Chapter 2
Note to self: going out was a great idea.
Broderick’s was exactly what you booked when you wanted the whole city to know you'd won. Low lights and a private section in the back, and a bartender who started lining up shots before we'd even gotten our coats off.
Someone had already put the game highlights on the screens above the bar. I watched myself score from three different angles while a stranger handed me a drink and told me I was a god.
"Thank you," I said, giving him my best smile. A smile that had been on magazine covers and social media stories that went viral the second they were posted. "I know."
This was the good part. This was the part I was actually good at. Someone grabbed my arm. Someone else said my name like it was a complete sentence. The music was loud enough that you couldn't hear yourself think, which was genuinely my preferred setting.
Not thinking was great. Thinking was where things went sideways.
The whole team had come out, more or less. My brother was near the back, standing with a beer he hadn't touched yet, scanning the room the way he scanned the ice, looking for problems before they happened.
He found me.
I gave Dylan a wave. He did not wave back.
Classic Dylan.
Dylan was twenty-seven and looked like our dad—same dark hair, same jaw, same build, same expression of a man who would tell you the truth whether or not you wanted it.
He was the biological son and the responsible one and the one who did everything right.
He was standing near the back of the bar with an untouched beer, which was what Dylan did at things like this: showed up and watched and didn't drink and went home early.
It had not always been easy to be his brother.
I was fairly certain it had not always been easy to be mine.
Dylan had gotten a fourth-round draft position and a mid-tier junior team and six years of doing everything right before he made the NHL.
I had gotten a first-overall junior draft and the highlight reels and the magazine features and a projected top-five pick.
Then the Wardens had taken me third overall and put me on Dylan's line like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Dylan's face when I walked into the Wardens’ facility for my first day had been the face of a man processing several things simultaneously and choosing not to say any of them.
I had never asked him which things.
I think I was afraid of what they were.
"The Little Lion himself.” A guy I vaguely recognized had materialized at my elbow, messy black hair, someone's friend, a face I'd signed something for once maybe.
“You and your brother are unreal together.
Best brother duo in the league, I'm not even joking.
Like watching two completely different styles just click. "
I smiled because I was good at smiling.
Dylan had been unreal before I ever laced up.
He'd been unreal in juniors, unreal in his first two NHL seasons, unreal in the quiet grinding way that didn't make highlight reels but made coaches trust you with their lives.
The click this guy was talking about was Dylan covering for everything I didn't bother to cover, the same way he'd been doing since I was a kid and running our parents' patience into the ground.
"Yeah," I said. "Completely different.”
I spotted Knox and Matthew coming through the main entrance, Knox with his hand low on Matthew's back, easy and unbothered.
A few people clocked them and went back to their drinks because it was the team and nobody cared, which was one of the things I actually liked about the Wardens.
No one was going to make a thing of it. Knox would have ended them if they tried, and Matthew would have helped.
Knox saw me and immediately made a face.
Not a bad face. It was Knox's version of concern, which looked approximately like suspicion. He said something to Matthew and they navigated through the crowd toward me, which I appreciated and also slightly didn't want, because Knox had this annoying ability to look at me and know things.
"You look like shit," Knox said, by way of greeting.
"I look amazing," I said. "I just scored on national television."
"Your eyes are doing something weird."
"My eyes are gorgeous."
"Morrison." He said it flatly.
"I'm good," I insisted.
Knox took my drink out of my hand, examined it, and handed it back. "You should be drinking water."
"You're not my doctor."
"You’re fucking right I’m not," Knox said. "Your doctor is—" He stopped. “Well, who would have guessed? Looks like your actual doctor decided to go out for once.”
I followed his eyeline.
Who would have guessed, indeed?
Dr. Cross was standing near the entrance.
White button-down, collar open, sleeves rolled to the elbow.
No white coat, no tablet, no penlight. Just the Ice Doc himself, standing there, in a bar, like a person who went to bars, which I had genuinely never once considered a possibility.
He looked slightly too formal for the environment, which tracked, because Dr. Cross looked slightly too formal for every environment, including, I suspected, his own home.
Cross didn't look at me.
I watched the doc scan the room, say something to someone from the training staff, and accept a drink I assumed he wouldn't finish. It looked like he was already calculating how soon he could leave.
Right.
Fine.
Obviously he was here. Dr. Cross was part of the team. He came to things occasionally. This was not interesting or notable, and I was not going to make it either of those things.
I turned back to Matthew and Knox and said something, I don't even remember what, something funny probably, something that made Matthew laugh, and got another drink. I let someone pull me toward the dance floor and I was fine, I was great, I was having an excellent time.
I was completely aware of where Cross was standing at all times.
It was like—okay, it was like having a splinter.
Not painful exactly, not the kind of thing you'd tell anyone about, just this constant low-level awareness that something was there, something that wasn't supposed to be, and you kept finding it with the same finger over and over even when you told yourself to stop.
And once, just once, between drinks, when I looked over without meaning to, Cross was already looking at me. Not the room. Not the team.
Me, specifically.
I mean, of course he was. I was sure he was running his assessment from across the bar, cataloguing my drink count, checking my pupils from thirty feet away, deciding what he was going to report back to Coach in the morning.
Probably had a whole section in his tablet for it.
Morrison: present, ambulatory, making questionable decisions as per usual.
He'd come all the way to Broderick's to keep track of the franchise investment so he could document my evening for whoever needed documenting.
Asset management. Same as always.
I got another drink.
Two drinks later, someone was flirting with me—a guy with good shoulders and a very straightforward approach, which I appreciated—and I was flirting back because I always flirted back. It was basically a reflex at this point. Somewhere in the middle of it, I looked up and Cross was looking at me.
He wanted to see if the team’s asset was okay?
I’d show him okay.
He wanted something to report back to Coach?
