Chapter 12 #2
Across my own half of the ice, three or four of the sector-two boys exchange a look I will be replaying for hours.
The look of men registering, in real time, that the giant quiet pillar of the house has just declared a thing in public, and that whatever they had privately suspected might be going on in the back wing of the farmhouse has, with that one even sentence, become the official position of their captain’s inner circle.
Hargrove’s eyebrows have climbed up under the front of his helmet.
Petrov’s mouth is open. Linder, ever the analyst, is already nodding the small slow nod of a man arranging his future opinions to align with whichever way the room is now committed.
“Cap approved the forms yesterday,” Rémi continues, conversational, as though the listening rink is a quiet party he has been politely asked to give a brief update at.
“Headmaster stamped them. We confirmed pack status this morning. She is our Omega. She is in our pack. She will be living in our sector at the house.”
Voss opens his mouth. Rémi continues over him without raising the volume one click.
“And you do all know,” he adds, with the precise, unbothered flatness of a man delivering a piece of information for the formal record, “that our sector’s wing is scent-proofed. Has been since the renovation two summers ago. So none of you needs to lose sleep about a thing.”
It is the second part of the sentence he wants them to hear. The first is the cover.
Matteo, two seconds behind on the cue but never one to leave a beat without a punchline, ambles forward and folds his arms across the front of his pinnie.
“So don’t get all jealous about how active we might be behind closed doors, gentlemen.
” He pauses, lifts a hand in apologetic generosity.
“And I would like to apologize, with my entire heart, in advance, because the house is not technically soundproof. So if things get loud and creaky on our wing some night, fellas, do yourselves a kindness, take your earbuds and your wounded male egos to a friend’s couch. Free advice from a concerned roommate.”
The whole rink, sector loyalties briefly forgotten, comes apart at the seams.
A chorus of whistles, groans, theatrical fake-retching from the sector-one half, the sound of two sector-two defensemen skating across to playfully slug Matteo in the upper arm and tell him in unequivocal language that they did not need that image with their morning coffee.
Hargrove, my breakfast-toast-bandit from the kitchen yesterday, lets out a delighted, unhinged hoot.
Petrov drops his stick. Linder, from somewhere in the back, simply says, very quietly, “gross,” and a fresh wave of laughter goes up.
Men. Sex. The whole gender, the whole subject, all at once.
I keep my face under my mask and roll my eyes so hard the inside of my own skull objects. I am, however, biting the inside of my cheek hard enough to leave a mark, because the corner of my mouth is doing the traitor thing and there is, professionally speaking, no time for the corner of my mouth.
The two assistant coaches are not amused.
Coach Whitlock’s mouth has gone pale at the corners.
Coach Marek has elevated his coffee back to chest level like a small ceramic shield.
Both of them are looking at Coach Declan with the specific, pinched fury of men who have just been outflanked in front of their own roster and would, on a different morning, be having this conversation in private.
Coach Declan does not give them that morning.
“Settle down.”
The whole rink obeys, the noise petering out within a beat, even Matteo wiping the grin into something more presentable.
“This is confirmed,” Coach Declan says, looking square at his two colleagues and through them.
“It is not under discussion. The paperwork is filed. I have spoken with the headmaster’s office.
I have spoken with my contacts at the Knot-Pucking League Organization — with whom this college, as the entire team is aware, has been in formal collaboration since the spring on the diversity-and-development initiative. ”
He lets the acronym sit a beat. The way you let a puck sit in front of an open net.
“For the room.” He widens his eyes a fraction, taking in the whole rink.
“The KPLO funds the merit scholarships this program runs on. The KPLO has, for three years, been pushing the league to broaden the talent pool and stop bleeding qualified athletes for the small unprofessional reason that they happen to be Omegas. They wrote a brief on it last winter. Several of you read it. The rest of you should have.”
Marek’s coffee tilts. He rights it.
“One of the reasons O’Shea was approved through that scholarship pipeline,” Coach Declan continues, eyes finally landing on me across the cold, “is that her file made the case for itself. Perfect academic record. Documented competitive history with awards in three age brackets in her home country. Save percentage in her last two seasons that the analytics department had to double-check, because they thought the file was corrupted.”
Stop it. Do not let his voice do this to your face. Strap. Stick. Mask.
“The only thing that has been standing between O’Shea and a serious professional career,” Coach Declan finishes, level, “is the fact that the league regs have, until this season, been written to prevent Omegas like her from making one. That. Is. It.”
Silence on the ice. The kind of silence that, if you listen carefully, has small private arguments going on inside it.
It does not last.
“Well.” From the sector-one cluster, lazy and loud enough to carry. “Guess it really does suck having a pussy, huh.”
A snicker rolls down the line.
Matteo does not even turn his head to look at the man who said it. He simply lifts his chin in the speaker’s general direction and pitches his voice exactly the right amount.
