Chapter 13 #2
“Ten years of regulation,” Marek says, with the flatness of a man who has, in his time, used the word regulation with affection.
“The league has a clean and consistent ruling on pack-eligibility for Omega athletes, the ruling has been respected in every program in the country for the last decade, and your captain, on your countersignature, walked it across the lawn yesterday and dropped it in a bin. With two of his senior teammates piling on as the supposed rest of her pack overnight. None of which is plausible. None of which makes sense.”
“Speak the rest, Marek.”
“You orchestrated this.”
“Mm.” I let the corner of my mouth do approximately nothing.
“If you genuinely believe that is true, gentlemen, and that I have manufactured an entire packship arrangement out of thin air to bypass a league rule, you are well within your rights to escalate. The KPLO compliance office takes anonymous tips. So does the headmaster’s council.
So does, indeed, the league commissioner.
I will gladly write the email myself if you would like the cc. ”
Whitlock’s mouth thins.
“The league only listens to you, Declan.”
I laugh.
It is not the right room for it, and I am not the right man for it, and I do it anyway, short and dry and entirely without warmth.
“No, gentlemen. The league listens to me because I was the youngest head coach in its history to take an Alpha-roster team to a championship final, and I am still, at thirty-six, the youngest coach on staff at any program in this division with more than ten years of senior-tier head-coaching experience. The league does not like me. It tolerates me, because the alternative is publicly admitting that the man with the trophy case is also the man who, in your shared opinion, has lost his professional mind over the first pink-haired Omega to walk through the door.”
Marek opens his mouth. I keep going.
“What you two are afraid of, and you can correct me if I have misread the room, is that I will, in fact, be the first coach in this conference to put an Omega goalie on a televised playoff series. That she will be on national broadcast, in a crease, doing her job. That every Omega kid watching with her parents will see her and understand the door is not actually nailed shut. That the next six years’ worth of Omega applicants this program is currently rejecting at the inbox level will, suddenly, become a great deal harder to reject.
None of which, I notice, is a development either of you appears interested in. ”
“Declan.” Whitlock, dangerously soft. “Whatever saint you have decided to play this season, it is not going to work. The other half of the team is the better half regardless. Brennan is a known quantity. Voss is a known quantity. We have spent two seasons grooming that unit. You should be pouring your strategic capital into the men who actually want the program to win.”
“Sector two has the better captain.”
It comes out without effort. It happens to be the truth. Marek’s mouth thins by a degree.
“Fine,” he allows, conceding the unwinnable point.
“Kavanagh is strong. We have never said otherwise. But the simple reality is that a pink-haired distraction in his crease is going to slow him down. Slow all of them down. Disrupt the cohesion you and I and Whitlock have spent two seasons building in that house.”
“Slow him down.” I sit forward. “How, exactly, is the goaltender supposed to slow the captain down. She is not racing the play. She is not centering the puck up the ice and missing handoffs. She is standing in twelve feet of painted real estate at the back of the rink, shielding the only piece of the game that converts to a number on the board. You are talking about her as if she were a forward losing pace. She is the wall. The wall does not slow the team down. The wall is the entire reason there is a team to slow.”
Silence.
“Instead of running your mouths in my office about a goalie on a sector you do not coach,” I add, evenly, “I suggest you put your energy where it can earn you something, and that is into proving me wrong on the ice. Get your half of the team to score on her. Plenty. Publicly. Reliably. Then you will have an argument I cannot refute. Until then, you are simply chirping in the staffroom.”
Marek puts the mug down on the corner of my desk.
“Careful, Declan.” Whitlock’s voice has gone almost gentle, which is the precise register of his that I have learned to dislike most. “You can talk down to us as much as you like, and the trophies on that wall will buy you the room. But the rest of the building knows you. You are packless. You are Omegaless. The KPLO conduct revisions hit next season. You can be the youngest coach in the country with the most banners and the cleanest history, and if you do not have a name on a registry by next August, you will not be allowed near a playoff bench. So talk. Run your mouth. Save the conference. But the rules apply to you too. And they are coming.”
I do not answer. There is, in fact, no answer.
“Am I interrupting?”
The voice comes from my doorway, easy and unhurried, and all three of us turn at once.
Kavanagh is standing in the threshold with the loose unbothered posture of a man who is going to act as though he has not heard what he has, in fact, just heard.
His hair is wet from the showers. His scent reaches me a beat after my eyes do — amber bourbon, the resinous warmth of him, layered now with the faint clean note of whatever drugstore body wash sector-two stocks for the visitors’ bathroom.
