Chapter 3
Here's the thing about being the life of the party: you can't stop.
Can't like the alternative is standing still long enough to notice things.
Like the way your skull was informing you, politely but firmly, that it had opinions.
Like the fact that the noise wasn't landing right tonight, that the drinks were fine and the people were fine and the whole evening was aggressively, relentlessly fine, and fine wasn't what this was supposed to be.
I'd scored on national television. I'd taken a hit and gotten up. The Morr Roar had come down from the upper bowl in a wave.
Tonight should have felt like something.
Part of it was the headache I was refusing to acknowledge.
The rest of it was Cross.
The Ice Doc was still at the bar. Over by the wall, same spot, same drink probably, doing that thing where he existed near a social event without participating in it, like a piece of furniture that had graduated medical school.
He wasn't talking to me. He wasn't telling me what to do. He wasn't doing anything except standing there being six-foot-one of complete stillness in a bar that was doing its absolute best around him.
So why was he still here?
If he were babysitting me, he could at least commit to it. Say something. Pull out the tablet. Do the doctor thing. Instead he was just there, in my peripheral vision, which I was not checking, which I kept checking anyway.
I turned my back on the wall. I gave my full attention to the person in front of me and was enthusiastic back at them because that was the job and I was good at the job.
The TVs above the bar were cycling through postgame coverage, some talking head segment I wasn't watching, when I heard Jenkins's name.
Not from the team.
Three guys a few feet down the bar. I caught it in pieces, through the music, through the noise.
The gist, assembled from fragments: Jenkins was a fourth-round reach who had no business on a first line.
Wouldn't be there at all if Morrison wasn't carrying the whole roster.
Speaking of which, did you see that hit?
Morrison's cooked. Team's been built around a guy who plays like he's auditioning for his own funeral.
Wardens are one bad game from being exposed and everyone knows it.
I turned around.
Didn't make a decision to. My body just redirected.
"You wanna repeat that?"
The guy closest to me was maybe twenty-five, thick in the way guys got when they played rugby in college and hadn't stopped eating like they still did. He looked at me with the slow-processing expression of someone who'd had four drinks before I became his problem.
"Easy," he said. "Just talking hockey."
"Sure," I said. "Keep talking, then."
He didn't love that. The guy next to him didn't love it either. I was aware, in the distant background of my attention, that several nearby conversations had gone quiet.
"Jenkins has forty points in forty games. You're a guy in a bar being wrong out loud. One of those is more embarrassing than the other,” I said, because I was not, historically, the type to de-escalate. "You should write that down somewhere so you remember it."
The first guy's face did something complicated. "The hell did you just say?"
"Wesley." Someone behind me. Not relevant.
The guy took a step forward. He was close enough now that I could tell he'd had more than four drinks, and that this had moved past the hockey analysis portion of the evening into something more personal.
His friend put a hand on his arm but he shook it off, which was the move of a man who'd decided on a thing.
Then several things happened fast and in the wrong order.
He shoved. I caught it on my shoulder, barely, not even a real hit, but my head disagreed.
My head disagreed loudly and immediately, a spike of pain that went from the base of my skull to somewhere behind my left eye, and the music got louder than it had been a second ago, and the bar lights were suddenly doing something I didn't appreciate.
I came back to myself with my hand in his collar. I didn't remember deciding to grab him. My ears were ringing in a way that had nothing to do with the music.
Then someone had my arm.
"Let go," I said, pulling against it, because I had not resolved anything here and I was not —
"Wesley."
I turned.
Cross had my elbow in one hand and was looking at me like a man who had done a rapid medical assessment and arrived at conclusions he wasn't happy about.
Not alarmed. Cross didn't do alarmed.
He did that thing where his face got very still and very focused, and that was somehow worse.
The bar had rearranged itself around us. Someone was dealing with the other guys—one of the training staff guys, I registered distantly. Jenkins had appeared somewhere to my left looking equal parts thrilled and horrified. The music was still going. The lights were still wrong.
And Cross was looking at me like I was exactly what he'd always thought I was.
There it was. The look I'd been waiting for, the one I'd known was coming eventually, like a man watching his worst professional assessment confirmed in real time.
Morrison, it said. Of course. Of course it was Morrison, in a bar, with a head injury, in a fight, at midnight. I could practically write the incident report for him. I'd probably given him enough material for a whole section of his tablet.
Patient demonstrated predictably poor judgment. Again.
"Breathe," Cross said. The same voice he'd used at the table.
I laughed, because that was what I did. "I'm breathing."
"Your pupils are uneven."
"That's a fun thing to say to someone at a bar."
He didn't react. He was looking at my face the way he'd looked at it on the bench, that full-attention thing again.
My head was doing something genuinely unpleasant and the lights were too loud and I was running low on the particular type of energy that powered the system.
"I'm fine," I said anyway, because some things were automatic.
"You're not." Factual, the way everything he said was factual, like he was reporting conditions rather than having a conversation. "How long has the right side been slow?"
I opened my mouth.
Closed it.
"You noticed that."
"I noticed that on the ice," he said. "Three hours ago."
Which was—that was a long time to notice something and not say anything, and I didn't know what to do with that information. My head was really hurting now, the bright persistent kind that sat behind your eyes and made the corners of everything go slightly wrong.
"The shove didn't help," I said.
"No." A pause. "It didn't."
Jenkins had materialized properly at my side, looking up at me with his face doing about eleven things at once. "Bro. Are you okay?"
"You're welcome,” I said.
"Wes—"
"He's handled," Cross said to Jenkins, which was a sentence that I was going to have opinions about as soon as I had the brain power to deploy them. He looked back at me. "I'm taking you home."
"You don't have to—"
"I wasn’t asking for permission.”
The bar went on around us, Jenkins hovering, the highlights cycling on the screens above like none of this had happened, and Cross was standing there with his hand on my arm looking at me with that expression I couldn't crack, and I thought: this is it, this is the version of me he's going to carry around, this is the file, Morrison, twenty-three, liability, confirmed.
The Ice Doc had always thought I was a fuckup.
Tonight I'd just made it easy for him.
"You're very annoying," I said. "For the record."
"I know," Cross said, steering me toward the door.