“Sorry, Voss. Maybe learn how to pound one before you have opinions on the subject.” A beat. “Oh wait. My mistake. You’re the one with the documented preference for Alpha ass. Carry on.”
The rink loses its collective mind.
Hargrove actually doubles over, his stick clattering against his own skate.
Petrov sits down on the ice. Linder turns his back entirely and his shoulders are shaking.
From sector one, an offended snarl, a muffled curse, the sound of at least two of Voss’s teammates struggling violently with their own commitment to the bit and losing.
A third one I do not recognize is openly weeping with the effort of not laughing, knuckles pressed to his mouth, eyes streaming behind his cage.
Voss is the color of an unsuccessful tomato.
“You,” he splutters, in the direction of Matteo, “are a piece of—”
“Work?” Matteo, beatific. “Art? A truly gifted teammate? I’ll take any of those.”
Coach Whitlock pinches the bridge of his nose.
Coach Marek has finally, blessedly, put the coffee down on the boards, the better to clap his hand over his own face.
“SANTORI.” Coach Declan. Brisk. Not amused. But, if I am reading the angle of his jaw correctly, not nearly as displeased as he is performing. “That is enough.”
“My apologies, Coach.” Matteo, all wounded sincerity. “I was simply offering Voss a pointer. In the spirit of teamwork.”
“Mm.” Coach Declan does not, you will note, repeat the order.
He turns, slowly, to address the whole rink one more time. The amusement, what little there was, drains clean off his face. What is left is the granite I have known since I was thirteen years old and a man five inches taller than my own dad first told me to stop crouching so low.
“Okay. Final word on this. I am not interested in spending the entirety of my season relitigating O’Shea’s placement on this roster.
Her position is finalized. Her continued time in this crease will be determined by exactly one variable, which is her performance, the same as every man currently breathing on this ice. ”
He lets that sit.
“So suck it up, Alphas. If you cannot manage to play the sport you came here for in the presence of an Omega, that is a personal problem. This program will, going forward, in formal collaboration with the KPLO, be the first safe-space pipeline of its kind in the country for Omega and other underrepresented athletes in this league. More of them are coming. This year. Next year. The year after that.”
Brennan’s mouth opens.
“If any of that,” Coach Declan continues over him, without raising his voice or breaking eye contact with the room, “tickles your feathers — if any of you genuinely cannot stomach playing hockey alongside a person whose only deviation from the standard you grew up with is biological — the door is right there. There is no shame in admitting it. There is also no negotiation. Drop out.”
Nothing.
Not a single sound.
“Good.” Coach Declan brings the whistle to his lips. “Let’s start with stretching drills. Move.”
The whistle splits the rink.
The team moves. Forty blades begin their controlled grinding scrape, the rink filling again with the workmanlike sounds of a practice resuming on something approaching schedule.
Jude peels off toward center, Rémi toward the blue line, Matteo — of course — winking at me across the cold as he glides past and pretends he was simply looking at a different part of the goal.
Coach Declan stays where he is for one beat longer than the rest of the staff.
His eyes find mine through the cage. Across the whole length of my crease.
And it is the same look as last night in the corridor outside the admin office.
The same look as this morning at the cabinet before I lost my mind on his lapel.
The same level, unreadable, professional-and-clean attention, with absolutely nothing underneath it for me to grip onto, and I do, in the small mean private chamber of my chest, hate it.
I hate it because I know, looking at him, that I still want it.
Not affection. Not warmth. Not the kind of thing a daughter wants from a father or a girlfriend wants from a man, though God knows I have spent five years deliberately not labelling whichever of those it was. What I want, plain and small and infuriating, is his approval. The nod. The
And the worst, the absolute worst of it, is that I still cannot read him.
Five years of cold rooms and rehearsed conversations and not one of them prepared me for the simple infuriating fact that the man whose every micro-expression I once knew the way another girl might know the alphabet has, somewhere in the years I was not allowed to see him, locked the entire door.
There is no tell to find. No flicker to seize on.
Whatever Declan O’Rourke now feels about anything — about me, about this rink, about a strawberry shake down the front of a jacket eighty minutes ago — is, until he decides otherwise, a closed file.
Which means if I want it open, I will have to earn the key.
It is a problem I am not going to solve before the first whistle of my first official practice.
I take a long, level breath in through my nose. Out through my mouth. Cold air, sharp on the way down, warm on the way up. The breath drill Declan himself taught me at fifteen, the one I am too proud to abandon and too pragmatic not to use.
I tap each pipe with the toe of my stick. Left. Right.
I roll my shoulders. I drop my mask down off my forehead and clip the chin strap.
The cage settles into the familiar grid in front of my eyes that has been the architecture of every important moment of my life, and the rest of the rink, the chirps and the coaches and the impossible green eyes, all of it dims to something I can shut out.
I press my forehead briefly against the inside of the mask and whisper it, quiet, mine.
It is time to lock in.
This is my chance to shine.
I will not fuck it up. By any means.