10. Nick
Nick
There’s a woman at the glass during warmups holding a sign that says MAKE IT OUT TO STEVE, and the worst part is I know which scar she means.
The romance is working, is what everyone keeps telling me. They mean the fake one. I’ve stopped being sure which one they mean.
Because here’s my problem, and I’ve got nowhere to put it, so it lives in my chest on the shelf where game-day nerves used to go: the kiss wasn’t fake. I planned a professional eight seconds, camera-angle aware, and then her chin came up and her breath did a thing and the plan went out the window.
The clip cuts off early. The real kiss lasted a few seconds longer than what the internet got, and I know exactly what got cut, because fine — I’ve watched the clip.
What got cut is the part where my thumb stayed at her jaw after the kiss ended.
No camera needed that. Nobody scripted it.
That thumb acted alone, and I’ve been managing it since like a bad hip.
So I do what I know. Ice baths cold enough to bleach thought. Film until midnight, defensive schemes, other teams’ tendencies, anything with rules. The staff thinks the comeback made me a monk. The truth is worse and has a green pen named Sharon.
Gwen, smelling blood in the metrics, tightens the choke chain in her friendly way.
Tuesday she books us for a puff-piece rehearsal, a national outlet wanting the story in our own words, and she sits us in a conference room to align our anecdotes, which is how I end up across a table from Frankie Delaney, professionally, with a media coach making suggestions neither of us can hear over the sound of each other.
“So the farmers market,” Frankie says, straight-faced, reading Gwen’s draft. “Where you, and I’m quoting the document, ‘reached for the same heirloom tomato.’”
“No.”
“It’s adorable, Nick. It tested adorable.”
“We met on a plane.”
“The plane is established, we need a second-date texture moment—”
“You cried at the rental car counter because they gave away the compact,” I say. “That’s texture.”
Her mouth falls open. The media coach looks up. Gwen’s pen stops moving.
“That never happened,” Frankie says, thumbnail rising, and it didn’t, it’s June, it’s chapter nine of her own book, and she knows I know it, and the point lands the way I fired it: I read you too. Two can play the archive.
“My mistake,” I say. “Different tomato.”
She declares war with her eyebrows and spends the next hour going in every direction, inventing a version of me who whittles, testing whether I’ll flinch at the word boyfriend, asking the media coach with total sincerity whether the outlet would prefer the story where I fixed her car or her sink, and I sit there matching her volley for volley with six words for her every sixty, and the media coach eventually closes the laptop and tells Gwen, in the tone of a doctor delivering twins, “Don’t coach this. Whatever this is, don’t touch it.”
Whatever this is. The city’s phrase. Everybody’s got it but the two of us under contract to have it.
Wednesday, the kid corners me at my stall with his phone, and my stomach drops on reflex, because that’s what phones have the ability to do to me now.
“Cap. Watch this. Watch what I said.” It’s his media scrum from the morning skate, some out-of-town columnist fishing, asking Rory whether the veterans worry the off-ice storyline is a distraction.
And the kid, twenty years old, on camera, doesn’t even blink.
“Cap’s the reason I know what pro looks like,” video-Rory says.
“He does everything right. Been watching him do everything right since I was nine. The book people love him because he’s exactly what it says he is. ”
Rory looks up at me, hopeful, wanting to have done well.
“You did good,” I tell him, and he glows off toward the showers, and I sit there with what he said doing structural damage.
Exactly what it says he is. The kid built his whole professional spine out of a man who does everything right, and that man has a stint in the desert in him the kid knows nothing about, and now that man is also running a scripted romance the kid is out there defending as gospel.
The myth was always holding weight. I knew that.
What I didn’t count was how many floors got built on it while I wasn’t looking, and how many of them have a twenty-year-old sleeping inside.
If the season goes wrong, I lose a contract. If the truth goes wrong, I take everything the kid believes in down with mine.
Micah finds me on the bike after, everyone else gone, and stands there in street clothes with his keys in his hand, watching me pedal nowhere.
“Third period Saturday,” he says. “Face-off in their end, TV timeout before it.”
“What about it?”
“You looked at the family suite.” He jingles the keys once, a slow-motion goalie shrug. “Eleven seconds. I had nothing else to watch.”
“I was checking the clock.”
“Clock’s at the other end.”
“Then I was checking the suite,” I say, which is the problem with a nineteen-year friendship: he knows when I’m lying. He nods, satisfied the way he gets when a save was clean, and leaves without telling me what to do about it, because he probably doesn’t know either.
Saturday I score in the second, an ugly one, a rebound whacked out of the air, what my father called an honest goal, and the building does its roar and the gold plane does its lap on the jumbotron, and my legs take me through the handshake line of gloves at the bench, and then, before I even notice, my eyes go up.
Suite level. Glass. A woman on her feet with her hands over her mouth, clapping wrong, clapping early, clapping like the metric is joy, and even from the ice, even at speed, even with eighteen thousand people between us, I can see she isn’t performing anything, because there’s no camera on her, there’s no camera anywhere near her, but she’s up anyway.
For me. Nobody staged it. I have the whole schedule; I’d know.
I look away first. New rule, mine, unwritten: don’t look at the suite.
It’s containment, same as the ice baths, same as rule three, same as every fence I’ve ever built around every appetite that could end me.
I skate to the dot and take the draw and win it clean, and if you watch the tape of the next shift, and I have, you can see number 19 glance up at the suite twice more before the whistle.
The fences are fine. It’s the fenceposts I’m starting to worry about, because they’re set in a man who keeps walking over to check the view.