Chapter 2
Dane
I got here early to get some reps in before practice. The locker room smells of losing.
Tape, sweat, and something quieter underneath. Defeat that's almost acceptable.
Twenty-three guys pretending not to stare at me.
I dropped my bag before at the stall with my name taped above it. Fresh tape. Someone put it up this morning, which means there was no rush to get a real name plate. I've been traded three times in twelve seasons and now on my fourth team. I know the difference between a welcome and a formality.
This is a formality.
"Kincaid." A guy two stalls down nods. Younger. Dark eyes, easy smile. The kind of smile that means he's already decided something about me. "Evan McLeod. Center."
"I know who you are."
"Yeah." He grins like that's a compliment. "Guess you did your homework."
I did. His name was in the trade notes. I read everything before I land somewhere new. It's the only control I have left. The old GM, now retired, had been here forever and had a winning tradition with Coach Ellison.
The new GM Cal Bowman is in his second season and rumored to have some kind of friction with Ellison since the team is in a down year. Usually new GM’s like to bring their own guy in.
I start unpacking without answering.
The room fills in around me. Guys filtering back from their morning skate, towels around necks, equipment in various states of removal. Nobody introduces themselves. A few nod. Most keep moving. That's fine. I'm not here to make friends. I'm here because I didn't have a choice.
The door to the coach's office opens.
Grant Ellison doesn't walk into a room. He takes it.
Broad shoulders, grey at the temples. The kind of face weathered from battling for years.
He played minor league. I read that. Spent his whole career close enough to smell the NHL but never getting in.
That tends to make men either humble or hard.
He looks at me.
Hard. Definitely hard.
"Kincaid." He says it flat. Not a greeting. More like a fact he resents. "My office."
I follow him in.
He doesn't offer a chair so I don't take one. We stand on opposite sides of his desk and he looks at me the way you look at a problem you didn't create but still have to fix.
"I'm going to be straight with you," he says.
"I'd prefer it."
"I requested Halverson. The GM went a different direction." He lets that land. "So understand that your presence here has nothing to do with what I wanted for this team."
"Understood."
"That means you start at zero. No reputation. No credits from whatever you did in Pittsburgh or before. You earn everything in this room."
I look at him. "That's how it should work."
He goes still for a half second, like he expected an argument and didn't get one. He picks up a folder from his desk and holds it out.
"Conditioning schedule. Mandatory for all players. Read it before tomorrow."
I take it. Don't open it yet.
"Anything else?"
"Yeah." He sits, which is a dismissal more than a comfort. "Team has a system. You'll learn it. Don't come in here trying to change things because you've got more seasons than anyone else in the room. What worked in Pittsburgh doesn't automatically work here."
"What's your record this season?"
The room gets very still. Even the white noise of the building seems to stop.
Ellison looks up slowly. "Seven and eighteen." I already knew that.
"Then maybe what you've been doing here doesn't automatically work either."
I walk out before he can answer.
Back at my stall I open the folder.
Practice times. Film sessions. Off-ice training rotation. Standard stuff. I flip through it until a single line catches my eye.
Mandatory Yoga and Conditioning Schedule: Led by M. Ellison. Three time per week during the season.
I read it twice.
Mara Ellison.
The woman from the ice. The one who crossed a rink in skates to dress me down in front of her student. Who held her ground when I gave her every reason not to. Whose voice stayed flat and precise even when I could see the effort it was costing her.
The coach's daughter.
I set the folder down on my stall.
This team is seven and eighteen. The coach hates me. The GM used me as a ticket-selling move without asking if I wanted to be sold. And now I'm going to spend three mornings a week in a room with the one person in this building who already got an attitude with me.
Evan McLeod drops onto the bench beside me. "Rough meeting?"
"Fine."
"Ellison's tough. He'll come around." He says it like we're friends. Like I asked. "He just needs to see you play."
I don't answer.
"You see the conditioning schedule?" He leans back, arms crossed, still wearing that easy grin. "Mara runs it. Coach's daughter yah know. She's good." A pause. "Real good."
The way he says it is designed to get a reaction.
I close the folder.
"Does she do yoga and conditioning for anybody else?"
"Just us. She trains figure skaters here too. Shares the rink." He shrugs. "She's been doing the team yoga thing for two years. Guys love it." Another pause. Longer this time. "I've been trying to get her to grab coffee for about as long."
I pick up my phone and stop engaging.
He gets the hint eventually and moves on.
The evening optional skate starts at six. I go anyway.
I need to get used to a different rink. The overhead lights hum at a lower register.
Ice that's been cut and cleaned smells sharp and fresh, like the cold has a texture.
I've been on skates since I was four years old and I still feel something shift the moment the blade hits the surface.
Like the rest of it, the trades, the meetings, the politics, belongs to someone else.
Out here it's just speed and contact and the geometry of where the puck needs to go.
I run drills alone for forty minutes. Edge work. One-timers. The defensive reads I've been running since I was twenty and first got paid to hurt people professionally. My body knows this. My body is the one thing nobody gets to take.
I'm finishing a last set of rushes when the door to the tunnel opens.
Ellison.
Not the coach. The daughter.
She's in street clothes, dark jacket, keys in hand. She clocks me the second she steps through and her pace doesn't change. Doesn't slow. Doesn't speed up.
She crosses to the boards on the far side and starts checking something on the wall schedule. Her back is to me.
I skate slowly and end up at the near boards.
She turns before I get there, like she heard it. "The optional skate ended at Seven."
"I'm aware."
"It's seven-ten."
"I'm aware of that too."
She looks at me. Same level gaze as this morning. Like she's got a tolerance for exactly this kind of thing and she's tracking how close I'm getting to it.
"You're in my schedule tomorrow," she says.
"I saw."
"I run a structured session. If you have problems following structured sessions, better to know now."
"I don't have problems following structure." I pause. "I have problems with authority that hasn't earned it yet."
"That's the same thing."
She's not wrong. I don't tell her that.
She pulls her bag higher on her shoulder and turns to go. I watch her and think about the folder on my stall and the teams record and the coach's face when he said I requested a trade for Halverson, like I was a consolation prize he was stuck unwrapping.
"I knew you’d be on schedule," I say. "When I read the calendar."
She stops. Half-turns. "Yes."
"And you said it anyway."
"Rules apply regardless of who's breaking them." She holds my gaze a beat longer than she needs to. "I'll see you tomorrow, Kincaid."
She walks out.
I stay on the ice another ten minutes thinking I just encountered the most beautiful women I’ve ever laid eyes on.
I'm almost to the parking lot when Ellison reappears in the tunnel corridor.
The coach. This time definitely the coach.
He's got his jacket on, keys in hand, heading for the same exit. He stops when he sees me. The look he gives me is different from this morning. Less measured, more direct. Like he made a decision while I wasn't in the room.
"You know Mara runs the conditioning program," he says. "She's an employee of this organization and she's a professional. You'll treat her as one."
"I treat people professional until they give me a reason not to."
"Good." He doesn't move. "Then we won't have a problem."
He says it like a period. Like it's the end of a sentence he's been composing all afternoon.
"Stay away from my daughter, Kincaid."
He walks out.
I stand in the corridor and the overhead fluorescents buzz and the smell of ice and rubber and cold concrete fills the space between us even after he's gone.
Stay away from her.
I think about her voice. When we first met. The way she squared up to me on the ice without flinching.
I think about that longer than I should. Staying away is going to be a hard thing to do.