Equipment Failure
Bennett
There’s a moment, right before things really start to unravel, where a person convinces themselves they’re still in control.
Same routines. Same plays. Same hands reaching for the same tools they’ve always used to get the job done.
And then—well. Sometimes you look down and realize you’re holding something that doesn’t belong to you, doesn’t fit you, and definitely isn’t going to get you where you thought you were going.
Now, you can call that distraction. You can call it bad luck.
Or you can call it what it usually is—your mind being somewhere else entirely, with someone who’s about to make the rest of your life very interesting.
Playlist: “I Wanna Get Better” by Bleachers
The Slammer’s bus smells like coffee, sweat, and whatever the hell Wolfe’s eating out of a container that probably came with a warning label.
Normal.
Everything about this is normal.
Guys are loud, chirping, arguing about playlists, someone in the back already yelling out fantasy stats. Coach is trying to pretend he has control over it. He doesn’t.
I should fit into this without thinking.
Instead, I stand in the aisle for half a second too long, bag slung over my shoulder, like I forgot how this part works.
“Move, Captain,” Gage grunts behind me, shoving past.
Right. Sit down. Be a person.
I drop into a seat near the middle, shove my bag under my feet, and stare straight ahead hoping that’ll make everything settle.
Every noise feels louder than it should. Every laugh hits a fraction too sharp. My brain keeps trying to pull me somewhere else—back to a locked equipment room and a decision I didn’t think through.
I drag a hand over my face and focus on my breathing until the seat beside me dips. I don’t have to look to know who it is.
“You look like shit,” he says. “Gisele-related?”
“It’s not anything,” I say.
“You ever notice how you only get like this when it actually matters?”
I say nothing.
“Because wanting something means it can be taken away.” He shrugs, easy, like he’s discussing the weather. “And you’d rather have nothing than risk losing something.”
The bus hits a pothole. Nobody else seems to notice.
“That’s not—” I start.
“The worst part?” He cuts me off, still in that same conversational tone. “Whatever’s got you looking like this? It’s still going to be there when we get back. You can’t road trip your way out of feelings, man. Trust me. I’ve tried.”
He stands, because apparently he’s said what he came to say. Squeezes past me into the aisle to go terrorize someone else.
“Shep.”
He looks back.
“If you say anything to anyone—”
“Relax.” He grins. “I’m the picture of discretion.”
He is absolutely not the picture of discretion.
I watch him drop into a seat three rows up and immediately start chirping Wolfe about the container. Normal. Easy. Like he didn’t just take a sledgehammer to something I was pretending was fine.
You’d rather have nothing than risk losing something.
I stare out the window at the highway blurring past and try very hard not to think about the way she kissed me back.
It doesn’t work.
The arena’s louder than it should be, or maybe it’s just me.
Lights, crowd, the sharp bite of cold air when I step onto the ice—it all hits at once, familiar and off at the same time, like something’s been dialed slightly out of tune. I tap my stick twice, skate a slow circle, try to settle into it.
Routine. That’s the point of it. Same warm-up. Same patterns. Same reads. Muscle memory takes over and everything else fades out.
That’s how it’s supposed to work.
I pretend I don’t know why it isn’t working tonight.
When the puck drops, I win the faceoff clean, slide it back to Holden, and pivot into position. The play moves up ice with a quick transition. Bodies shift, and lanes open and close in a rhythm I’ve known since I was a kid.
I should be ahead of it.
I’m not.
A pass comes across the slot—I reach, miss it by inches. Their winger snags it, snaps a shot on net. Gage smothers it with a glove save that he absolutely should not have had to make because I should have had that pass.
“Foster!” Coach Duff’s voice from the bench, sharp enough to cut glass.
“I’ve got it,” I call back.
I don’t have it.
Next shift, I overcorrect. Push harder, skate faster, close gaps that don’t need closing. I drive a guy into the boards harder than necessary, feel the hit echo up my arm as the crowd reacts.
The puck cycles back to me off a turnover. I pick it up at the blue line, head up, scanning—
Her hands in my shirt. The way she breathed in when I pulled her closer.
I hesitate.
One second. Half a second. The gap between the play I should make and the one I actually make.
Their defenseman reads it, steps into the passing lane, picks it off clean.
“Foster!” Coach again, louder.
“I know,” I mutter, chasing the play.
A whistle blows with a stoppage in play. I coast to a halt near the bench, grateful for thirty seconds to breathe, to reset, to remember what I’m doing and why.
Gage skates out toward the circle for the faceoff, muttering to himself the way goalies do. He passes our bench, leans his stick against the boards, and grabs a water bottle.
I’m already looking back out at the ice.
