Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Max Stevens
The arena has its own battle scars and is full of these marks.
Dents and scratches and water stains in the shape of states, built up over decades of bodies in transit.
The building keeps score differently than the scoreboard does.
Away arenas have their own superstitions too.
Ours at Gold Coast: you tap your stick on the Zamboni bay door on the way to the ice, not the tunnel wall.
Trey started it. Nobody remembers why. We do it anyway.
I sit in the locker room, tightening tape around my stick while music pounds through the speakers. Guys move around me in practiced chaos. Pads snapping, jokes flying, trainers weaving through stalls. Fuze drops onto the bench beside me. “You’ve checked the hallway six times.”
“I have not.”
“Seven,” Dude says from across the room.
“I’m hydrating.”
“You craned your neck around the water cooler,” Lucas adds.
Traitors. I glare around the room. “Don’t any of you have jobs?”
“We do,” Trey says, his captain’s voice calm as ever while lacing skates. “Ours starts in twenty.” Trey glances at me with the expression he inherited from somewhere. Probably Chase. “Try not to embarrass yourself tonight.”
“Can’t promise miracles.”
He smirks. “Try not to embarrass the franchise.” Closer.
Coach storms in, holding lineup cards. “Stevens.”
I point to my myself. “Present.”
“Discipline. Structure. Short shifts. No stupid penalties.”
“Your faith in me inspires.”
He leans close. “And Toni Amato is in the building, evaluating.”
The room erupts. “Ohhhhhh.”
“Performance anxiety!”
“Comb your hair, Max!” I throw a roll of tape at Fuze’s head. He catches it one-handed.
Coach pinches the bridge of his nose. “I hate every one of you.”
I know the second she walks into the press box.
She is not visible to me. I’m on the ice for warm-ups, the Garden buzzing with that pre-game static that gets into your blood whether you want it or not.
Fourteen thousand people finding their seats.
The PA system running through its usual announcements.
Pucks flying across the ice in a dozen directions.
I know anyway.
Some part of me learned to track her absence so well that it registers her presence the same way.
I find her on my second lap. Press box level, third window from the left.
She’s not watching warm-ups. She’s watching a specific player.
Her head turns with his movement across the neutral zone.
My movement. Her pen stops. I don’t react.
I pull wide around the far circle, fire a shot on Knox that he catches clean, and skate back to the bench for water.
Trey appears at my shoulder. “Are you good?”
“Yeah.”
“You skated that last lap like you were proving something.”
I squirt water at him instead of answering. He dodges it, laughing, because we’ve been doing some version of that since I was nineteen and he was the first captain who didn’t immediately try to trade me. But he’s not wrong. I was proving something. I just haven’t decided what yet.
Boston comes out physical, which I knew they would.
Their third line has a guy called Rourke who has decided his entire career goal is to live rent-free inside Knox’s crease.
Two minutes into the first, he edges Knox on a play the refs swallow, and I file it.
I don’t go. Not yet. I skate through the neutral zone and pick up a pass from Trey and miss the shot, and that’s fine, and I loop back and file it again.
Coach wants clean. Toni wants smart. Rourke runs Knox again on the next shift, and I let it go, which costs me something. My jaw aches from it.
But I let it go.
The first period ends 1-0 Boston, a power-play goal on a call that was probably right, a high stick from Fuze who still hasn’t figured out that his stick goes up when he gets excited.
The locker room is tight. Coach keeps it short.
Trey says the right things. The room settles.
Fuze drops onto the bench beside me, already stripped to his undershirt, still buzzing.
He leans over and catches my eye with the grin he wears when something's funny to him.
"So I'm guessing the compliance lady had a good view of all that." He waggles his brows. "Better hope she grades on the curve.” I keep my eyes on my skate laces.
"Word is she had her tablet out the whole time." He elbows me, still grinning. "What's the over-under on whether you're benched Monday for looking good doing it?"
The locker room is loud. Three guys laugh. Somebody tosses a roll of tape across the room. Normal.
"She’s doing her job tonight," I say. My voice comes out flat. The ceiling on the conversation.
Fuze's grin holds for one beat. Two. Then he reads the room — or he reads me, which is harder — and it fades by degrees. He picks up his gloves. "Yeah," he says. "Sure."
