12. Colton
COLTON
I’d left her doorway and walked back down the hall, and I’d stood there for longer than I was going to admit before I moved.
She had been gone twenty minutes by the time I made it to the ice.
I'd sat at my desk for ten of them staring at a schedule I wasn't reading. Spent the other ten changing into practice gear and reminding myself why I was here.
First practice. Twenty-three men waiting. That was what mattered right now.
I stepped out through the gate and pulsed my whistle twice.
They snapped to.
Good reflex. That I could work with.
Even though I’d met them in a hallway Friday afternoon, and saw them at the bar that night, the ice was where I would find out actually what kind of team I had
“Tighten it up,” I said as I moved along the boards. “You’re sloppy on the left side. Jett, your weight’s back again.”
Jett shifted forward immediately. “Sorry, Coach.”
“Don’t apologize. Fix it.”
I moved them through the first set of passing drills, watching form, watching footwork, watching where their eyes went when the puck wasn’t with them.
That last one told you more than anything else.
Players who tracked the puck exclusively were predictable.
Players who tracked the whole ice were dangerous.
Right now I had a team with exactly two dangerous men on it and twenty-one predictable ones, and we had six weeks before the season opened.
Doable. Not comfortable, but doable.
“Rhett,” I said, not using his nickname the way the team did, “your release is late. You’re holding it a half second longer than you need to.”
He nodded. “Yeah. I’ve been working on it.”
“Work harder.”
He grinned like I’d given him a compliment. I probably had.
I kept them moving for the first hour, running the drill cycle I’d mapped out the night before in my office while the penthouse sat quiet around me and the Strip glittered outside the floor-to-ceiling windows.
I’d been in the city four days and I still wasn’t used to those windows.
In New York you looked out at buildings.
Here you looked out at light, just light, in every direction, the whole city going at once like it had something to prove to the dark.
I’d gotten more planning done in four days here than I had in four weeks in New York.
I wasn’t thinking about what that meant yet.
“Moose,” I said as I moved toward the crease. “Your tracking is off. You’re reading the shooter too early and it’s costing you the angle. Watch the puck until the last possible second.”
Moose pulled his mask up. “I tend to anticipate.”
“I know. Stop it.”
He dropped the mask back down.
“Again,” I said. “Full speed this time.”
I pulsed the whistle and they went.
Then Rhett skated past me on a line change, smooth as anything, and said without looking at me, “Brynn still in your office?”
I didn’t look at him either. “Run the drill.”
He kept skating. Kept grinning. I could tell without seeing it.
The thing was, I’d known exactly what I was doing earlier.
It wasn’t a reflex. I knew I was flirting with her but I couldn’t stop myself.
Which made it a choice, and choices had consequences, and the consequence of this particular choice was that I now had to figure out what to do with the fact that I’d made it.
She was the owner’s daughter. She was fourteen years younger than me.
I had been in this city less than a week and I was already running into problems that looked uncomfortably similar to the ones I’d just spent six weeks trying to outrun.
Except it didn’t feel similar. That was the part I couldn’t rationalize away.
The thing with Lydia had been easy and uncomplicated right up until it wasn’t.
This thing felt complicated from the first night she stood behind that bar and looked at me like she was running numbers in her head.
Easy things didn’t feel like this.
I blew the whistle. Reset the drill.
“Jett,” I said as he came around on the rotation, “you’ve got good hands. Your problem is you know it. When a player knows he’s good at something, he stops paying attention to the rest of his game. Don’t let your hands make you lazy.”
He considered that while coasting. “What should I focus on?”
“Your feet. You skate like someone who assumes he’ll get the puck. Skate like someone who has to earn it.”
He didn’t say anything, but something shifted in his stance on the next pass. Good. He was coachable underneath all that chirp.
I ran them through two more cycles before calling a water break.
While they congregated at the boards, I walked the length of the ice and made notes on my clipboard.
Line combinations. Timing issues. The gap between Rhett and Jett on the offensive rush that we’d have to fix before we played a team that knew how to exploit it.
The way our third defenseman, a kid named Frank who hadn’t said more than six words to me yet, had instincts that nobody had bothered to develop. That one was going to be interesting.
I had a lot of work to do.
For the first time since the gala, I was glad about that.
“All right,” I said as I moved back to center ice.
“Last set. We’re going to run a power play sequence.
Defense gives me a screen, offense finds the lane.
Moose, I want you reading the lane, not the shooter.
You give me the same anticipation tells you’ve been giving me all morning and you’re doing bag skates at the end of practice. ”
Moose straightened up. “Yes, Coach.”
I ran them through the power play sequence three times.
The first was a disaster. The second was mediocre.
The third time, Rhett found a seam I hadn’t even drawn up in the play and put it on Jett’s tape so cleanly that even I had to blink.
Jett buried it top shelf, turned around, and spread his arms wide at me like he was expecting a standing ovation.
“Again,” I said.
He dropped his arms. The boys laughed.
We ran it twice more. By the end I had what I needed. A baseline. Something to build from.
I pulsed the whistle three times. “Off the ice. Cooldown stretch in the gym, then showers. I want everyone in the film room at three.”
“Film room?” Jett called. “We have a film room?”