I’m already thinking about her mouth.
I reach for my stick.
I don’t notice immediately. That’s the thing. That’s the part I will never be able to explain to anyone because there is no explanation that doesn’t end with me being a complete and total idiot.
I reach for my stick, and skate back out for the faceoff.
It’s all muscle memory.
But this feels different. The weight’s wrong. The balance is off. The blade sitting on the ice at an angle that makes no sense for the way I’m standing.
I look down.
I’m holding a goalie stick.
Gage’s goalie stick. Forty-seven inches of thick paddle and hooked blade, built for blocking shots and not a single other thing on this earth, currently in the hands of the Slammers’ starting center who is standing at the faceoff dot like he’s never seen ice before.
I stare at it.
The referee skates over. Looks at the stick. Looks at me. Looks back at the stick with the expression of a man encountering a problem he has never once prepared for.
“Are you—” He stops. Starts again. “Foster, is that a goalie stick?”
“No,” I say. “It’s my special stick.”
It is absolutely a goalie stick.
The referee looks at me for a long moment with what I can only describe as professional pity.
“I’m going to need you to—”
“I know,” I say.
“Illegal equipment,” he announces, loud enough for both benches to hear. “Two minutes. Number eleven.”
The crowd reacts. Not with anger—with confusion, then laughter, because there is genuinely no threatening way to interpret what just happened. Their bench is already losing it. I can hear it from here.
I skate to the penalty box.
I don’t look at our bench.
I especially don’t look at Shep.
The penalty box attendant opens the door, closes it behind me, and then very carefully does not make eye contact with me for the full two minutes, which is the kindest thing anyone does for me all night.
I sit.
Two minutes. A hundred and twenty seconds.
Nowhere to go, nothing to do, no play to make or gap to close or puck to chase.
Just me and the glass and the insults of the Wisconsin fans behind me and the very clear view of our bench where I can see, without wanting to, Shep Sawyer in the process of the most complete physical breakdown I have ever witnessed from a professional athlete.
He’s doubled over.
Actually doubled over, one hand on Holden’s shoulder for support, the other pressed to his face like he’s trying not to combust. Holden is shaking.
Heath has turned completely away, shoulders heaving.
Even Coach Duff, who has maintained a straight face through decades of professional hockey, appears to be studying the ceiling with suspicious intensity.
Gage is back in net.
He got his stick back. Obviously. But he keeps looking down the ice at me with an expression I’ve never seen on a person before—somewhere between outrage and a disbelief so profound it’s looped back around to become almost spiritual.
A goalie’s stick is sacred. I grabbed his sacred object and skated onto the ice with it because I was thinking about lips. Lips on my lips.
I deserve these two minutes.
I deserve every second of them.
I stare straight ahead at the ice and think about absolutely nothing except the game and the penalty and what I’m going to do when I get out of this box.
Her hands in my shirt.
Okay. Almost nothing.
The clock ticks down. Ninety seconds. Sixty. The power play clears without damage, which is more than I deserve. Thirty seconds. Fifteen.
The door opens.
I step back onto the ice and skate to the bench for a line change because I am not capable of looking my teammates in the face right now and playing hockey simultaneously.
I sit down.
Shep drops onto the bench beside me fifteen seconds later, coming off his shift. He doesn’t say anything. Just sits there, breathing hard from the skate, staring out at the ice.
I wait.
“So,” he says finally, voice perfectly conversational. “Your special stick.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not doing anything.” He takes a water bottle, squirts it into his mouth. “Just sitting here. Thinking about how a man grabs a goalie stick by accident.” Another squirt. “A goalie stick, Cap. It’s four feet long. It has a paddle on it.”
“I’m aware of what a goalie stick looks like.”
“Are you though?” He turns to look at me with genuine curiosity. “Because the evidence suggests—”
“Sawyer.”
“Right.” He faces forward again, nodding slowly. “Right, right, right.”
Ten seconds of silence.
“She must be really something,” he says quietly.
It’s not a joke. It doesn’t have the shape of one. It lands somewhere underneath the chirping, underneath the penalty box and the blown passes and the two minutes of staring at the ice wishing I could disappear.
We both watch the play develop up ice, and I do what I’ve been doing since the puck dropped—try to be here, in this arena, in this game.
Try to stop thinking about the way she kissed me back.
I manage it for almost forty-five seconds before Shep leans over one more time.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, “Gage is going to be mad about this for a minimum of three years.”
I close my eyes.
“WOOOOO!” he yells, standing up as our guys score on the other end of the ice, using the celebration as cover, arms in the air, grinning at me over his shoulder like he’s won an award.
He kind of has.
I can’t wait to get to the locker room so I can text Gisele.