3. January 17, Monday #2
The conference room was small, over-cooled, and somehow always smelled faintly of dry-erase markers and stale coffee.
Ilya took the chair beside Bobby at the long dark table while the coaches and staff settled into their usual positions.
At the far wall, a whiteboard was already covered with names, arrows, matchup notes, and enough crossed-out ideas to suggest everyone had started disagreeing before the meeting officially began.
Coach Montgomery stood at the front with a marker in one hand and the expression of a man who was pushed in two different directions by management.
Ilya and Bobby were there, technically, to represent the room the coaches often forgot existed: the one where the players were actual people and not just stats with sticks.
It had become necessary.
Montgomery wasn’t evil. He wasn’t even stupid. But he had a remarkable ability to miss emotional context until it started costing him points in the standings.
After the Ty Daniels mess, everyone became more careful.
Or, more accurately, Bobby and Ilya had.
“The second line,” Montgomery said, tapping the board. “What’s going on there?”
Bobby sat back, ankle crossed over his knee, expression blank. “Just an off night.”
“Mm.” Montgomery’s mouth flattened. “Christian’s distracted. Tommy’s fighting too much. Jason looks caged. That’s not one off night.” A deep crease formed between Montgomery’s brows as he listed the concerns.
Ilya kept his face neutral. He could feel Bobby doing the same beside him.
“Something going on there we need to know about?” Montgomery’s sharp gaze shifted between them, unreadable but intent.
“Christian’s dealing with personal stuff,” Bobby hedged.
“What kind of personal stuff?” Montgomery scowled like it was an affront to even mention that there was life off the ice.
“Girl problems,” Ilya added, trying to be as vague as possible.
Montgomery’s eyes cut to him. “And the other two?”
“We’re not sure yet.” Ilya shrugged, keeping his voice casual. They were working on it. He had theories about Jason, concerns about Tommy, and a growing list of people on this roster who needed one night of decent sleep and one honest conversation before they started detonating in weird directions.
“You gonna figure it out?” Montgomery challenged.
“We’ll talk to them,” Bobby promised.
Montgomery exhaled hard through his nose and turned back to the board. “Fine. Then who are our fallback options if they can’t get their heads on straight?”
That kicked off twenty minutes of the usual debates.
“We need more offensive pressure,” an assistant coach campaigned, leaning forward. “We’re too passive in transition.”
“That’s not systems,” another shot back. “That’s personnel. You don’t tweak drills, you change pieces.”
Another assistant coach, Scott, vibrating with caffeine and sincerity, renewed his yearlong argument. “We should be mandating sports psych for every player in the league. Whether they like it or not.”
The other coaches all started shaking their heads, already protesting their reasons why that wouldn’t be feasible or wise.
“We’d be preventing breakdowns!” Scott fired back immediately. “Improved mental health could make a huge difference.”
Montgomery glanced at his other assistant coach, Dennis, and they rolled their eyes in unison.
The whiteboard started filling anyway—names appearing, circling, getting crossed out, rewritten in tighter handwriting.
“Move him up or move him out,” Sam, their GM said.
“That contract won’t move.”
“Then it’s a buyout conversation.”
Trade deadline season had a way of doing this—turning every suggestion into movement, every name into a decision that couldn’t stay hypothetical for long.
It hung over them anyway, unspoken but constant, like pressure behind the eyes.
“Then what the hell do we do?” Montgomery demanded as Sam vetoed another name with a sharp swipe of her marker.
Silence settled.
Ilya looked at the board. Then at Sam. Then back at Montgomery. Well. It couldn’t hurt to say it. “What about Mitch Collins?”
The room shifted. Not dramatically. Just enough. A glance here. A lip press there. The kind of hesitation people used when they thought they were being subtle.
Montgomery planted one hand on the table. “Mitch is a great player. Fantastic player. But we’ve got a strong first line already, and here he’d likely land second or even third. I’m not sure he’d want to leave his role in San Jose to be back-burnered here.”
“That’s a copout, and you know it,” Casey said from halfway down the table.
A small silence followed.
Interesting.
Montgomery closed his eyes briefly, then reopened them with visible effort. “He’s potentially problematic,” he hedged.
Casey looked like she wanted to keep pushing, but Montgomery continued.
“We’ve discussed him before. There’s his history of partying too hard, showing up in police reports, being in places he shouldn’t be during the season, and generally acting like consequences are for lesser mortals.