“You do now. I set it up this morning.” I moved toward the gate. “Three o’clock. Don’t be late.”
I heard Rhett’s low whistle behind me as the team shuffled off the ice, and then his voice carrying to whoever was closest: “We’ve got a real one, boys.”
I didn’t let myself react to that until I was down the hallway.
Then I let myself think it might be true.
My office was empty when I got there. She’d left a while ago. I sat down at my desk and picked up my pencil and looked at the schedule I’d been working on that morning. The schedule that had been abandoned approximately two minutes after she walked in with her iced coffee and her glasses.
I pulled the pad toward me and started writing. Filled in the gaps. Blocked out the film sessions and the practice rotations and the first week of games. Got about halfway through before I put the pencil down and leaned back in my chair.
Four days. Ninety-six hours. I had a team that hadn’t made the playoffs in four years, a reputation I was still digging out from under, and a very clear memory of her forehead against my mouth that I was apparently not going to be able to think my way past.
The film room was a converted storage space at the end of the east corridor that I had spent two hours clearing out and setting up the morning after I arrived.
Folding chairs, a projector, a screen that rolled down from the ceiling and bounced a little when it got to the bottom. Not glamorous. It worked.
The team filed in at three on the dot, which told me they were taking the threat of bag skates seriously. Good. I’d use that for at least another two weeks before it lost its teeth.
I waited until they were settled before I killed the lights and pulled up the first clip.
Film from their last three seasons, which Dave had sourced for me back in New York before I even said yes to the job.
I’d watched all of it twice on the plane and once more the night before, and I knew exactly what I was looking for.
The clip that came up first was a power play from two seasons ago. I let it run for about eight seconds before I froze it.
“What do you see?” I asked.
Silence.
“Not a trick question,” I said. “What do you see?”
Jett leaned forward. “We’re set up wrong on the left side.”
“Keep going.”
“The lane’s open but nobody’s reading it. Our guy on the half wall is standing still.”
“Right. He’s waiting for the play to come to him instead of making the play happen.” I advanced the clip three seconds. “Watch what happens next.”
The puck turned over. I froze it again.
“That turnover costs you the power play,” I said.
“And it happens because one guy decided to be a passenger. In this league, you cannot afford passengers. Not on special teams, not on regular shifts, not for one single shift in a game that matters.” I let that land.
“We’re going to watch six more clips. Every time you see a passenger, I want to hear it. ”
There was a beat of silence, and then Rhett said, “What do we get if we spot them all?”
“The satisfaction of not running bag skates.”
The team laughed. I advanced to the next clip.
We went through all six. By the third one they were calling it out before I had to ask, which was exactly what I wanted.
Film wasn’t about humiliation. It was about building the reflex, that moment where a player recognized the mistake on screen and felt it in his own body.
Once that clicked, it transferred to the ice faster than any drill I could run.
Jett called out a positioning error on clip four that I hadn’t even planned to address in this session. I made a note on my clipboard.
“Good,” I said. “That one’s yours to fix.”
He blinked. “Mine specifically?”
“You’re the one who spotted it. You understand why it’s wrong, which means you understand what right looks like. So it’s yours.” I moved to the next clip. “That’s how this works. You see it, you own it, you fix it.”
The room was quieter after that. The good kind of quiet. The kind where people were actually paying attention.
We finished the last clip and I brought the lights back up.
Twenty-three men squinting in the fluorescent light, most of them looking at me with an expression I recognized.
Not quite belief yet. Something earlier than belief.
The thing that came before it, when a team started to understand what was being asked of them and realized it might actually be possible.
I had seen that look before. I knew what to do with it.
“That’s it for today,” I said. “Film again Thursday. I want everyone well-rested tomorrow because morning practice is going to be harder than today was.” I looked around the room. “Any questions?”
Moose raised his hand. “Are we actually going to make the playoffs this year, Coach?”
The room went very still. I looked at him for a moment.
“That depends entirely on what you do between now and March,” I said. “But yeah. That’s the plan.”
Nobody said anything. Then Rhett started clapping, slow and deliberate, and one by one the rest of the room joined in until it was all of them, loud in that small converted storage space with the projector still humming and the screen still bouncing slightly at the bottom.
I let it go for about five seconds before I pulsed the whistle.
“Go home,” I said. “Sleep. Eat. I’ll see you at eight.”
They filed out in a wave of noise and shoulder-shoving and Jett saying something inadvisable that made two of the defensemen crack up. I stayed behind and rolled up the projector cord and folded the screen back up and stacked the chairs against the wall.
By the time I flicked off the lights and headed back down the hallway, the arena was quiet.
Victoria’s office light was off. Brynn’s car was gone from the lot.
I’d clocked it on the way in that morning, a ten-year-old Honda that looked like it had opinions about the Bentley parked next to it, and now the space was empty.
She’d said she was going home to bring her mother a burger.
I had no business picturing that. A woman in her mother’s kitchen with a takeout bag, still in those glasses, still with whatever expression she’d been wearing when she walked out of my office.
I walked to my car.
I had a schedule to finalize and a season to build and approximately zero business thinking about anything else.
I thought about it the whole drive home anyway.