7. CHAPTER 7
Locke
The arena is thunderous, the Calgary Wild fans losing their shit because their team just went up by two goals and there are nine minutes left.
Calgary has been playing a suffocating defensive game that makes a comeback feel less like an opportunity and more like a mathematical problem with no clear solution.
I sit with one elbow on my knee, the other clutching my stick at mid-shaft as I watch the ice and wait for my line change.
I ignore Adam on his own bench, just as I’ve been trying to ignore him for most of the game. Of course, that’s virtually impossible given we are opponents whose lines are facing each other.
Warm-ups were the first test. We were out there at the same time, the two teams sharing the ice in a loose pregame ritual.
I had prepared for it the way I prepare for most things—by lifting my walls and locking them tight into place.
I skated my patterns and I took my shots.
I kept my eyes where they belonged, and I envisioned my performance on the ice.
I truly don’t find it difficult to cut someone out of my sphere of interest so completely. I’ve had experience with this, having played against Adam a handful of times per season over the last nine years. It’s like we don’t even exist to each other, unless a puck gets in between us.
It doesn’t mean I don’t feel him though. He was too integral to my formative life that I can’t switch off the anger just because I refuse to look at him.
My very first shift out on the ice during the game, I’d hopped out and barely made it down to the blue line before I knew he was out there with me.
Knew it before I saw it.
All these years and my nervous system still has him mapped like a threat.
The trick for me is to recalibrate him in my mind to be nothing more than a threat against the win. I have to consider him nothing more than an enemy, same as all the Wild players, and hope to fuck my temper doesn’t get the better of me.
The game has been physical, but then again… this is hockey. Calgary’s system is built on long shifts, heavy forechecking, and grinding possession along the boards until the other team makes a mistake out of exhaustion or frustration.
Every shift my line has been matched against Adam’s, we look like nothing more than two defensemen doing their jobs. Bodies against the glass, sticks in each other’s space, scrabbling for the puck.
There’s no chirping, though.
There are never words between us. In the nine years of playing against each other in this league, we have never spoken a single word on the ice.
Not one.
I don’t know if that’s his choice or mine or if we simultaneously arrived at the same decision, but it holds like an unspoken agreement.
I watch as the Wild break away, bearing down on Crosby in goal.
I can feel his focus radiating across the ice, and I watch in absolute amazement as he plucks a blistering shot right out of thin air.
I think Rowe’s done a lot of things right in putting this team together, and getting Crosby Hale as our goalie is at the top of the list. As an expansion team, we’re not considered competitive this year, but I think we might just have a good chance of making a name for ourselves.
Current ass-whipping excluded, of course.
I become aware of movement to my right and I don’t want to look, but I do anyway.
Livia Cross is four bodies down the bench from me, standing with her tablet tucked under her crossed arms. She’s watching the game with an intensity that makes me think she’s not watching the game at all but rather the people in it.
She’s purportedly here to make the players better, but I’m not buying it.
The rest of the team though… they’re getting on board.
I’ve heard them talking about it. Sure, there’s typical locker room talk about how hot she is, as if any of these guys would ever have a chance with her.
But for the most part, the guys are curious about what she brings to the table, and I know a handful have already met with her.
Arch Hewitt even stopped me in the hallway to tell me that whatever Livia had talked him through about his pregame visualization routine he felt the best he had in two seasons.
The enthusiasm is the thing that gets under my skin. Not because I think they’re wrong but because enthusiasm for Livia Cross is enthusiasm for the idea that I might be fixable, and I stopped believing in fixable a long time ago.
My eyes roam over her. She’s in full Wildfire staff gear with her hair pulled up into a ponytail.
She tracks the action with laser attention, an expression I saw the other day at the hotel gym in San Diego.
Fucking five forty-five in the morning and she asked me if the Eisenhower book was any good.
I somehow fell into a discussion with her about Roman infrastructure.
Admittedly, I was engaged and found myself kind of enjoying such a benign conversation.
Just two people talking and it had nothing to do with my penalty minutes, behavioral history or whether I was a manageable asset or a liability.
And then she asked me a question I didn’t like.
I closed off and locked tight like a bank vault door.
That was the day before yesterday and I hate that I’ve been thinking about her question since. Not because I intend to answer it but because she got close enough to ask it, and that’s a gnawing irritation that doesn’t seem to be lessening.
I look back at the ice and away from her because looking at her while thinking about that conversation is an exposure I don’t need while sitting on a hockey bench with eight minutes left in a game we’re losing.
I look back at the ice.
I look at the Calgary bench.
I look at Adam.
He’s bigger than he was at seventeen. We both are.
I think about the kid who used to steal my pregame protein bars.
The kid who could make me laugh in the middle of the worst days just by existing in the same room.
The only person who had ever made me feel like I was someone’s first choice rather than an afterthought, the way my parents made me feel.
We were absolute best friends. Hell, Adam was really my only family.
And then I think about his face in that doorway.
I think about the seven minutes left in this game and the fact that my line is about to go back out there and Adam’s will probably meet us on ice, putting us in the same twenty feet of space again whether either of us wants it.
“Donovan.”
I’m over the boards before Coach Monahan finishes saying my name.
The shift starts clean. I pick up my defensive assignment, move through my coverage reads, do the work.
This is the part that never fails me—when the game is happening and my body knows what to do.
The noise in my head goes quiet because there’s no room for it.
Fifty-three minutes of knowing Adam Belleau was on this ice and I’ve played sound, controlled, professional hockey.
Just shy of six minutes left now. I can do it.
