5. Colton
COLTON
I watched her until she turned the corner.
Then I turned back to the team.
They were looking at me the way new players always looked at a new coach, sizing me up, trying to figure out what kind of man they were dealing with, whether the reputation matched the reality.
I had been on the other side of that look enough times to know exactly what it meant and exactly what it needed from me.
I let the silence sit for a second longer than was comfortable.
"Tomorrow," I said. "Seven a.m. On the ice. Not in the parking lot, not in the hallway, not almost there. On the ice." I looked at Jett specifically, because Jett was the kind of player who needed to know he was being watched. "Any questions?"
Nobody had questions.
"Good." I nodded once toward the exit. "Go home. Eat something real. Sleep."
They moved. Not scrambling, not dragging their feet. Just moved, which told me the baseline was better than I expected. Rhett was the last one out. He paused at the door and looked back at me with an expression I recognized, the kind that was deciding whether to say something.
He decided not to. Just nodded once and left.
Good instincts. I filed that away.
The hallway went quiet. I stood there for a moment in the doorway of my new office, looking at the space Victoria had just walked me through.
Drop ceiling. Desk too small. Chair that was going to last about three days before I found a replacement.
A whiteboard on the wall that still had Coach Harry's handwriting on it in blue marker, some kind of defensive scheme from a season that was already over.
I left it there for now.
I had been sitting at the desk for maybe twenty minutes, going through the schedule Victoria had left me, when I heard her heels in the hallway. She appeared in the doorway in that way she had, like she had been there for a moment before you noticed her.
"Ready?" she asked.
I set the schedule down and stood. "Yeah."
She walked me out the way she had walked me in, like she owned every room, which she did.
And she talked the whole way. Through the corridors she covered the first game schedule, the media obligations she expected me to fulfill, the community events Brynn had already locked in on behalf of the team.
Past the trophy case she covered the season ticket numbers, the sponsorship renewals that were pending, the local press contacts who were already calling for a first interview.
I said the right things. Nodded in the right places. Asked two questions that I actually wanted the answers to.
The third time she said Brynn's name I stopped hearing the sentence around it.
One handshake. That was all it was. She had slipped her hand into mine for exactly three seconds and something had moved in my chest that I hadn't felt in a long time. Not since before New York went sideways. Not since before Claire. Maybe longer than that.
I didn't know what to do with that so I filed it somewhere I wasn't going to look at and told myself it was nothing.
It wasn't nothing. I already knew it wasn't nothing.
That was the problem.
"The pre-season community skate is something Brynn set up last year," Victoria was saying, "and it did wonders for the team's visibility in the city. I'd like to keep it on the calendar if you have no objections."
"No objections," I said.
We came out through the front doors into the desert night. The parking lot was mostly empty. The air hit different than New York at night, warm and dry and smelling like nothing I could name.
She was a different kind of owner than anything I had dealt with before.
I had done my research before I got on the plane, financials, background, public record.
Old family money. No prior sports ownership experience.
On paper she looked like a grieving widow with deep pockets and sentimental reasons for staying in the game.
In person she walked like someone who had never once needed a reason to be in any room she walked into.
She had a clipboard. Not a tablet, not a phone.
A clipboard with actual paper, covered in dense handwriting.
She knew the lease terms on the scoreboard equipment and the name of the guy who maintained the Zamboni and the exact date the arena's HVAC system was last overhauled.
I had thought about owning a team once. Years ago, back when the money first started making itself clear.
The trust, the portfolio, all of it sitting there doing nothing while I collected a coaching salary I didn't need.
It made a certain kind of sense on paper.
Buy in somewhere, have a seat at the table, stop answering to men who knew less about hockey than I did.
I never pulled the trigger on it. Took me a while to figure out why.
It was the ice. Always the ice. Owning a team meant conference rooms and cap negotiations and press releases and you were still forty feet from the game at all times.
Coaching meant you were in it. You were the one making the call with thirty seconds left and everything on the line.
You were the one who watched a kid find something in himself he didn't know was there and knew you had something to do with it.
I could buy a franchise tomorrow. I didn't want to own one. I wanted to coach one.
None of that was what I was actually thinking about.
