Chapter 24
It was game day in Toronto, and Matthew had a laptop.
This was not unusual. Matthew Quinn always had a laptop, Matthew was the kind of person who had brought a laptop to Knox's birthday party once, and Knox had taken it away from him. Matthew had spent the next hour looking like he'd lost a limb.
Matthew had a laptop, expecting us to pay attention, but all I could think about was last night, sleeping in Nathan’s arms.
"Brodeur Holt," Matthew said, to the table, to his laptop. "Thirty-four goals this season. Leads the league in faceoff percentage. Physical on the puck, hard to move once he's established position."
Someone across the table made a noise. Searcy, probably.
"Casimir Vrek on the blue line," Matthew continued, with the calm of a man who found this interesting rather than alarming. "Plus twenty-eight. Seventeen hits in the last five games. He pinches high—"
"That's a thing we can use," Dylan said, from somewhere to my left, without looking up from his own breakfast.
"That's exactly what I was going to say," Matthew said.
"I know," Dylan said.
"Tomas Selig in goal," Matthew said. "Point-nine-two-four save percentage away from home. Two hundred and eighty-seven shots faced in the last ten games—"
"Twenty-two goals against," Searcy said, like he was reporting a death.
The table went slightly quiet.
Knox put his fork down.
"Say it to my face," Knox said.
Searcy looked at him. "What?"
"Tell me you're scared of a goalie," Knox said, at a volume that caused the family at the next table to look over. "To my face. So I can remember this moment for the rest of my life."
"I'm not scared," Searcy said. "I'm statistically—"
"Statistically," Knox repeated, like the word had personally offended him.
"Andrew," Matthew said, without looking up.
"I'm calm."
"You're pointing."
Knox looked at his hand. He was, in fact, pointing. He put it down.
Jenkins raised his hand. "Can I ask what save percentage has to do with—"
"No," Knox said.
"I was just—"
"Jenkins." Knox picked his fork back up. "Eat."
Jenkins ate.
From the far end of the table, where he'd been sitting since breakfast started without saying a single word to anyone, Foster looked up from his coffee.
"Is he always like this?" Foster asked. To no one in particular. To the table. Deadpan, the way people spoke when they genuinely didn't understand what they were witnessing.
The table went quiet.
Knox turned his head very slowly toward the far end.
"Like what?" Knox asked.
Foster looked at him. "Like that." He gestured at Knox with his coffee cup. Unhurried. Completely unbothered.
"I'm not—" Knox stopped. "I'm not being like anything. I'm being normal."
"You told Searcy you wanted to remember the moment."
"I do want to remember the moment."
"Because he read a save percentage out loud."
"Because he read it like it was a—" Knox stopped again. His jaw moved. Matthew, without looking up from the laptop, put his hand on Knox's arm with the practiced ease of someone who had been doing this for two years and had developed excellent reflexes.
Foster looked at Matthew's hand on Knox's arm. Then at Knox. Then he picked up his coffee and drank from it like the conversation had concluded satisfactorily.
"The Hawks are good this year," Foster said, to his coffee. "That's all he was saying."
Knox made a sound that was not a word.
"Andrew," Matthew said. Still not looking up. His hand still on Knox's arm, which was doing significant structural work.
"I'm fine," Knox said. He picked up his fork. Put it down. Picked it up again. "Foster," he said.
Foster looked at him.
"Welcome to the team," Knox said, in the tone of a man saying the opposite of that.
Foster looked at him for a moment. "Thanks," he said. Flat. Sincere. Completely immune to the subtext.
Jenkins, who had been watching this exchange with his fork suspended halfway to his mouth, leaned over to me and said, very quietly: "I like him."
"Don't tell Knox that," I said.
"I heard that," Knox said.
I moved my eggs around the plate.
The thing about road game mornings was that everyone managed the pre-game in their own way and you learned to read the room early.
Dylan ate and said useful things about the opposition and was already mentally on the ice.
Knox performed aggression at any statistic that suggested the other team was good, which was its own kind of preparation.
Jenkins asked questions that revealed he hadn't been listening.
I usually fed off all of it. Usually I was in the middle of it, the noise, the energy, giving it back at a markup. That was the system. That was what I was good at.
