11. Falcon Bait #2
By the second period, the building smelled like thawing coats, beer, and old concrete under the clean knife-edge of ice. North Lake tied it early off a point shot that changed direction through traffic, and for thirty seconds the Wolves bench remembered how to breathe.
Noah was on the ice for the goal. He didn’t get a point. He got an elbow in the ribs net-front and skated back to center with that bright animal ache sparking under the right side of his chest.
The Falcons captain lined up opposite him on the next draw and bent low over his stick.
“You should smile more, Mercer,” he said. “That’s what everybody likes about you, right?”
Noah won the draw clean.
For a while, hockey saved him.
There were shifts where instinct took over and the rest dropped away—the read off the half wall, the pressure angle on the backcheck, the beautiful economy of a breakout tape-to-tape through the middle.
In those stretches, he was only his body and the game.
Lungs burning. Sweat cooling at his spine.
Blade edges biting, releasing, biting again.
Then a whistle would go. Or a board-rattle. Or a Falcons forward would drift by murmuring some variation of academic fraud, and all the off-ice poison would flood back in.
Midway through the second, Dylan got cross-checked after the whistle and shoved back. Scrums started. Gloves stayed on. Refs circled and warned. The crowd bayed for blood.
Noah grabbed Dylan’s jersey and hauled him away before the officials could make a choice for them.
“Not you,” Noah snapped.
“He started it.”
“And you’re helping him.”
Dylan yanked free. “So what, we just let them keep talking?”
Noah got in his face because sometimes eighteen inches and direct eye contact were the only language adrenaline understood. “We let them look stupid by themselves. Skate.”
Dylan’s nostrils flared. Then he pushed off.
Protect your people first.
It was easier when protection looked like pulling someone back from the edge.
Harder when the edge was under Noah’s own skates.
The game cracked open with four minutes left in the second.
A puck rimmed hard around behind the St. Brendan net. Noah chased, shoulder to shoulder with the Falcons captain. They hit the end boards together. Noah got there first, absorbed contact, tried to kick the puck loose, and took an extra shove after it was gone.
His taped thumb exploded with pain against the dasher.
He snapped around.
“What the hell was that?”
The captain shrugged, gliding backward with infuriating calm. “Thought you liked extra help on assignments.”
Something in Noah went hot and stupid.
He shoved him.
Not a brutal hit. Not a punch. Just a hard two-handed jolt high to the chest after the play, visible from three sections and every camera angle in the building.
Whistle. Arm up. Crowd screaming in delighted unison.
The Falcons captain sold it with a stagger Noah would have mocked if he’d had any air left in his lungs.
Noah knew it the second he did it.
Knew the penalty. Knew the optics. Knew Coach’s face before he even looked toward the bench.
Cross-checking.
Two minutes.
Dylan skated in fast, jaw set. “Noah—”
“Off,” Noah bit out, and hated the tone as soon as it left him.
The ref pointed him to the box.
The crowd stood as he crossed the ice.
“FAKE. GRADES.”
“PAPER. CHAMPS.”
“CRACKED. CAPTAIN.”
That last one was new. Improvised. It followed him all the way to the penalty box and sat down with him in the plexiglass cage.
Humiliation was hotter than anger. Anger could move. Humiliation just sat there under the skin and made every stare feel deserved.
Noah planted his stick between his knees and breathed through his mouthpiece. The box smelled like rubber, damp gloves, and stale spit. Across the ice, Coach refused to look at him for the first ten seconds of the kill.
North Lake got through the penalty.
Barely.
By the time Noah stepped out, the game had turned ugly in the way rivalry games sometimes did when everybody sensed a fracture and started pressing their thumbs into it.
Every hit finished hard. Every whistle came with gathering bodies.
Refs lost control by trying to maintain it through warnings nobody respected.
Noah played the rest of the period on a wire.
He made one good block, one clean zone exit, one controlled carry that should have settled him. Instead he kept hearing the captain’s voice, the crowd, Coach’s I need you boring.
At the horn, with the score still tied, the Falcons captain chirped him again at center.
“Thanks for the power play, hero.”
Noah turned.
The officials were already between them. Cameras found the confrontation instantly, because cameras always did.
“Walk,” the linesman barked.
Noah did.
But not before he said, clear enough for anyone close by to hear, “Try playing hockey instead of opening your mouth for a full night.”
The captain laughed and tapped his own crest. “People still believe ours.”
The words followed Noah down the tunnel.
The corridor to the locker room felt ten degrees colder than the bench.
