between us and just sat there.
Captain. If they still wanted me wearing the letter after this. After the miss. After four days of national television deciding I was the guy who couldn't do the one thing the moment asked for.
"Let's not," I said.
"Why not?"
"Because the C is a maybe right now. So's the roster spot, depending on the week."
"Don't be dramatic."
"It's not dramatic. It's the standings. I had the shot to tie it and send it to overtime. I missed it. People remember the miss."
Mason set his elbows on the table and gave me the look he saves for when he thinks he's about to say something that belongs on a poster.
"You played forty-two minutes that game. Two assists. You set up three more that nobody finished. One puck goes wide and you've decided that's the whole story."
"It's the whole story when it's that puck."
"That's garbage and you know it."
Maybe it was. It didn't move anything. Didn't unmiss the shot, didn't wipe the bench's faces when I came back to it, didn't call off the two weeks of cameras. Being right about the math and being the guy who missed were just two things that were both true.
I drank instead of answering. The bar had filled in around us, more bodies, more noise, everybody in here working on a day that had gotten away from them too.
"When we win it next year," Mason said, "nobody's gonna remember this."
"If."
"When."
It should have landed like encouragement. Mostly it just measured the drop for me. How far up next season was going to put me, and how many people would be watching to see if I'd hold the rung or come off it again.
"You really think we can take them," I said.
"The White Hearts? Yeah. We figure out their system, we stop being a team they've already scouted. Like you said. Evolve."
"Easier said."
"Everything is. Doesn't get us out of doing it."
I wanted to buy it. Wanted next season to be the clean one, the one where I got the look again and put it where it belonged. But hope was running expensive lately, and I was short.
Then someone passed the table, and I caught the scent before I caught anything else.
Light. A little floral. The exact thing that had been on her in that hallway, close enough to taste, and my body filed it before my brain had finished the sentence.
I looked up.
Her.
Dark hair pulled back now. Same set to her jaw, the one that had walked her across a parking lot to fight a man twice her size over a dog. Ten feet away and aimed at a table by the bar.
I ducked. Actually ducked, like a puck was coming.
"What are you doing?" Mason said.
"Nothing."
"You look unwell."
"Drop it."
She sat down with two friends. Hugs, noise, that grin breaking across her face, the one I'd already spent the entire drive trying not to think about.
I needed to leave. Clean change, no whistle, gone before the puck found me.
"Is that an ex?" Mason was already leaning in.
"No."
"Then what is it?"
"Gas station."
His face did something delighted. "No."
"Yeah."
"The dog lady?"
"Yeah."
And because the third beer had loosened the bolts and because a thing that loud needs somewhere to go, I told him. The rain. The chain. The dog that wasn't mine and the woman who'd prosecuted me for it anyway. The hallway.
The kiss. I told him about the kiss.
Mason's eyebrows climbed the entire way through it, and by the end he was grinning like a man who'd just been handed something he fully intended to misuse.
"You kissed a stranger in a gas station."
"Supermart. And for the record, she kissed back."
"This is the best thing I have ever heard."
"It's not a big deal."
"Matt Baker. Mr. Structure. Mr. There's-A-Right-Way-To-Do-Everything. Coming apart in a hallway with a woman whose name he didn't get." He shook his head, reverent. "I'm framing this."
"Keep your voice down."
He did not keep his voice down.
He laughed instead. That big, dumb, carrying laugh of his, the one with no volume control, the one that had been getting us looked at in public since juniors. And this time it worked exactly the way it always works. Heads came around. The bartender glanced over.
So did she.
Her eyes came up and found mine across the room, and I watched it land. The pieces clicking into place. The eyebrows. The mouth opening a fraction around a word she hadn't said yet.
Recognition, full and certain.
"Oh, hell," I said.