Chapter 19
Bare Minimum
~IRIS~
“My fucking God, is this absolutely necessary.”
I have asked the question with my whole chest at four-oh-two in the morning, in full gear, on a sheet of ice that has been Zambonied so recently that the surface still has the faint humming sheen of cold water that has not entirely decided to be a solid yet, while staring — glaring, technically, my mother would call this glaring — across the empty rink at the man who has been the plague of my existence since I was thirteen years old.
If he had not vanished from my life on a Wednesday five years ago, would I be standing here at four in the morning. Would my entire athletic trajectory have routed itself through this exact pre-dawn ice at this exact college on this exact continent. Hard to say.
What I am willing to confirm: I would, by any sane scheduling logic, still be in a bed somewhere. Asleep. Like every other functional adult human in the postcode.
Coach Declan stands at center ice with his arms folded over his black jacket, his breath plumed in the cold, his green eyes giving me the precise level professional look he has been issuing me at the front of every practice for the past two weeks.
He is dressed exactly the way he was dressed nineteen hours ago, when I robbed Saint Aldwin’s star forward on the glove side in overtime and he gave me an eight-word sentence in a hallway.
He smells, even across thirty feet of cold, the way he always smells.
Cedar. Black coffee. The bracing cold-on-wool of an Irishman who has been awake longer than the woman in front of him.
“Your performance last night was good, O’Shea.”
Oh.
Oh, now we are willing to say it. In a private rink. At four in the morning. With no witnesses. That is convenient timing, Declan.
“But there is a number of things,” he continues, ignoring whatever my face is doing, “that we need to clean up before the road game on Friday. Hip mechanics. Recovery angle on the post-side. A couple of habits I have been watching you carry that we are going to break, with kindness, this morning.”
“Could this,” I demand, gesturing with my stick at the empty arena, “not have happened during actual practice hours, like a normal coaching session. Or are we doing this at four in the morning because we do not, in fact, want to be associated in a professional manner with the trending Omega goalie currently spawning new hashtags on the platform of public discourse.”
He gives me a look.
It is a level look. A professional look. The exact same look that has, in the past two weeks, communicated to me approximately fourteen things he is not willing to say out loud, and I am, at this hour, frankly not in the mood to parse it.
“Let us get to the point.” I huff. “I have a date.”
His eyebrow arches.
It is a small thing. The fractional climb of a single eyebrow over an otherwise unmoved Irish face. But I clock it, and I clock him clock me clocking it, and the small spiteful private chamber of my chest that has been carrying the corridor-nod for nineteen hours lights up like a vending machine.
Intrigued. Or bothered. Or both. I do not care which one. Either is a victory.
“A date with whom.”
“None of your concern, sir.” I hum it. Genuinely hum. I pull my face cage down with the satisfying small clack of plastic against plastic, drop into my stance, and tap the toes of my pads with my stick. “Let us get this shit over with.”
He does not press it.
That is one of the things I have always known about Coach Declan O’Rourke, and one of the reasons the absence of him for five years was, on balance, harder than the presence of him would have been.
He does not press. He does not chase. He does not ask twice.
He files the information into whatever quiet inner ledger he has been maintaining on me since I was thirteen years old, and he gets on with the work.
He gets on with the work.
Forty minutes of butterfly-recovery drills.
Twenty minutes of post-integration footwork.
A long block of low-shot tracking with the puck-spitter, the small mechanical contraption that throws pucks at me on rotation and that I, in my private opinion, want to take out behind the dumpsters and shoot.
He calls his corrections from the blue line in the same even pitched voice he has been calling them in since I was fifteen.
“Hip, O’Shea.”
I drop.
“Hip.”
I drop better.
“Hip, O’Shea.”
I lift my mask off my forehead and skate two strides toward center, because if he says the word hip to me in that tone one more time before I have had coffee I am going to come out of the crease and physically aggress him.
“Coach.”
“Mm.”
“If you are going to keep being a nagging broken record of an ass about my left hip, you can come fix it. Personally. With your hands. Like a professional coach who is invested in the corrected outcome of his goalie’s mechanics.
As opposed to, say, standing on the blue line at four in the morning and barking the same syllable at a person who you taught the syllable to. ”
Long beat.
