Chapter 8 #2
Because here is the part I do not say out loud: I have never been someone who admits to lonely.
Lonely was for girls in the kind of movies my dad would have switched off after twenty minutes, muttering about wet paint.
Lonely was for women who did not have a glove hand and a goal crease and a town that, however badly, knew their name.
I have spent my whole life with a team somewhere in the next room. That has always been enough. Or it has always been close enough to enough that I could not tell the difference.
And then I met Matteo Santori, and felt, in that one stupid suspended second, like I was the only person in his orbit. Like there was a small private room being built in the air between us, and I had a chair in it.
I have not been able to put down the feeling since.
It is a problem, O’Shea.
It is a very specific problem with a name and a jersey number.
Maybe that is what is doing this.
Surely this bench is fine and I have simply gotten used, very fast, to the temperature of being looked at by someone who wants to look. Or maybe I am, in fact, more tired than I have allowed myself to be.
Tired of the constant fight.
Tired of being the only one of me in every room.
Tired of arriving in a new country and discovering the bureaucracy here has the same words for no that the old bureaucracy did, just polished to a higher shine.
I dig my own phone out of my coat pocket.
The screen flickers on. One bar of service appears, holds long enough to insult me, and dies. Reappears. Dies again. The little wheel of trying spins on the home menu and refuses to commit to anything more useful than that.
I sit there in the cold and watch it try.
And I wait.
Because somewhere in the back of my chest, against every cynical instinct I have ever owned, a small idiot version of me is still waiting for it.
Pete. Lonnie. Coach Daniels. Anyone. A landed safe? A how was the flight? One single check-in, posted across the ocean from the town I have just spent my whole life trying to earn my way out of, to confirm that the absence of me has been noticed.
Nothing comes through.
The bar holds. The notifications panel is empty. No missed calls. No texts. No tagged photos from the farewell party where Pete cried into a Solo cup.
Not even a forwarded link to one of Lonnie’s godawful TikToks.
The signal dies again. The wheel spins.
Were any of them genuine?
The thought lands in my sternum like a slap, and the embarrassing part is that I have to actively decide not to cry on a public bench about it.
Iris O’Shea does not cry on benches.
I’m a goalie with a sense of humor and a long established policy of being too pissed off to weep about a town she was always going to outgrow anyway…
I blink hard at the maple. I count its branches. Count the cars in the lot behind it. The panes of glass in the window of the building across the path and refuse, with the discipline of a woman who has trained for it, to let a single drop fall.
Tonight will be the worst of it.
That is the part I see coming and can already taste.
The temporary placement room they’ve booked me into is somewhere in the freshman quad.
A bed. A desk. A window. I will sit on the bed in my pyjamas, the phone will not work, and I will doom-scroll TikTok on the dead-and-resurrecting bars I do have, watching strangers tour their cozy two-bed apartments with a candle lit in every room and a partner sleeping just off-screen.
And truthfully, I will hate, with a precision usually reserved for opposing wingers, how much I want someone to text.
Not even about anything. Just to say my name out loud in a sentence that does not need an answer.
It is not a big deal.
It is, though. Quietly. A lot of this is.
I have spent five years training myself to lower the bar.
Telling myself the chirps were affection.
Telling myself the silences were busy.
Telling myself a small frozen rink in West Yorkshire would build me bonds that did not need maintenance to survive a postal code change.
The truth, sitting on this bench with my dead phone, is that I built my whole social architecture on people who were standing in the same room as me, and the building of it apparently does not have a door that opens from anywhere else.
I have to blink three more times before the maple stops swimming.
Then something vibrates.
Not the pocket with my own phone. The other one. That I had forgotten about, or at least tried to ignore the fact that Matteo handed me a working device an hour ago, and I have spent every minute since acting as though I do not own one.
I pull it out.
The screen lights, crisp, clear, and on a network that is doing its job.
One message, freshly arrived, from a contact saved as Jude (Captain).
Chin up. You look odd when you seem sad.
I stare at the words for a full three seconds before my brain registers them as English.
Then I lift my head.
And there he is.
Across the path, propped against the brick of the building opposite mine, one shoulder set, one ankle crossed over the other in the easy posture of a man who has been there long enough to have settled in but does not particularly want me to know how long.