Dylan looked at me across the table.
"Did you check in with Mom and Dad?" he said.
"Dad texted me from the hotel,” I said.
Dylan nodded. He picked up his coffee. "You talk to them today?"
"I'll see them after," I said.
Dylan looked at me for a second. Then he looked at his coffee. "Okay," he said, in the tone of a man who had more to say and had decided not to say it.
I pushed my eggs around for another two minutes and then gave up and went to stand in the corridor outside the breakfast room, because the corridor was empty and the eggs were doing nothing for me and I needed approximately thirty seconds of not being watched by Dylan.
The corridor was quiet. Hotel quiet. I leaned against the wall and looked at the carpet, which was aggressively patterned in the way hotel carpets were aggressively patterned, presumably to hide everything that had ever happened to them.
I heard Nathan before I saw him.
Not his voice — just his footsteps, which I had apparently learned to recognize. He came out of the breakfast room, and he was moving with purpose. Then he saw me in the corridor.
He stopped.
The hotel was quiet around us. Somewhere behind the breakfast room door Knox was probably still vibrating about Tomas Selig's save percentage.
Nathan looked at me for a moment. Then he looked at the corridor in both directions—left, right, same check as when he'd pulled me into his room, which felt like a year ago and also like this morning—and then he crossed to where I was standing against the wall.
He kissed me.
His free hand coming up to my jaw the way it always did, the thumb, and his mouth warm and deliberate and—Nathan, just Nathan, the real version, the one from the hotel room and the pizza place and all the rest of it.
He pulled back.
Looked at me with those blue eyes, very close.
"Okay?" he said.
It was the same word I'd said to him. In the office, after the first easy kiss, the one that started everything. He'd said yes and now he was asking me back and I didn't know if he knew he was doing it or if it just came out.
"Yeah," I said. "Okay."
He nodded once. Stepped back. Adjusted his tablet under his arm.
"Good game tonight," he said. Professional. Completely level. Like he hadn't just kissed me in a hotel corridor before a game.
He walked away.
I stood against the wall for a second.
My parents were coming up from Boston for this game. Rob had driven four hours each way to junior games in weather that should have kept him home. Linda had worked extra shifts so I could skate with better programs.
Rob and Linda Morrison were going to be in section 112 tonight.
Dylan and I were going to be on the ice.
I was going to score or I was going to die trying.
There was no Morr Roar in this arena.
That was the thing I kept coming back to, in the warmup, in the first period, every time I did something worth responding to and the crowd responded by booing.
No upper bowl, no section 214, no guy in the red jacket starting it from the rafters.
Just the Hawks faithful doing what road crowds did, which was make noise that worked against you instead of with you.
I played anyway.
This was not new. I'd played road games before, I'd played in buildings that wanted me gone, I'd played through crowds that made every good shift feel smaller because there was nobody to amplify it.
The transaction that usually powered me, the one where I gave the crowd the moment and they gave me the noise back—that transaction wasn't available tonight.
I played anyway. Not for the crowd. For something else, something that was harder to name.
Second period, Wardens down by one. Vrek pinched high on the left side exactly the way Matthew had said he would, and Dylan read it before I did—Dylan always read it before I did, Dylan watched film the way other people breathed—and the give-and-go happened in about three seconds.
Clean and fast. Dylan's shot going top corner past Selig who had a point-nine-two-four save percentage away from home and was apparently having an off night.
Dylan skated past me.
I pointed at him.
He kept skating, jaw doing something that wasn't quite a smile but was closer than usual, and something in my chest was warm and uncomplicated and had nothing to do with crowd noise.
We tied it. Then we went up by one.
Then I lost the puck.
Third period, Wardens up by one, two minutes gone.
I read an opportunity that wasn't there.
I saw the gap, went for it, the way I always went for it when I was running on instinct instead of system.
Holt was faster than I'd tracked and the puck was gone and I was standing in the offensive zone watching it go the other way.
The Hawks scored forty seconds later.
Holt did a lap. Standard celebration stuff, fist pump, the crowd going insane around him. Then one of the Hawks forwards—Decker—drifted toward the Wardens bench on the way back to his own zone and said something that was not directed at me.