She paused at the bottom of the steps and nodded toward the bar across the street. The Hideout. Sign lit up, handful of trucks in the lot, faint sound of music and voices carrying across two lanes.
"The boys wind down there after practice," she said. "It's become something of an institution." A beat. "Brynn tends bar there some nights. You can head over if you want to get to know her and the team a bit more before tomorrow."
I looked at the sign.
Owner's daughter. First day in a new city in a job I didn’t want to blow up.
"I might stop by," I said.
She nodded once. Turned and walked back inside.
I stood there for a second, jacket over one arm, the city humming somewhere beyond the arena walls.
Then I crossed the street anyway.
The bar was loud the way bars got loud when a group of athletes descended on them.
The team was already there, same guys I’d met in the hallway an hour ago, now loud and loose in the way players got when nobody was watching them.
Rhett had a pool cue. Jett was already too loud for nine-fifteen on a Tuesday.
Moose was attempting to order what looked like an entire kitchen’s worth of food from a very patient server.
I found a stool at the end of the bar and sat down.
She was already moving when I got there, working the length of the bar with the kind of ease that came from doing something so long it stopped requiring thought. She clocked me without breaking stride.
“What can I get you?”
“Bourbon. Neat.”
She nodded once and reached for the bottle without looking, which told me she’d already catalogued where everything was. I watched her pour and set it down in front of me on a fresh napkin, clean and efficient, and then she was gone to the next person before I’d even picked it up.
I picked it up.
She looked completely different back here than she had in the hallway two hours ago.
There, she’d been standing next to her mother in a bar shirt and glasses, arms crossed, deciding whether to approve of me.
Here she was in her element, unhurried and easy in a way that people only got when they’d stopped performing and just existed somewhere.
I needed to stop looking at her.
I didn’t know why the hell them calling her ‘Bry’ grated on me so much.
“So, Coach,” Brynn said as she washed some glasses and dunked them in some sort of sanitation solution. “Where ya from?”
Ah. Casual conversation.
I didn’t lead a life that lended itself to the art.
“Grew up in New York.”
“State? Or city?”
“Doesn’t really matter with New York.” I downed the rest of my drink before I spun the glass around slowly in my fingertips. “Don’t tell the upstaters I said that, though.”
She giggled, and the sound reverberated through me like bubbles in a hot tub.
“Another,” I said as I lifted the glass for her to view before I placed it back down onto the bar.
“Count me in for another, too,” Moose said.
She smiled and went to pour. I looked over just long enough to see Moose wink at her.
“Lookin’ pretty hard into that glass, Coach,” Rhett said as he bellied up to the bar on my other side.
I didn’t have to look up to hear the grin in his voice. “Rhett.”
He clapped his hand against my shoulder. “Most just call me ‘Stone’.”
“I will never call you that,” I said as I downed the rest of my second drink.
“You and me, both,” Brynn said with a snicker as she buzzed by and plucked my drink out of my hand.
“Another!” Moose exclaimed as he slammed his glass down onto the top of the bar.
I peeked over at him. “Another what?”
Moose beamed with pride. “Drink.”
I pinned him with a look while the team snickered around us. “Another drink, what?”
Moose blinked. “Please?”
I pointed to Brynn. “Now, turn and say that to her.”
Rhett cackled beside me as Moose turned toward her. “Sorry, Bry. I’d like another drink, please.”
She smiled, and I suddenly wanted to slam Moose’s head into the bar for making her smile.
Those were my smiles.
Not his.
The fuck has gotten into me?
“Of course,” Brynn said with a playful wink before she scooped up our empty glasses. “For you, Coach?”
“Colton,” I said. I looked down at my glass. I had already had two. I wanted another but I gritted my jaw slightly. “And, no. Just a water. Or Coke, if you’ve got it.”
She smiled. “One Coke and another Viper's Kiss for the Moose, coming right up.”
Then finally, I turned my attention to Rhett. “You need something?”
He grinned as his arms folded across his chest. “You up for some pool? The team’s about to take over the tables and rack some balls up.”
I slowly peered over my shoulder toward the side of the bar and, sure enough, the team rallied around the four pool tables over there and were already tossing money into a betting pile.