That's it. Nobody adds to it. Trey, two stalls down, hasn't moved, but I catch the specific quality of his not-moving and I don't look at him. Mac's eyes are on his skates. The music keeps going.
Mac keeps his head down. He's hard to read and reads everyone else without trying, which is unsettling. "You're playing differently tonight."
"Playing smarter."
"That's what I said." I look at him. He goes back to his skates. I sit in my stall and re-tape my stick and say nothing, which is unusual enough that Mac glances at me twice.
“You good?” he asks.
“Yep.”
The second period, Rourke runs Knox a third time, and this time Knox goes down to one knee and comes back up slowly, and fire burns in my chest like a starter pistol. I’m already in motion on my skates, already moving, already—
I stop.
Knowing she's watching makes me stop. I read the play instead and then execute Toni’s demonstrated technique from the Vancouver clip.
I get between Rourke and Knox. Not a hit.
Not a shove. I just put myself there, all two hundred and fourteen pounds of me, and I look at Rourke until he makes a choice.
He makes the smart one. He moves off. Knox taps my shin pad without looking.
Player language for got it, thanks. I skate back to the wing.
One of the refs, a guy called Hendricks, with whom I have a complicated professional history, skates past me. “Nice read, Stevens.” Three words. I’ve never gotten three words from Hendricks that didn’t include the phrase two minutes.
We score seventeen seconds later. Fuze, tapping a rebound that Trey set up, and the building goes loud all at once.
I’m first over the boards, first to pile on.
Fuze is grinning so wide his mouthguard nearly falls out.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” he yells, and we’re all yelling, and the crowd is loud enough that I can feel it in my sternum.
The third period, Boston ties it back up. A line change, a breakaway, Knox had no chance. It happens. Rourke runs Knox a fourth time, and I don’t go. Instead, I position; I wait; I read. Hendricks catches Rourke for interference before I have to decide at all.
Power play. Trey scores on the man advantage with forty-one seconds left.
Wrister from the top of the circle, short side.
The building comes completely apart. I’m over the boards before the puck is through the net.
I get to Trey first, which is both instinct and priority, and he grabs my sweater and yells in my face.
I can’t hear it over the crowd. It doesn’t matter. We know.
Final whistle. 3-2. Gold Coast. The handshake line takes two minutes.
I shake Rourke’s hand and mean it, which I couldn’t have told you I’d do at the start of the night.
He held back in the third. Adjusted. So did I.
The team filters toward the locker room, the noise following us down the tunnel.
I stop to sign a jersey for a kid in the front row who has been screaming my name since warm-ups with the specific, unhinged energy of a seven-year-old who got a Mountain Dew at dinner.
He’s delighted. His dad looks exhausted.
I get it. When I straighten back up, she’s there.
She possibly arrived between the second and third goal, or right when the whistle finally blew.
She’s watching the crowd thin, or she was.
Now she’s watching me. I walk toward her.
No grin. No line ready. I just walk over because she’s there, and the game is over.
I don’t have any performance left in me tonight.
I’m just Max. Sweaty, adrenaline-scraped, still running hot from the final sixty seconds. Just me.
“Hendricks said, ‘Nice read,’” I say.
She blinks. “You heard that?”
“Ice is muted when you’re not fighting.” I drop one shoulder against the tunnel wall. “I filed Rourke four times. Let it go four times. The ref caught it on the fifth.”
“I know.” She looks at her screen. Back at me. “I was tracking.”
“Were you tracking the entire game?”
“That’s my job.”
“Toni.”
She stops. Looks up. “Were you watching me specifically?”
A pause. One beat. Two. The kind of pause I've learned to read."
“Yes,” she says. Just yes. Clean. No cover story.
My lungs constrict with an emotion I’m not ready to name while I’m still in pads and skates and smell like a professional hockey game. I push off the wall. “How’d I do?”
Her mouth forms an almost-smile, but she pulls it back just before it reaches her lips. “You read the Rourke situation correctly all four times. The position you took on the third incident was textbook.”
“Textbook,” I repeat.
“It was good, Max.”
She says it the same way she said your last coach was wrong.
Like it’s just true, and she’s saying it because it’s true, and that’s all.
No agenda. No bait. No clipboard distance.
I look at her for a long second, my stomach uneasy.
The tunnel is emptying. The locker room's getting loud.
I've got maybe three minutes before Trey looks for me.
“You came down from the press box,” I say.