He is in a clean grey hoodie and jeans, with a folded piece of paper tucked between his fingers, and his eyes hold mine for a precise and entirely deliberate beat that tells me without saying so that he caught at least the last sentence.
How long has he been standing there.
Long enough.
“Kavanagh.” I rise. “Come in. Glad you could swing by. We needed the quick meeting before the weekend on training rotations and roster jersey sizes.”
Whitlock and Marek do not move at first. Then they do, both at once, with the small choreographed shuffle of two men deciding the door was, after all, a better idea than the desk.
Jude tracks them out with a single neutral dip of the chin.
“I have everyone’s size,” he says, holding up the folded paper. “And Matteo just texted me to say Pinky is a small in the women’s jersey cut. He clarified twice. He was concerned.”
I frown.
“Pinky.”
Jude looks at me for a long, even beat, and the corner of his mouth does almost nothing, which on Jude reads loud.
“O’Shea.”
Right.
Right. Pink hair. The mess of it pulled into the high bun she lives in when she is preparing to demolish whatever has been put in front of her.
I have, in the last eighteen hours, watched her wear that exact bun in a corridor outside the admin office and in a dark kitchen at five-oh-five in the morning and in a goalie crease for six straight hours of drills, and the nickname tracks. The nickname tracks too well.
“Got it.” I lower myself back into the chair.
“Sit. Let’s get the practical out of the way so you can join your teammates before they finish whatever ill-advised post-practice plan they are already running through Hargrove.
And, for the record: I do not want to hear a single report of a frat party this weekend. Not one.”
“Understood, Coach.”
He sits. He side-eyes the doorway one more time, confirming.
The latch clicks.
Jude turns his head and looks at me with the level, full attention he usually reserves for an opposing-team film session.
“You do not have an Omega.”
Not a question. A statement, with the captain’s polite invitation to confirm or contradict.
“Not your problem, Captain.”
“Will it be.”
The question lands in the small panelled quiet of my office with a weight that is, briefly, not appropriate to the seniority of the man asking it, and yet the seniority is exactly the point.
The roles, for one strange half-second, are not where they should be.
I am supposed to be in the driver’s seat of any conversation I host inside this room, and Jude Kavanagh, who has been in that chair five minutes, has just calmly seized the wheel.
I take a breath.
“The team can survive with any coach, Kavanagh.”
He does not answer immediately. He leans back, folds his arms across his chest, and lets the silence work for him. Then he tilts his head, deliberately, and his eyes track up to my wall of plaques.
I follow the look without meaning to.
“You are right, Coach,” he allows, slow and even. “The team can survive with any coach.”
A beat.
“But we both know there are only so many coaches in this country who can get a roster to come together and play dirty enough on that ice for the whole world to want to watch. You are one of them. There are maybe four others, two of whom are retiring this year. So pardon me for asking, but losing you would not be a small inconvenience. It would be a foundational one.”
He pauses. The next part comes out quieter.
“And it looks like O’Shea is now on that very short list as well.”
The corner of my mouth, the same one Jude’s does almost nothing with, betrays me by lifting half a notch.
“Even though she hates me.”
“So I heard.”
We share a look. The look is enough. Rémi has, in his own quiet way, made sure his captain knows about a strawberry shake down a black coach’s jacket at five in the morning, and probably made sure Matteo knows, too, which means the entire sector-two wing of the house is, by now, fluent in the incident.
Nosey fuckers…
“I am not going to ask,” Jude says, mildly. “Unless it becomes a problem. So hopefully it is not a problem.”
I do not answer.
I do not answer because I do not, in fact, know whether it is going to be a problem.
The honest answer is that the entire architecture of my professional ambition this season — the entire ten-year project I have been quietly running since the morning Iris O’Shea was sixteen years old and I first saw her save a top-shelf rocket with the back of her glove in a barn in West Yorkshire — hinges on the unproblematic delivery of the first openly Omega goaltender to a sanctioned televised conference playoff in this country’s history.
If we pull that off, the doors do not get pried open. They get torn off their hinges.
If we do not, every administrator who has been quietly stalling Omega applications at the inbox level for the past decade gets to point at us and say we tried, it did not work, do not ask again.
And the dangerous, inconvenient, professionally embarrassing truth, which I will not be sharing with my captain, my colleagues, or any other living soul this side of a confessional booth I do not intend to enter, is that the unproblematic delivery part is the part I have absolutely no faith in.
Because I have known Iris O’Shea since she was thirteen years old.
And truthfully, anything with O’Shea involved, is doomed to cause trouble.