The coach in me wanted to stop the bullshit.
What the hell kind of team took bets on pool games at the start of the season?
It was unprofessional, at worst, and stupid, at best.
But, if all of them were over there, then that meant…
“Nah, you guys go on ahead,” I said as I reached into my back pocket. I pulled out my wallet, handed Rhett forty bucks, and then slid my wallet back into my pocket. “Put forty on Jett for me.”
Rhett barked with laughter. “Jett!? You want to bet forty on the man who’s only won four pool games?”
I shrugged. “Then, wager on whoever you think I should. But if you lose my money…”
He clapped my shoulder and snickered as he hopped off the bar stool. “Hey, you wanna lose your money, that’s fine by me.” Then he trotted off. “Hey, guys! Coach’s got forty on Jett!”
“You hear that!?” Jett chirped. “Coach already has his tiddies in a knot for me!”
“If only your balls were big enough!” I chirped back.
The boys fell apart in a chorus of ‘oooo’’s and ‘aaaah’’s and laughter that had them clapping backs and breaking racks of balls.
Pretty soon, the team fell into a rhythm over at the pool tables that seemed almost familiar, and when I felt a shadow cloak my arm at the bar, I didn’t have to look over to know who approached me.
“They’re a good team,” Brynn said, “if a big rag-tag.”
I watched Jett sink a ball into one of the holes before a grin slid across my face. I swiveled my bar stool back toward the bar and reached for my Coke that’s ice melted a bit toward the top.
“Need a fresh one? I can get it for you,” she said.
I shook my head and took a sip. “It’s fine, thanks.”
“Mhm.”
I peeked back over at the boys before returning my attention to her. “Born and raised?”
“Hmmm?”
“Here,” I said as she dunked more cups into a hot sanitizing solution. “Born and raised? Or are you a transplant?”
Her smile told me her answer before she did. “Born and raised. Though, I left for college.”
“That’s what college is for. Degree?”
“English Lit. Did you go to college?”
I shook my head. “Dove straight into hockey professionally out of college and never looked back.”
Her smile was kind. “That doesn’t shock me one bit. You strike me as the kind of person that makes hockey their world.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
She shook her head. “My father played for the Vipers. Before they went PHL. He loved the game more than just about anything, right up until the day he—”
When she cut off her own sentence, the rest of the world fell away. I wanted to reach out and take her hand. I knew what it felt like to lose a father before his time. To bury a good man well before he deserved.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.
She shrugged and averted her gaze, returning her attention to work. “It was a while ago. I was still in middle school.”
I took another long pull from my Coke. “My father died when I was young. I never knew him.”
She sighed heavily, but her eyes didn’t return to me. “I’m so sorry, Colton.”
For a second neither of us said anything. The bar noise filled the space around us the way bar noise did, covering everything without actually touching it.
“How did you lose him?” she asked. Her voice was careful. Like she already knew it was the kind of question you didn’t push on.
“He was never really there to lose,” I said. “My mother was young. He wasn’t ready for any of it. By the time I was old enough to go looking, she told me he’d been dead for years. Some bar fight that went the wrong way.” I turned my glass slowly in my hand. “Hard to grieve someone you never had.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then, soft enough I almost missed it: “Mine was shot. Random thing. Wrong place, wrong time.” She kept her eyes on the glass she was drying. “He was just at the wrong gas station on the wrong night.”
I didn’t say I was sorry again. It felt thin in the face of that. Instead I just let it sit there between us, the way some things needed to.
“The hard part isn’t the losing,” she said after a while. “It’s that life just keeps going. Like it doesn’t even notice.”
I looked at her then. Really looked. “Yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly it.”
Even with the pity in her voice, my name on her lips made my heart thud against my chest.
I sat with that for a second. One conversation.
She was the owner’s daughter, she was a decade younger than me, and she was exactly the kind of woman who made men like me make exactly the kinds of decisions that ended careers.
I already knew she wasn’t someone I could push away and leave alone. That was the whole goddamn problem.
I needed someone like Victoria. Not someone like Brynn.
Shit.
I’m so fucking screwed.
And I hoped to hell on high, it was by her.