Chapter 11
FINN
Finn came off the bench in the second period and drove the right wing at a speed that made the Michigan State defenseman take a half-step in retreat before he’d decided to.
The arena cold bit at his lungs on the first stride, that crisp bite of rink air that never quite left his chest, and he used it.
The boards rattled under someone’s check behind him, the crowd noise swelling and flattening in waves he registered the way he registered weather.
Finn cut inside, drew both defenders toward him, dropped the puck to Hayes at the top of the circle without looking.
Hayes shot. The puck rang off the post, a high clean ping that cut through the noise and hung there before the crowd groaned.
Finn was already skating to the bench, reading the next shift before the current one had finished.
Weeks of this. Playing too fast and too clean and none of it was about hockey. The ice made sense in a way the rest of his life did not, and he was using it for everything it was worth.
In the press box, a man in a gray jacket leaned forward and wrote something down. Finn clocked it on his way to the bench. Kept going.
The draft was right there. Should have been the thing he wanted most. Wasn’t.
Coach Tremblay said “Good” when Finn came off. One word, which from Coach meant something.
Ashley had texted twice since the break. The notifications sat on his lock screen, and every time he set the phone down without swiping. His thumb hovered over the thread once and then he locked the screen. The old relief valve didn’t fit anymore. None of them did.
Finn took his water bottle and did not look at the operations section.
* * *
The locker room after practice smelled like rubber floor mats and weeks of accumulated gear sweat, the industrial spray they used on the boards cutting through the top of it without winning.
The fluorescents buzzed at a frequency that lived just below conscious hearing.
Someone had left a half-eaten granola bar on the bench between stalls.
Hayes or Petrov, an argument ongoing with no resolution in sight.
Finn sat in his stall and taped his stick.
He’d already taped his stick. He was re-taping it because his hands needed something to do and the blade was the most defensible option available.
The white tape came off in a long strip, adhesive pulling at the composite, and he wound fresh tape from heel to toe in overlapping passes, pressing each layer flat with his thumb.
“So,” Hayes said from the stall to his left, “there’s this girl in my econ class.”
“No.”
“You don’t even know what I—”
“You want to set me up.” Finn pulled the tape taut. “No.”
Hayes was grinning, one leg crossed over the other, shoulder pads on, looking like a golden retriever who’d found something dead in the yard and was bringing it home as a gift.
“She’s great. You’d like her. She has opinions about hockey analytics that would genuinely piss you off, which I feel like is your type. ”
“My type is people who don’t get introduced to me by their teammates.”
“That’s not a type, that’s a trauma response.”
“Hayes.”
“I’m just saying.” He held up both palms.
“Find somewhere else to be.”
Hayes found somewhere else to be. Someone floated the idea of Rick’s, the bar on Liberty the team used as a default. A general murmur of interest through the room, twenty-two guys deciding they deserved to be somewhere loud with overpriced drinks.
* * *
Finn went to the library instead. The reading room on the second floor had tall windows that looked out over the quad, the glass gone opaque by five, and the old radiators clicked in the cold.
Finn sat at a desk near the wall with his headphones on and a textbook open to a page about macroeconomic policy he’d been staring at without absorbing a word.
He turned a page. Didn’t read that one either.
The next day he did it again. The day after that. The pattern became the week.
* * *
The locker room was mostly empty by eight.
Late skate, just a handful of players staying after, and they’d filtered out.
The ventilation was louder without voices to compete with, the rubber mats drying in uneven patches where wet feet had tracked across them.
Hayes was there when Finn came in from the ice, sitting in his stall with his skates off and his phone face-down on his knee.
He’d showered already, his hair damp and pushed off his forehead.
Finn sat down and started on his left skate lace. It had been giving him trouble, the eyelet on the third row sitting wrong, catching when he pulled it tight. The waxed lace snagged and he worked it with his thumbnail, the metal edge biting into the pad of his finger.
“You’re in it with someone.” Hayes said it flat, the way he said things when he’d already decided they were true.
Finn didn’t look up from the lace. “I’m tying my skate.”
“Yeah. You’ve been tying your skate for two weeks.”
The HVAC cycled somewhere in the building, a low hum and then a click. Through the small window above the schedule board, the sky had gone flat.
