11. CHAPTER 11
Locke
The New York Vipers are a physical team and their home crowd is so loud, I sometimes can’t hear my teammates calling out to me. The Vipers have been making this game personal since the first puck drop.
That’s not unusual. Physical teams are physical because their coaches build them that way, because it works, because wearing down the other team over sixty minutes is a legitimate strategy and I respect it even when I’m on the receiving end of it.
What I don’t respect is the running commentary that’s been coming from their defensive corps all night—the kind of chirping that has nothing to do with hockey and everything to do with getting inside someone’s head.
Zane Nolan has been at it since warm-ups. I clocked him then and filed him away—big, rangy, the kind of defenseman who plays right at the edge of what the officials will call. He’s good. I’ll give him that. Good enough that he doesn’t need to play dirty, which means playing dirty is a choice.
I know about choices like that.
We’re about five minutes into the second period and I’ve got the puck behind our net.
Rome Davies, our other first line defenseman, runs interference for me on my left, the Vipers forecheck pressing hard.
I move it up the wall, feel the play develop, start transitioning—and that’s when Nolan’s stick comes up.
It catches me on the bottom of my chin. No clue if it was deliberate or accidental, because I didn’t see it coming. White light, immediate, and blood pouring from the gash before I’ve fully registered what’s happened.
The whistle blows and the ref calls a penalty against Nolan, but Rome takes issue with his carelessness.
There’s a reason the league has a penalty against high sticks, regardless if it’s intentional or inadvertent, and it’s because serious injury can occur.
As such, all players are required to keep the sticks below shoulder level or the height of the goalie net’s crossbar.
Rome charges after Nolan, dropping his gloves by the time I get a hand up to my face. The crowd erupts and Rome gives Nolan a lesson in what happens if one of his teammates gets hurt.
It’s not a big deal, because I’d do that for him. It’s part of our job.
One of the officials gets between them before it fully escalates, but the message has been delivered. Rome lets himself be separated without resistance—job done, point made. He skates past me on the way to the box and doesn’t say anything. Just lifts his chin once.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
A trainer appears before me and gives the cut a quick examination. “Going to need stitches,” he says and then hands me a towel to hold against the wound.
I’m escorted off the ice, back into the visiting locker room where one of our team physicians, Dr. Warrick, waves me to an examination table.
This isn’t the first time I’ve bled in a game and certainly not my first set of stitches.
It’s not the doctor’s first rodeo either.
He’s efficient and unsentimental about it.
He gets me under the light, cleans the cut, tells me it needs four stitches and gets to work.
A little anesthetic and he’s looping thread.
He doesn’t make conversation while he works and I stare at the ceiling of the medical room, letting him do what he does.
The doc smears ointment on it. “All done and ready to get back at it.”
Because as hockey players, that’s what we do. We get back out there.
“There are only three minutes left and Coach said to stay here until the end of the period.” I glance over to see Livia standing there with a look of concern on her face.
“Those stitches need to come out in ten days,” Dr. Warrick says, clapping me on the shoulder, and then he leaves me alone with Livia.
“For as stubborn as you are, I expected your chin to be made of concrete,” she says with a playful smile.
“Funny girl,” I mutter, standing up from the table and moving into the locker room area.
She follows me all the way to my cubby where I examine the fresh stitches in a small mirror.
“In case you’re wondering… chicks really do dig scars,” she says from behind me, and my gaze meets her in the reflection.
Why the fuck do I want to laugh at that?
I don’t.
“Here to run a post-concussion check on me?” I ask as I turn around to face her.
She chuckles, crosses her arms. “No. Dr. Warrick is far more qualified than I am for that. I did want to make sure you were okay.”
“Right as rain,” I tell her.
“Rome got a two-minute minor,” she tosses out.
I lift a shoulder. “He was teaching Nolan a lesson.”
“He didn’t have to do that,” she says, not being argumentative but sounding almost as if she doesn’t understand the game. “I saw the play and it was accidental.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I say, leaning against the frame of the stall. “Intentional or not, high sticks are penalized, either by the ref or by a teammate.”
Livia nods slowly as she absorbs that. “That makes sense. But the ref already gave Nolan a penalty. Why did Rome go after him?”
“Because you make sure the lesson is learned.”
She wrinkles her nose slightly. “Ice hockey is a weird sport sometimes. It’s almost… mafioso.” She puts on her best Don Corleone voice. “You mess with my family, you wake up with a horse’s head in your bed.”
I snort, refusing to let a full laugh release. “Good analogy.”
“And you’d have done the same for him?” she asks.
I blink at her in surprise. “Yeah… anybody on this team would have.”
