HOME ICE (Jacksonville Admirals #3)

1. Evan

ONE

EVAN

The buzzer was a formality. I'd already checked out two reps earlier.

Half the guys had already pulled their helmets off before Coach Callahan's whistle finished echoing through the rink.

The breakout drill argument followed us off the ice the same way it always did — whoever was wrong loudest usually won, at least until the next practice gave someone fresh ammunition.

I'd heard the same argument in Detroit, in Vancouver, in Boston.

Different players, same argument. The specifics changed. The pattern didn't.

I skated off last.

Not for any particular reason. I just liked the few seconds after everyone cleared — the ice quiet, the soft scuff of my blades the only sound left in the building.

The rink had a quality in those moments, something between empty and inhabited, the cold air carrying the smell of shaved ice and the echo of the session that had just ended.

The lights were the kind of white that showed everything — the scrapes in the ice, the divots near the boards, the smear of a hard stop near the blue line that had been mine in the third drill.

I looked at it for a moment. Then I stepped off the ice.

Two weeks out meant everything got measured differently.

Not bigger. Just sharper. The half-second read you'd been making automatically all season suddenly had weight attached to it.

Small errors that cost nothing in November cost something now.

I'd been in the league long enough to know the difference between a team that understood that and one that was still learning it.

We were still learning some of it. But we understood enough.

The NHL had taken me to ten cities in eleven seasons. Enough to know the difference between a team that was ready and one that was still pretending to be.

Then Petrov's voice came through the tunnel loud enough to rattle the dasher boards, and the moment passed.

—

The locker room was already going by the time I got back.

Mason had his phone up on the shelf — classic rock, same as always, a guitar riff that had no business being this loud at six in the evening but which nobody argued with because arguing with Mason about music produced nothing.

He'd been playing the same rotation since October and the room had simply absorbed it.

That was Mason. Steady, immovable, his presence in a locker room the same quiet anchor it was on the ice.

Viktor Petrov was still mid-argument, one shin pad in his hand like a prop he'd forgotten he was holding.

He'd been going since before we hit the tunnel, and he showed no signs of resolution.

Connor Hayes sat two stalls over unlacing his skates with the patience of a man who had decided, at some point earlier in the season, that he would never again engage Petrov on a tactical point.

He had reached this decision and was at peace with it.

I found my stall and started working through the gear.

Gloves first. The right one had a small tear at the palm seam I'd noticed in the second drill — not enough to affect anything today, enough to address before the next skate. I set it aside and made a mental note.

The tape on my stick I'd want to redo before tomorrow's session.

The grip had been slightly off in the third repetition of the neutral zone sequence — the handle rotating a fraction under pressure at the moment of release, the kind of micro-variance that didn't show up in any result but that I felt and couldn't unfeel.

Eleven seasons had given me a very specific relationship to what my hands told me. They were usually right.

These things mattered more this time of year.

Small breakdowns didn't stay small. A fraction of a second in a neutral zone read.

A grip that rotated under pressure. A line change that came a half-beat late.

Everything was connected to everything else and the playoffs had a way of revealing the connections.

"If you hold the lane," Viktor was saying, his shin pad now being used to illustrate some kind of positioning concept that required both hands and a significant amount of floor space, "the whole play opens. It is not complicated."

"It opens if everyone moves at the same time," Hayes said, without looking up from his skate.

"They should move at the same time. That is the point of running it."

Hayes paused in his unlacing. Looked up. The expression was the one he'd been deploying on Petrov since training camp — not hostile, just complete in its neutrality. "That wasn't a compliment, Viktor."

From across the room, Mason caught my eye and shook his head once. I turned back to my tape.

He always went back to his tape. The wrist-work was automatic at this point — he'd been doing it since juniors — but the ritual of it was useful. Something to do with his hands while his brain ran other things.

It was a known pattern. The locker room had dozens of them — arguments dressed up as debates, rituals that looked like conflict but were really just the room exhaling. You learned to read them. You learned which ones needed intervention and which ones just needed air. This one just needed air.

Someone called out from the back of the room asking if anyone had plans. Mason said Driftwood without looking up, the way you'd read a score off a board. Flat. Factual.

I looked over at him. "Yeah," I said. "I'm in."

The tape on his wrists. The beat before he decided.

He nodded once, already back to his phone.

—

The air outside hit the way Jacksonville air always did in April — warm, thick, the air textured enough to slow you down and make you aware of breathing in a way that northern cities didn't. I'd grown up in Chicago, played in cities where April still carried the memory of winter.

Jacksonville had no such memory. It was just warm, steadily, without apology.

The back lot had the particular atmosphere of a practice facility at the end of a long day.

Equipment cases being loaded by the support staff, the training room lights still on behind the frosted glass, the cars spread across the asphalt in the patterns of people who always parked in the same spots without formally deciding to.

I found my car where I'd left it, third row, end space. Habit.

We filtered out in ones and twos, the way we always did.

Viktor had resolved the argument to his own satisfaction somewhere between the locker room and the exit, which was its own kind of magic.

Hayes had his earbuds in. Mason walked with his hands in his pockets and said nothing, which was Mason's natural state once the ice was behind him.

I fell into step beside him.

The parking lot was quiet enough that our footsteps were audible. The arena lights were cycling down behind the building. Somewhere across the lot, an engine turned over.

"Two weeks out," Mason said.

That was the whole sentence. He didn't editorialize. He didn't attach a prediction or a question. Just the fact, placed in the air between us.

"Two weeks out," I said back.

We got to the cars.

The house came back to me crossing the lot.

Not with urgency — more the way a background task surfaced when the foreground went quiet.

Contractors in and out all week, timelines shifting, decisions stacking up on a list I kept pushing to the end of the day.

Marcus had handled the site questions. That was fine. That was what Marcus was for.

Still. Bought in January, and it was April, and the place still didn't feel like anything particular when I walked into it. Big, well-built, the waterfront view doing everything it was supposed to do. Empty in a way that had nothing to do with furniture.

Natalie had mentioned something about that last week. A designer she knew. Someone whose work she'd seen featured somewhere. I'd nodded and moved on.

I got in the car and drove.

—

The Driftwood hadn't been open long, but it had already stopped trying.

That was the thing about places like this — low ceilings, weathered wood that wasn't pretending to be weathered, a long bar running the length of the interior and opening at the far end onto a deck with a direct view of the water.

The marina was visible from the outdoor section, the boats rocking slightly in the evening current.

Someone had calibrated the music to just below conversation level, which was the correct call.

On a Tuesday in April it was busy without being packed.

The after-work crowd thinning out, the dinner crowd settling in, the waterfront doors propped open for whatever breeze was coming off the river.

The smell of the water made it through the doors — something brackish and alive, the smell of the St. Johns at this hour.

I walked in behind Mason and Hayes and felt the room shift in the way rooms shifted — not dramatically, just the ripple of recognition moving outward from the door, the slight recalibration of ambient attention.

A few heads at the bar. A table near the window doing the quiet double-take.

A server who caught Mason's eye and didn't need to be asked what we needed.

One of the bartenders gave Mason a nod toward the back corner.

We pushed two tables together. The scrape of chairs. Jackets off. Drinks ordered before everyone had fully settled, one of the guys rattling off a round for the table without looking at a menu.

Viktor had ended up in the same chair he always chose, which he always arrived at through a process of deliberation that suggested he believed the outcome mattered. It always did matter to him. That was Viktor.