It was directed at Dylan.
"Must be exhausting," Decker said, loud enough to carry, with the particular smile of someone who had done their homework. "Cleaning up after your little brother your whole career."
The bench went very still.
Dylan's jaw set. That was it. That was the whole reaction—Dylan's jaw, Dylan's shoulders, Dylan processing it inward the way he processed everything inward, filing it in the place where he put things he never said out loud.
My parents were in section 112.
My gloves were off before I'd decided to take them off.
I was over the boards before Coach could say anything.
The thing about fighting was I wasn't a fighter.
Knox was a fighter. Knox had been an enforcer for years and had the hands to prove it.
I was a scorer who occasionally lost his mind, which was a different category entirely, and Decker was bigger than me and had the look of a man who'd done this before, but none of that registered in the way that things stopped registering when something crossed a line I hadn't known I had until it was crossed.
"Say it again," I said.
I was in his face. The linesmen were already moving. The crowd was already louder.
Decker grinned. Up close he was a lot bigger. "Which part? The part where your brother's been carrying you since—"
I threw the first punch.
It wasn't clean. I wasn't trying for clean.
I caught him on the shoulder and he got his arm up and then his fist connected with the side of my helmet and the world went white, briefly, something rattling loose, and I staggered but I didn't go down, I didn't go down, I grabbed Decker's jersey because that was the only thing available to grab and I could hear the linesmen and the crowd and Knox at a volume that suggested he was being physically restrained and somewhere underneath all of that I could hear Dylan.
I turned my head.
Dylan was across the ice, being held back by Foster of all people—Foster, three weeks on this team, tattoos and deadpan and apparently willing to wrap his arms around an alternate captain to keep him from charging across the ice—and Dylan's face was doing something I had never seen it do.
He was looking at me.
Not the older brother look. Not the I told you so look. Not any of the looks I had a catalogue of, all the ones he'd been giving me since I was sixteen and running our parents' patience into the ground.
Something else. Something older than all of it. Something that had been there before the resentment and the comparison and the distance that had grown up between us like a thing neither of us had meant to grow.
He was coming for me.
Not to stop me. For me.
Dylan Morrison, who never fought, who processed everything inward, who let things go and kept letting things go because that was the system he'd built for surviving a childhood where he was always the one who held it together—he had been coming across that ice, and Foster had his arms around him, and his face had something on it that I didn't have a word for and was going to need significantly more time to look at directly.
Decker said something else.
I turned back.
I didn't hear what it was. The ringing was too loud, the white still at the edges of my vision, and I registered Decker's mouth moving and I threw another punch that didn't land cleanly and he shoved me and the ice came up fast.
The arena went loud.
I was on the ice.
The lights were doing something. Not off, the lights were on, the game was happening, I could hear the whistle starting somewhere, but different, like someone had turned the brightness up past the point where it helped and into the point where it didn't. The crowd noise had a quality to it I couldn't quite locate, like it was coming from farther away than it should have been.
I knew this. I knew what this was.
I started the inventory anyway because that was the system, because the system was all I had right now.
Head: something. Not nothing. Something that had been something since Decker's fist connected with my helmet and was now significantly more something.
Vision: coming back online. Mostly.
I turned my head and Nathan was already at the boards.
Both hands on the boards, no tablet, and his face—I'd been watching Nathan Cross's face for two years and cataloguing every variation of the nothing he kept on it, and what was on it right now was not nothing, was not the professional wall, was not any version of the managed expression I'd been learning to read.
It was just him.
Just Nathan, looking at me on the ice, and whatever was on his face had gotten past everything he'd built to keep it from getting past, and the Hawks crowd was roaring around us and he either didn't notice or didn't care.
I could see Dylan too, somewhere to the left, standing, not sitting, and his face was doing the thing again, the thing I didn't have a word for, the thing that was older than everything between us.
I put my hand on the ice.
Pushed up.
The world tilted—hard, definitive, the kind of tilt that wasn't a suggestion.
My arm went out from under me, and I was back down.
The ice was cold against my helmet, and the lights were still too bright.
Nathan's face was the last thing I'd clocked before the tilt, and it was still there when I closed my eyes.
I stayed down.