I’d give him that, too.
So I kissed the guy.
It was a perfectly good kiss, I guess. The guy was into it, and I was performing it, and there was nothing wrong with it except that I was doing it primarily because I wanted to see what Cross would do.
But Cross did nothing.
Nothing.
When I managed to glance at him mid-kiss, Cross didn't look away disgusted, didn't tense up, didn't react at all.
He just continued existing against the wall with his drink, and after a moment he turned and said something to the training staff guy again, like he'd had a thought, like I hadn't even registered, and that—
That fucking pissed me off.
Not because I cared. I didn't care. I was twenty-three and I was at a bar and this was a Tuesday and I absolutely did not care what Nathan Cross thought about any of it.
Somewhere around midnight I had agreed to a body shot off a stranger's collarbone, which I was recording a zero percent chance of regretting in the morning. Then the guy with the good shoulders said something in my ear. Something about a table.
Sure.
With the music turned up and half the team doing something on the dance floor that wasn't technically allowed in public, I climbed up on a table.
It just seemed like the right move. The moment called for it. The whole room turned toward me the way rooms did, the way they always did, and I gave them what they came for, arms out, grinning, saying something that got a roar out of the crowd, feeling the noise in my chest like a second heartbeat.
My head swam.
Just for a second. Just a small tide-going-out feeling, the lights a little too bright, the music a little too loud, and I shifted my weight and caught myself and it was fine, it was absolutely—
"Get down."
Cross. He was right there, at the side of the table, which meant he'd been moving toward me before the table situation, before I'd climbed up.
No one else had noticed him appear. The party kept going around us.
"The table can hold me," I shouted over the music.
He said something I couldn't hear.
"What?"
"I said I'm not concerned about the table."
I looked down at him from up there, which was a new angle on Cross.
Cross from above, Cross with the bar noise and the lights and the whole room going insane around him, still completely still, still looking at me like I was the only thing in the room worth looking at.
Something hot and sharp moved through my chest that I converted immediately into something simpler.
"Right," I yelled back. "You're not concerned about the table." I spread my arms wider, gave the room more, felt the noise spike in response. "You're only concerned about the team's asset."
Something moved across his face.
Something that arrived fast and left faster.
I was too far up and too loud and the lights were too bright for me to read it correctly, and then it was gone and he was just Cross again, standing at the foot of my table looking up at me.
"Get down, Wesley," he said.
Not loud. But I knew what he said.
I got down.
Cross stepped back to give me room and then didn't move, which meant I was stuck in the small pocket of space between him and the table and the noise, closer than I wanted to be. The bar smelled like alcohol and sweat and, under that, faint and completely unwelcome, clean soap.
Cross didn't move back. That was the thing.
He'd stepped forward to give me room to climb down and then he just stayed, which meant we were close in a way the situation didn't strictly require.
We were close enough that I could see the blue of his eyes in the low bar light, close enough that I was aware of my own heartbeat in a way that had nothing to do with the music.
He was looking at me.
I was drunk enough that my system for handling Cross's full attention had gone slightly offline.
The noise and the heat of the bar made everything feel closer than it was, or exactly as close as it was, and I couldn't tell anymore which one it was, and I was finding it difficult to care about the distinction.
"You're compensating," he said. Low. Just for me.
I could feel it when he spoke. That close.
I should have said something sharp. I had something sharp somewhere in the back of my mouth, the usual thing, the deflection, and I didn't say it, because my eyes were doing that thing they did sometimes without consulting me.
I was watching Cross's jaw, his mouth. I caught myself doing it and looked back up and found him already back at me.
The moment stretched out in the loud dark of the bar like something pulled too tight.
Neither of us moved.
Then the crowd moved for us.
The dance floor surged the way it surged when the song changed and everyone recalibrated at once, this wave of bodies pressing outward, and someone hit me from behind, not hard, just the thoughtless momentum of people moving in the same direction, and I went forward.
Into Cross.
My hand came up against his chest by instinct, catching myself, and his hand came to my arm, steadying, and for a second we were close, closer than the table had put us. My hand was flat against the front of his shirt, his fingers wrapped around my arm, and I could feel him breathe.
I looked up.
He was looking down.
The bar kept going around us, completely indifferent. His hand was on my arm, and my hand was on his chest, and I could feel his heartbeat under my palm.
It wasn’t steady.
His heartbeat wasn’t the controlled, metronomic thing I would have expected from Cross. No, it was something faster than that.
Neither of us moved for a moment. Then someone laughed loudly somewhere to my left and the spell broke the way spells broke—all at once. I stepped back, and he let go. We were two feet apart again with the bar noise rushing back in to fill the space between us.
His hand dropped to his side.
I looked at my own hand. The one that had been on his chest. I put it in my pocket.
"You're compensating," he said again. Like he hadn't stopped. Like the last thirty seconds hadn't happened and he was just continuing the sentence from before.
Except his voice was slightly different. Just slightly. A fraction lower. A fraction less certain.
I heard it. I was drunk but I heard it.
"Go home, Wesley."
He held my gaze for one moment that neither of us filled.
Then he turned and walked back toward the wall, back toward the training staff guy and his drink and his general existence as a person who had come here for reasons he was apparently not going to give me.
I watched him go and thought about his heartbeat under my palm, fast and human and not steady at all.
I stood in the middle of the bar.
The guy with the good shoulders materialized at my elbow.
"Hey." He nodded in the direction Cross had gone. "What's the deal with you two?"
I laughed.
It came out just slightly off, the way things went when you hadn't prepared for a question. "No deal. He hates me."
The guy watched Cross across the room. "Huh."
I got another drink.
I did not think about what I'd felt under my hand.
I filed it under things that didn't mean anything. The category was already too full.
I thought about it the entire rest of the night.