His own phone is in his hand. His hood is up. The amber-and-bourbon warmth of him does not reach me at this distance, but my memory supplies it anyway, low and steady, and the rest of him assembles around it. The dark blond hair shoved back. The twice-broken nose. The furniture shoulders.
The captain of sector two, watching me from across a quad with the same patient attention he uses to watch a faceoff.
Our eyes lock.
He does not move or wave. He simply tilts his head a quarter inch, the way a person does when waiting for an answer, and lets me decide what to do with the fact of him.
My pride, the small mean part of it that has been holding me together for the past forty minutes, makes a complete recovery in under a second.
I nod at him.
Once. Slow.
Then I look down at the phone in my hand and type with thumbs that are, I notice with private interest, no longer threatening to shake.
Aren’t you supposed to be doing drills with Matteo?
The three little dots appear almost immediately. I do not let myself enjoy how fast they came.
Did my drills. Santori was the one playing hookie with a certain new goalie.
My mouth crooks.
Bet he said it was worth it.
The dots dance. I glance up.
And I catch him smirking. Small. Barely a line.
The kind of expression a less attentive woman would miss entirely, but I am, on a professional level, paid to read movement that no one else can see.
The corner of his mouth has lifted, and his thumb is moving across his screen, and the captain who has not allowed himself a single visible reaction since the moment I walked into his rink is letting one slip on a bench across the quad.
I am intrigued he phrased it exactly that way. Came to see for myself.
Bold of you. Although, Captain, leading from the front. Expected, I suppose.
I am the captain. Of course I lead.
Cocky looks good on you, Kavanagh.
There is a beat. A longer one.
Long enough that I think I have overplayed it, and the small mean part of my pride starts loading a retraction, and then the dots come back and the next message arrives with the unhurried gravity of a man who has decided exactly how he wants to receive a compliment.
Glad you like it, O’Shea.
I look up.
He is smiling. Properly. Not the line. The full mouth.
Across thirty feet of quad and a thinning maple, Jude Kavanagh is letting me have a real smile, and the warmth of it lands in my chest as physically as a hand pressed flat against my sternum, and the bench is, abruptly, not the worst place I have ever sat.
So, the next message reads, what’s the plan?
Plan?
Dorms. Or what.
I think about it. I think about the paper folded in the front pocket of my duffel.
About box one, box two, and the red-pen note in the margin.
About a sector that has refused me, a sector that has not been asked, and the captain of the second sector, currently standing across a quad waiting to see whether I am going to be honest with him or charming.
I look up to do both.
He is gone.
The brick wall stands empty. The patch of pavement where one ankle crossed over the other is filled now by a girl in a green scarf going the other way, and I sit on the bench with my mouth half open and a freshly typed message that has lost its audience, and I am, for one full beat, comically annoyed.
Are you kidding me?
My pout assembles itself entirely without permission.
“You need help with your luggage, or what?”
The voice arrives at my back, low and amber-warm, and I do not jump.
I want it on the record that I do not jump. I turn, slow and composed, like a woman who has known the whole time that a captain who watches faceoffs the way Jude Kavanagh watches them does not announce his approaches.
He is standing behind the bench.
Arms crossed. The hood pushed back now, so I can see the full face that has so far only been visible from across a rink and across a quad, and up close, he is even more settled than the distance suggested, the kind of broad, steady physical presence that takes up the space behind a piece of furniture and makes the furniture feel smaller for the occupancy.
His scent reaches me on the next breath.
Amber smoke. Bourbon vanilla. The low warm spice that, on the ice, read like a kitchen at the exact moment dinner is ready, and at conversational range reads like the kitchen has been your kitchen for so long you no longer notice you are hungry until you walk in.
It curls around me, settles, and the small private part of me that has been on its hind legs all afternoon lies down.
He is going for serious, the closed arms and the level mouth and the no-nonsense weight of his stance, but I clock the rest of the picture.
We are in a public quad.
He is the captain of the elite hockey program at the most-watched college in the state, and he has just trotted halfway across the campus to lean on a wall, then walked the rest of the way across it to plant himself behind the bench of the pink-haired Omega the other team has spent all day not shutting up about.
The serious persona is a stage.
The seriousness of whether to help me or not…is real.
I tip my head back further to look up at him.
“Uh … well,” I say, and my own voice comes out smaller than I would like and crooked at the same corner of my mouth he was smirking from a minute ago, “there’s a dilemma.”
Let’s see what happens when I trust in my new Captain.