I don’t see Adam take the ice but suddenly, we end up in the corner together.
We battle hard for the puck that’s rattled into the boards, both of us holding opposite angles.
His shoulder hits mine, my hip drives into his, and we’re scrabbling for possession with fury.
I try to muscle the puck back along the boards and his stick comes in and ties it up, locking together.
We both lean our full weight in, neither giving ground.
Normal.
This is normal hockey.
“Get the fuck off me, you motherfucking snitch,” Adam snarls in frustration.
My chest feels heavy and my blood freezes in my veins.
Those are the first words he’s spoken to me in almost ten years.
Motherfucking snitch.
He’s the only person in the world who could say those particular words and have them mean what they mean, a truth that has been between us for a decade finally said out loud in a place where I can’t walk away from it.
And while I am indeed a snitch by his definition, the fact that he’s choosing now to lay this on my doorstep causes rage to sweep through me. It’s hot, blinding, and there’s no controlling it.
Fucking ten years and he chooses now to open the door to our past.
I shove him hard.
Not a hockey shove. Not a body check or a positioning move or any of the hundred types of physical contact that are part of this game.
I shove him the way you shove someone you want to look at you, both hands on his chest, hard enough that he stumbles back two steps and his eyes come to mine for the first time all night.
He looks surprised.
Good.
He shoves me back and I smile around my mouth guard in joy that he’s willing to engage.
The refs are already whistling, and the crowd has picked up on two players who are no longer trying to get at the puck but at each other. We lock in, both of us breathing hard.
Then we lunge at the same time.
Gloves hit the ice simultaneously, which tells me he’s been waiting for this too, whether he’d admit it or not.
And then we’re into it and it’s nothing like the fight with Morrow in Portland. That fight was anger looking for a target. This is years of guilt, regret, blinding fury and betrayal—and I let it out through my hands. Violence is the truest language that has ever spoken about me when on the ice.
Adam’s good, but then again, he always was.
We grew up fighting and scrapping in practice, and when we left the ice, we scrapped in the room.
The kind of sparring that exists between people who trust each other completely.
Adam played with me long enough that he knows my tendencies and I know his, and for the first ten seconds of fists flying, we’re perfectly matched.
But I’m bigger now.
And angrier.
All of the guilt and hurt I’ve felt has been transformed into rage and I’ve been carrying this misery for years without a rewarding outlet for it.
My knuckles catch Adam under his chin and his head rocks back. I latch onto his sweater and deliver one—two—three more hard punches and he starts to sag.
I should drop him, but I don’t. I try to haul him back up so I can hit him again. The refs and linesmen swarm in and attempt to pull us apart. Someone has my jersey from behind and someone else has my arm, preventing me from landing just one more solid punch.
Unfortunately, I’m ripped away, dissatisfied with the outcome, especially since Adam seems to have regained his feet. I cut open his chin and it’s freely bleeding. He’s heaving, sucking in oxygen and glaring at me as a trainer comes out on the ice with a towel for him.
I start to turn away, but Adam isn’t finished with me yet. “You fucking traitor,” he screams.
My entire body flinches but I don’t look back. I know the bench heard it. Pretty sure the officials did too. The crowd is roaring their approval as we’re both motioned to our respective penalty boxes.
Adam jerks the towel away from the trainer, presses it to his chin, and waves off any further help. He slowly skates to the penalty box, the altercation apparently over in his mind.
It’s not over for me.
Traitor.
He’s got a lot of fucking nerve calling me out like that, and he should be taught a lesson.
I go back in, fast before anyone understands what’s happening. I lunge for him, catch him by surprise, and manage to land one more hit to the side of his helmet with my fist, hard enough that his skates go out from under him.
The linesmen are on me, each one with a grip on my arms.
“Who’s your traitor now?” I yell at Adam as he gets back on his feet.
He stares at me. His face contorts but not quite in anger. It actually looks uglier than anger and far more complicated. If I broke it down, I bet I would recognize it as the same thing that lives in my chest.
“That’s a misconduct, Donovan,” the ref says as he skates by me. “You’re done.”
Yeah… I’m done. While I’m not officially ejected from the game like I was last week, I have to sit out for ten minutes and the game will be over by the time it expires. I head off the ice as the crowd jeers me and I take stock of a new feeling.
For the first time after a fight—any fight—I don’t feel the familiar flat emptiness that follows the expenditure of rage.
I don’t feel the low sick residue of knowing the cost to my team.
It feels closer to… relief. Like a pressure that has been building since I was seventeen years old found the one valve it was always meant to come out of and some small portion of it is gone now.
Not healed. Not resolved. Not even close to either of those things.
Just… slightly lighter. Like I dropped an invisible weight I didn’t recognize was still holding me down.
Just before I step off the ice, I glance at the bench to see Livia watching me.
Not with her evaluating professional gaze but in the way a person looks at another person when they’ve witnessed something for which they don’t have full context.
In a way that transmits she understands instinctively that this incident carries more importance than the surface showed.
She heard him call me a traitor. I’m sure of it.
She saw my face when he said it.
I think about her in that gym two days ago, following a thread about Eisenhower and empires and the cost of doing the right thing, asking me a question I still haven’t answered.
Whether the rightness of that thing is ever actually enough when it costs you a piece of yourself.
She doesn’t look away and neither do I. For several heartbeats, we just stare at each other across the ice amid the noise of the arena and the events that just transpired, full of questions and answers neither of us are ready to share.
I’m the one who breaks the contact and heads toward the locker room though.