Concrete sweated under fluorescent lights.
Someone kicked the base of the wall hard enough to rattle a metal trash can.
Noah stripped off one glove, then the other, and nearly fumbled his stick because his left hand had started trembling.
He hated that more than the pain.
Inside the room, Coach let the door slam.
Silence hit first. Dense. Helmet-heavy. The kind that meant everybody knew they were one sentence away from the room going bad.
Coach stood in front of the whiteboard and looked straight at Noah.
“That,” he said, voice low enough to make everyone lean in, “is exactly what they wanted.”
Noah’s pulse pounded in his ears. “I know.”
“Do you?”
The question cracked harder than if Coach had yelled.
Noah stared back. Around him, gear dripped onto rubber matting. Sweat cooled into a chill between his shoulder blades. His ribs hurt. His hand hurt. His pride hurt worst of all.
Coach took one step closer. “You think they don’t know where we are right now? You think this room doesn’t have enough heat on it without our alternate captain taking revenge penalties because some idiot in red said something ugly?”
Noah’s jaw locked.
“Answer me.”
“No.”
“Then act like it.”
A couple stalls down, somebody shifted. Nobody spoke.
Coach pointed at the floor. “This team does not get to lose its mind because the crowd found a slogan. We are already under enough scrutiny to choke a horse. The only thing we control is discipline.”
Noah looked at the whiteboard over Coach’s shoulder because eye contact felt too much like taking the blow where everyone could see.
“Mercer.”
He looked back.
Coach’s expression changed by a fraction. Still furious. Also worried. Worse combination.
“I need your head,” Coach said.
Not your points. Not your body. Not your pain tolerance.
Your head.
Noah swallowed. “You have it.”
Coach held his gaze another beat, like he was deciding whether to call the lie.
Then he turned to the room and started diagramming adjustments.
Noah sat and retaped the knob of his stick with short, vicious pulls. The adhesive bit his thumb where the trainer’s wrap had loosened. Beside him, Dylan leaned down and spoke without moving his lips.
“You okay?”
Noah let out a laugh with no humor in it. “Do I look okay?”
“No.”
There was no pity in the answer. Just fact.
Noah nodded once. “Good.”
When they headed back out for the third, his phone sat facedown in the inner pocket of his suit jacket under the stall bench, dead weight and possibility.
Somewhere outside this room, there were reporters, clips, social feeds, faculty group chats, board counsel, Talia’s sharp eyes, and a whole campus ready to build a story out of the first image they got.
He had just handed them one.
The third period was worse.
St. Brendan scored five minutes in off a broken play at the blue line after Noah lost the puck on a stick battle he usually won. His thumb gave again. The Falcon winger walked in and snapped it glove side.
2–1.
The building shook.
North Lake chased after that, and Coach had specifically told them not to. Chasing made gaps. Gaps made odd-man looks. Odd-man looks made desperation. Noah knew all of it in real time and still could not slow himself enough to fix it.
He played harder, not better.
That was the humiliation too—the private knowledge that everyone calling him dependable was now watching him become exactly what Talia had warned him against. A man mistaking strain for virtue. Effort for clarity. Protection for control.
Midway through the period he hammered a Falcon clean at center, shoulder through chest, textbook legal. The crowd howled anyway. The bench came alive. For a moment he thought maybe he’d dragged them back into the right kind of fight.
Then the Falcons captain skated by on the change and said, “There he is. Knew the fake nice-guy thing wouldn’t last.”
Noah did not answer.
He wanted to. God, he wanted to.
He bit it back so hard his teeth ached.
North Lake pulled within one when Dylan buried a rebound with six minutes left. The Wolves bench erupted. Gloves hit boards. Noah grabbed the back of Dylan’s helmet and shouted something wordless and fierce into the noise.
There. That. Team first. Push.
For three shifts, they looked like themselves again.
Then a scrum in front of the St. Brendan net ended with Noah tied up under two bodies after the whistle, the Falcons captain taking one last sneaky jab to his ribs while the linesman hauled them apart.
Noah jerked free and barked, loud enough to carry.
“Are you going to call one thing on him or just let him keep acting like a cheap little—”
The rest blurred under whistles and crowd noise and the official in his face.
Bench.
Now.
He skated there shaking.
Coach caught him by the arm before he could vault the boards too hard. “Sit down.”
“He’s been doing it all night.”
“I don’t care.”
“That’s the problem.”
Coach’s eyes flashed. “No, the problem is you giving them a headline.”
The line hit like a check he hadn’t braced for.