He looks at me. He does not move. He does not, of course, come over.
Of course.
“Break,” I announce, to the empty arena. “Five minutes. I require hydration and a reason to live.”
I skate to the home bench without waiting for permission.
The home bench at four in the morning smells of cooled rubber, the slow dissipating ghost of last night’s salt and adrenaline, and the very faint chemical pine of the cleaner Jimmy ran along the boards at midnight.
My pads, dropped against the gate of the bench, smell of leather and yesterday’s overtime and a perfume I do not, on first whiff, recognize as mine because my own scent has gotten denser over the past forty-eight hours in a way I have, against Rémi’s gentle morning prompts, declined to interrogate.
I lift my water bottle. I squirt a cold arc of it directly through the cage of my mask onto my forehead and let it run down. I exhale.
Then I pull my gloves off, drop them on the bench, and reach for my phone.
Three texts. All from the same source.
Where is my Pinky. I am owed cuddle time.
Pinky.
Hello. I am being ignored. This will be reported to the proper authorities.
My mouth does the traitor thing at the corner. I roll my eyes for the benefit of nobody watching, and type back.
We have never once cuddled, Santori. Your lies will not work on me.
My bed is always open for you, Pinky. Always.
Funny.
Where are you?
Coach said I need to work on my A game or whatever, so I am on the ice. Dying. Slowly. Picturesquely. Send help.
The typing bubble appears. Disappears. Comes back. Vanishes again. Comes back.
Did you eat.
What is this you speak of, sir.
I know it is going to piss him off. That is, frankly, the point.
Matteo Santori has, in the past two weeks, made it the cornerstone of his identity to monitor my caloric intake, my hydration, my sleep cycle, and the general operational status of the small biological machine I am driving around.
He has noticed, with the precision of a man auditing a tax return, that I have a tendency to survive on iced tea, protein shakes, and the spite of any man who has ever underestimated me, which is not, per the medical literature, a balanced diet.
I am going to start punishing you for not prioritizing yourself, Pinky.
Haha. Throw me over your lap and slap me, Daddy.
I send it before my pride can recall the message.
I stare at the screen. I watch the typing bubble appear.
I watch it disappear. I watch it reappear.
I watch it disappear again, this time for a longer beat than the last one, in the precise way the typing bubble vanishes when the person on the other end of it has decided that whatever they were about to type is going to require a quieter room and a sit-down.
Oh. Oh, that landed.
I snicker into the open cage of my mask, more pleased with myself than I have been at four in the morning in approximately ever, and I put the phone face-down on the bench, and I turn to grab my gloves.
I walk straight into Coach Declan.
The man is, somehow, off the ice and over the gate of the bench and standing directly within my personal radius without having made one audible sound, which is, I am going to assume, a thing he has been able to do since I was fifteen and that I will need to ask Rémi to investigate at a later date.
I blink up at him.
“Excuse me, why are you off the ice. Why are you off the ice and in my personal space. Why are you off the ice and in my personal space at four-twenty-seven in the morning when I am attempting to hydrate, sir.”
He says nothing.
His green eyes drop briefly to the phone on the bench. Up to my face. Down to the phone. Back to my face. The professional Irish granite has gone, for one strange suspended half-second, the smallest fraction less professional than I have seen it in five years.
“So,” he says, very quietly. “You are actually being serious with your pack.”
The way he says the word pack is the way another man might say ex-husband.
I cross my arms. I attempt to cross my arms. The chest protector and the pads and the bulky stupid bib of my hockey gear make crossing my arms a functionally impossible gesture, but I manage a credible approximation, and I lean into it.
“Why is that any of your business, Coach.”
“O’Shea.”
“Do you want to join in, perhaps? Wait in line as the next bidder for a temporary packship slot? I can put you down on the waitlist. Henderson at admin loves a waitlist.”
Something behind his face moves.
It is not, by any visible measure, a large movement. It is the tic of a jaw muscle, the kind of thing you only catch on a person you have spent your adolescence cataloguing the micro-expressions of. But it moves, and I clock it, and I am, abruptly, no longer entertained.
“You are still angry.” Stated.