Chapter 14 #4
Coach does the short post-game version because the team played okay, and we still lost. My prayers have been answered.
Coach is too tired and too pissed to call me out on my wrongs.
Defense was fine. Power play was an embarrassment.
Bauer is going to be in our heads if we let him.
UNH on Saturday. Eyes forward. Coach looks at me, finally, on the last sentence — no penalties next game — and I nod once.
He moves on. He leaves. The door swings shut behind him, and the room exhales.
The team undresses. I’m at my stall, and the shoulder is in real trouble.
I twist sideways to peel my jersey off, the bad arm hanging dead, the good arm doing the lifting.
I get the chest pad off. I drop it between my feet.
I sit there in my soaked Under Armour with my gloves on my lap and look at my taped knuckles.
Benson sits down next to me. “Blue.”
“Reeve.”
“Good game.”
“We lost.”
“You played good.”
Stanley sits down on my other side and the bench shifts under his weight. His hair is wet from the shower. He has a towel slung around his shoulders. He smells like the cucumber-mint body wash he uses.
“Goldie.”
“No.”
“I’m just gonna say one thing.”
“Nope.”
“One thing.”
I stare at him.
He leans in. He drops his voice down. “I saw you give Melly that puck.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose.
“I think everyone saw that,” Benson says.
I swing my arm to Benson, gesturing that he’s right. “Yeah.”
“I’m just saying, baby Blue. You gave her a puck. After you made her think you don’t a fuck. A bit ironic, don’t ya think?”
I hit him in the back of my head with my glove.
Stanley swats it away and says, “It’s a token of love.”
Benson, on my other side, makes a small, choked noise into the towel he is using to dry his hair. I blink and don’t look at either of them.
“You might be giving her the wrong idea.”
Walker, across the locker room, undoing his last skate, laughs out loud at the ceiling.
Benson says, “Stan, that’s enough, man.”
Stanley smiles, “I’m done. I am done. That’s all.” He lies flat down on the bench with his hands laced behind his head and his towel still draped over his shoulders and proceeds to stare at the ceiling tiles like a man at peace with the work he has done in this world.
The guys continue in the locker room talking about weekend plans.
Drew nods. “Hawthorne House this weekend?”
Benson shakes his head. “Nah, man. Not this weekend.”
He nods, moving back to his conversation with Walsh, Sam, and Theo.
Then Benson says to me quietly, “Blue.”
I look up.
He whispers, “The girls had a study group last night.”
“Yeah?” I say, not amused. I don’t care.
He looks at me and holds my eye. There’s a small pause in him that I don’t like. “Melly cried.”
The locker room continues.
Walker is laughing at something Tate has said in the corner. Drew is bent over cursing at his skates. Percy is decompressing while Stanley whispers something to him. Somebody in the showers is singing.
“What?”
Benson says, “Not about her ex.”
My stomach does a thing. “What do you mean?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know everything, man. Lucy told me she was crying.”
“Reeve.”
“I don’t know why she cried.”
He looks down at the floor between his feet.
He looks back up. He does the thing he does where he chooses the next sentence carefully because he knows the sentence is a knife and he is, despite the captaincy, despite the easy charm, one of the most careful men I have ever known, and he is about to slide the blade in clean, and there is nothing I can do to stop him.
“Why are you in the penalty box every single game, Goldie?”
The question lands the way Bauer’s elbow landed an hour ago, except this one I see coming the whole way in and cannot get my stick up.
I have no answer, because we both know the answer. I’m running from my personal shit and taking it out in the rink like any other bastard in the sport.
He says, “I think she was crying for the same reason, bro.”
I still.
He reaches over and rubs my good shoulder once with the heel of his hand, a small clean brotherly gesture, and says, “The girls are coming to Hawthorne tonight.”
“What?”
“They’re going to the house after the game.”
“What the fuck do you mean?”
“Lucy and Gianna invited them. You know how they are.”
I shake my head. “Reeve.”
“What?”
“What the fuck?”
The smallest possible smile pulls at one corner of his mouth, the smile of a man who has, with the calm patience of a chess player three moves out, set the board exactly the way he meant to and is now politely watching me discover it.
“It’ll be good.”
Stanley, who’s been pretending he hasn’t been eavesdropping, chimes in, “It will be good.”
I stand up and throw my glove at my stall. It hits the back panel, bounces, and falls into the boot of my own skate, and I don’t pick it up. I walk to the showers with my shoulder aching, my chin throbbing, and my third knuckle pulsing in time with my heartbeat.
I stand under the shower for a long minute trying to figure out what the hell Benson is up to. He told me that she cried for the same reason I get put into the penalty box every game. He’s hinting at something, and I don’t want to figure it out. I rinse my hair, get out, and dress fast.
The trainer slaps a square of medical tape over the split in my chin and tells me to ice it tonight and tomorrow morning. I nod the small lying nod I have been giving her for the past month, and she narrows her eyes at me and lets me go.
I walk back out into the locker room and most of the team is already gone. Benson is at the door with his bag over one shoulder, waiting. Stanley is bouncing on the balls of his feet in the doorway like a man at the gate of a theme park ride he has been queueing for.
“Let’s go.”
“Let’s go.”
“Let’s fucking go.”