“That’s next-level loyalty,” she muses.
I can’t decide if she’s legitimately trying to learn the game or if she’s trying to poke at me. “You’ve been around us for a few weeks, been to every game, and you’re talking as if you’re watching from the outside. You do understand this is a team sport and loyalty is inherent in that, right?”
“Of course,” she scoffs. “I’m a very keen observer.
Rome Davies has been your defensive partner all season.
He reads your positioning before you make the decision.
He covers your weak side without being asked.
And tonight when someone put a stick in your face, he dropped his gloves before you started bleeding.
” She tilts her head slightly. “That’s not a teammate doing his job.
That’s someone who gives a damn what happens to you. ”
That hits me wrong. “People give a damn until they don’t,” I say caustically.
Livia stares at me and I brace, waiting for her to push me on the vague meaning behind my words. To see if she goes back on her promise to leave my past alone.
Instead, she sighs and says, “I know that all too well.”
I look at her, confused. She’s not making a blanket statement. That’s personal experience driving her words.
And I can’t fucking help myself. I make a sound that is not quite a laugh. “You know?”
I’m not being cruel about it. I’m just… she works in a performance facility. She went to UCLA and then to grad school. Her trust issues are probably about a research paper someone published without crediting her.
She nods at me. “Yeah… I know. I was with someone for almost two years,” she says, a hint of sadness but also anger in her voice. “He was smart, charming, the kind of person who’s very good at being exactly what you need them to be right up until they aren’t.”
Her words trail off and her gaze shifts to some middle point in the room, as if lost in memory.
I want to hear more. I’m morbidly curious. “What happened?”
“I found out he was cheating.” She wrinkles her nose as if it’s distasteful to even say those words. “So, I ended it and I felt his displeasure at me confronting him in the form of bruises.”
My entire body locks tight and an irrational fury wells up inside me. The fucker cheated on her and then punished her for it? I want to pound this unknown man into the ground, but more importantly… why do I even give a fuck?
“The thing that stayed with me wasn’t the grab,” she says more firmly, her eyes clearing from the haze of a bad memory.
“It was that I never saw it coming. I’m professionally trained to read people…
I do it for a living. And I was completely blindsided by someone I thought I knew down to the bone.
” She looks at me now. “That’s the part that doesn’t leave.
Not the betrayal itself. The fact that I trusted my own read of someone and I was wrong. ”
The room is very quiet.
My chest feels like it cracks open, because that hit close to home. I don’t know what to do with it, so I don’t do anything. I sit with it, the fact that someone just described the precise interior of my own damage using a completely different story.
I don’t say that though.
“Is he why you came to Portland?” I ask..
She shakes her head. “No. I came here because Portland’s my home, but nine hundred miles felt like the right distance. He didn’t take the breakup well.”
I nod once.
She collects her tablet from the counter. The period is about over and I’ll go back out and whatever just happened in this room will get filed away under the professional relationship it technically still is.
“Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving,” Livia says, and the change in subject catches me off guard.
“So I heard,” I say.
“You’re going to Miller’s house for the get-together, right?”
She’s reminded me on no fewer than three occasions.
“I’m not sure,” I say, mainly to get a rise out of her.
“Yeah… that won’t work for me, Locke.” Livia crosses her arms over her chest. “We made a bargain.”
“I remember,” I grit out.
“Do holidays bother you?” she asks.
“They weren’t big in my house growing up,” I say, and then wonder why I admitted that to her. I’ve opened a proverbial can of worms for her to poke and prod at.
But she doesn’t, instead distracted by the team filing into the locker room signifying the end of the previous period. “I’ll see you at the team gathering and you can follow me to my parents’ place after.”
She turns her back on me, an obvious spring to her step, which means she feels like she got the better end of our collective bargaining agreement.
I pull my jersey back on and check my chin one more time.
A hand claps me on the shoulder. “All good?” Rome asks as he eyeballs the stitches.
“Yeah, man,” I reply, and then as an afterthought, “Thanks for the lesson delivery out there.”
“I got your back, bro,” he says, holding a fist out. I bump it.
Those words really don’t mean much because words are just words. Yes, he’s shown he has my back out on the ice, but it’s nothing special. It’s part of the job.
But there’s comfort in that because I know my teammates will do their jobs. I don’t have to worry about emotions or hard feelings getting in the way.
It’s like Livia said a few minutes ago. It’s not the betrayal that hurts the worst. It’s the fact you trusted your own read of someone and completely got it wrong.
Meaning… it’s your own fucking fault.
And when it boils right down to it, it’s not others I don’t trust.
It’s myself.