” He looked at Ilya. “We have a younger room now. I’m not eager to import that into it. ”
Distaste moved through Ilya, sharp and immediate. “Look,” he said, leaning forward, both feet planted on the floor, “Mitch likes to have a good time. He gets loud. He’s reckless sometimes. Fine. But there are worse hobbies than edibles and bad judgment after a win.”
Scott cleared his throat. “He’s still in a lot of police reports.”
“Usually adjacent to the problem, not causing it,” Bobby said smoothly.
Scott gave Bobby a look and kept going. “He’s still always there. At bars, at fights, at situations that become someone else’s cleanup.”
“He’s loyal,” Ilya insisted, more sharply than he intended. Then, after a beat, “Sometimes in messy ways. But loyal.”
The room stayed quiet.
Ilya looked at the whiteboard, but what he saw was a dingy apartment kitchen in Boston, cheap linoleum, and Mitch at twenty-two, furious and terrified and refusing to let Ilya sink quietly.
Ilya switched to happier memories. Though, happier was maybe not quite the right word.
“In college,” Ilya said, “an assistant coach was pushing to have my scholarship pulled. Mitch found out before I did. He stormed into the office while they were packing my locker and said he was gone if I left.”
Scott frowned. “Pretty cocky for a college recruit.”
Ilya kept his voice flat. “For a guy who could have left and gone pro the year before if he wanted, he was a pull for them. And they knew it.”
The room went still.
“He fought for me,” Ilya said. “And absolutely would have left if they kicked me out. It was reckless and stupid and inappropriate, but it was loyal. He’s the reason I’m here today. The reason Kira is here today.”
A few of the coaches shifted. No one interrupted.
“He’s not neat,” Ilya conceded. “But he shows up. You want to talk about locker-room loyalty, there it is.”
That was not the whole truth of Mitch. It probably wasn’t even the fairest version.
Mitch showed up hard, loved hard, took up oxygen, and sometimes made a mess of the room while doing it.
But when Ilya thought about the places his life could have ended if Mitch hadn’t dragged him out of them, “problematic” wasn’t the word that came to mind. Necessary was closer.
He sat back a little and tried for lighter.
“Just don’t take the C off my sweater and give it to him. He’s one step ahead of me in enough things already.”
A few quiet laughs broke the tension.
Not Bobby. Bobby just looked at him with the weary expression of a man who knew exactly how much history lived under that joke.
Fuck.
Montgomery clapped once and straightened. “All right. We’ll revisit it.”
The meeting shifted on.
They ran through the rest of the usual list of human complications that eventually spilled onto the ice if no one paid attention early enough: a sick parent, an engagement, a dead cat, an unplanned pregnancy, a custody battle one player was trying very hard not to discuss.
Montgomery liked to know the outline now, ever since learning the hard way that “quiet” and “fine” were not, in fact, synonyms.
Beside Ilya, Bobby shifted his leg under the table and took in a controlled breath through his nose. Small movement. Barely noticeable. Unless you were looking for it.
Ilya’s eyes cut to him.
Bobby’s expression didn’t change, but when he glanced back, there was a flicker there. A grimace. Gone just as fast.
Shit.
Was his leg bothering him?
Bobby had a gift for carrying too much too elegantly. The guys came to him because he made hard things feel survivable. Which usually meant he forgot he was allowed to need anything himself.
Ilya made a mental note to corner medical after the meeting. Or maybe Kayla, if this was more stubbornness than injury. As a psychologist, she had a way of getting inside a player’s head without making him feel flayed open afterward.
The thought of Kayla brought Zoey with it, because apparently his brain was a vindictive little bastard.
He stared at the notes in front of him and tried to listen while the conversation moved to practice rotations, but his thoughts had already gone elsewhere.
Zoey.
Years ago, she became an annoyingly permanent fixture in his head.
She’d been quieter these last few years.
More careful. Harder to reach. Their friendship thinned from easy and constant into something polite, sporadic, and always slightly off balance.
He still wasn’t sure when the shift started exactly.
He only knew he’d felt it while it happened and done absolutely nothing about it.
Then the divorce happened.
And suddenly everything between all three of them—Zoey, Mitch, him—felt like a room full of broken glass no one was willing to walk through.
He was still allowed to be friends with both of them. Probably. In theory.
But theory was cheap. In practice, every possible move felt loaded.
Text Zoey, and it might look like opportunism. Disloyalty. Bad timing dressed up as concern.
Stay silent, and he was one more man in her life deciding distance counted as kindness.