“Whoever they are,” Hayes said, “they’re an idiot for letting you go.”
Finn’s hands stopped. The lace between his fingers, the eyelet catching, the mat cold under his feet. His ribs compressed.
“Yeah.” He pulled the lace tight. “Well. Their call, not mine.”
Hayes nodded. Picked up his phone. Finn finished the lace, got his skates off, went to the shower. The water ran hot and the tile walls threw the noise at him, and he stood under the spray with his head down until his shoulders loosened and his breathing evened out.
When he came out, Hayes was gone.
His phone rang. Unknown number, Chicago area code.
Finn let it ring once. Answered.
“Finn Holloway?”
“Yeah.”
“Eli Kowalski. Chicago Fury.”
Finn sat up straight. His spine went rigid at the stall. “Holy shit.”
Silence on the line. “Good holy shit or bad holy shit?”
“Good. Definitely good. Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Eli Kowalski was calling his cell phone. Eli Kowalski, whose name was on a plaque outside the rink, whose jersey hung in the corridor Finn walked through every day. “Michigan players are good people.” The voice dropped half a register. “You’ll be fine.”
The call was brief. The voice had been calm, a little dry. Finn held the phone at his thigh, the screen warm, then set it on the shelf.
Everything he’d worked for was happening. His chest hurt anyway.
Finn should go home. Instead he grabbed his gear and headed to the rink for a late skate.
The ice was fresh from the Zamboni, the surface catching the overhead lights in long white ribbons, and he pushed himself through drills until his legs burned and his lungs screamed and the only thing in his head was the next stride.
* * *
The parking lot was empty. Snowing. Finn’s breath went white.
He was halfway to the F-150 when he saw Evan.
Standing beside the truck. Coat on, hands in his pockets.
His shoulders were drawn up, the collar of his wool coat turned up, and his hair had been pushed by his own grip enough times that it had lost its shape.
On the hood of the vehicle next to the F-150, a paper cup from the building’s machine sat with a dusting of snow on the lid.
The flakes weren’t melting. The contents were long past warm.
Evan had been here a while.
“What are you doing here.” Not a question.
“I needed to talk to you.”
“So talk.”
Evan’s jaw tightened. His hands hadn’t left his pockets, not casual, braced. Whatever he’d rehearsed in the vehicle was gone.
“I’m sorry. For the hallway. For all of it.”
“You’re sorry.”
“Yes.”
“You erased me in a hallway and you’re sorry.”
Evan’s chin dropped. His gaze closed for a breath, the lines at the corners of his lips deepening.
“Do you know how long I waited for you to show up?” The thing Finn had held out of his voice in the apartment was in it now, rough and rising, his breath making short white clouds. “How many days I sat in my apartment thinking you’d realize? That you’d call, or text, or come to my entrance?”
Evan said nothing.
“You didn’t come. Not until I ended it.”
“Finn—”
“You waited until I ended it to show up.”
Evan’s shoulders dropped. His jaw went tight, his gaze wet in the lot lights, the prepared version of whatever he’d been going to say gone. “That’s not—” He stopped. “Fuck.” The word came out low, surprised. “You’re right.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I chose to be.”
Finn held his gaze. Flakes landed on his shoulders, on the bag strap. He didn’t blink them away.
“I know what I did.” Evan’s voice went low. Stripped down. “I know why I did it. And I’m not here to make you forgive me tonight.”
Finn waited.
“I just needed you to know that it mattered. That you weren’t a mistake. That you weren’t something I only wanted when no one was looking.”
“I spent years being the guy everyone was guarded around after I came out.” Finn’s voice held even as his hands shook at his sides.
“The guy teammates checked themselves around, the guy coaches made a point of treating normally, which is its own kind of abnormal. And I am not going to spend the rest of my life being the thing someone is guarded about.”
The lot lights buzzed. The flakes drifted between them.
“I don’t forgive you.”
“I know.”
“I’m angry.”
“You should be.”
Finn held his gaze for a long moment. He knew what he was doing. He knew it wouldn’t fix anything. He also knew that if he didn’t touch Evan Tremblay right now he was going to come apart, and he could be angry about that later.
“Get in the truck.”