Nine
The hemlock sauna in my penthouse has always been my reset button. Forty minutes of heat, silence, and controlled breathing—enough to burn through whatever bullshit the day threw at me.
Right now, the steam feels impossibly heavy, crawling into my lungs and suffocating me instead of clearing my head.
I lean back against the bench, eyes closed, forcing air in through my nose and out through my mouth. In. Out. The same rhythm I’ve used a thousand times. But instead of calm, all I see is her face.
Fuck.
Thirty minutes. I’ve been in here thirty minutes, and I’m wound tighter than when I walked in. Usually, practice burns off the worst of it, and the sauna melts whatever’s left. Clean slate.
Not tonight.
Tonight, I can’t shake the weight of her stare. Like she knows exactly where to put the knife.
Giving up on meditation, I grab my towel and step out; the cool air of my bathroom is a relief against my overheated skin.
I take a thirty-second shower and wrap the towel around my waist. Water drips down my chest as I stare at my reflection in the mirror.
I look exactly as I feel: tense and irritated.
Her words circle my brain like vultures. Remember what? A hookup? A bad date? I’ve had my share of both, but nothing that warrants the level of hostility she’s throwing my way.
This is ridiculous. I don’t owe some bartender anything. Whatever her problem is, she can get over it.
Frustrated, I grab my laptop off the nightstand. If I can’t stop thinking about her, I might as well find out who the hell she is.
I type Ivy Hayes The Penalty Box Whistler.
More comes back than I expect.
The bar’s Instagram is first—drinks, hockey nights, staff photos, Ivy smiling at customers with an ease she apparently reserves for people who aren’t me. The place even looks different through the screen. Warm. Inviting.
Bullshit promise.
I keep scrolling.
Four pages down, I hit The Peak Press. My thumb stops on the trackpad.
A younger Ivy, same burgundy hair, stares at me in the photo, a bittersweet look on her face—a smile for the camera but downcast eyes.
A thin man with her eyes stands beside her, his arm around her shoulder, a bluish tint around his mouth.
Clearly sick. Still smiling like having his daughter beside him is enough reason to.
John Hayes. Her father.
I skim. Long illness. Ivy came home when he got sick. Took on more of the bar as his health declined. Eventually took over completely after he died.
At the bottom, a quote by then-19-year-old Ivy Hayes: “The Penalty Box was Dad’s dream. I’m just trying to keep it alive.”
Dad’s dream.
Mine died right when everything I’d spent my life chasing was finally happening. Drafted. Cameras. Everybody asking what came next, like the future was a straight line and all I had to do was keep skating. Dad was supposed to see what came next.
And as always, since Dad’s on my mind, Valentina follows.
I haven’t called my sister in months. Her feed gives me the shape of a life I’m not part of—art exhibitions, new friends, a guy with his arm around her waist whose name I don’t know.
She was twelve when Dad passed away. I was eighteen with a contract and an entire organization telling me exactly where I needed to be next. I got very good at paying for things after that: tuition, flights. Whatever showed up in an email with a number attached.
Shame sits heavy behind my ribs. I should call her. Tomorrow. Maybe.
My jaw tightens. I don’t know why I’m thinking about this. Ivy’s father got sick, and she came home. That’s different.
Except apparently she was seventeen when she started doing it. Came home from where—boarding school, like Val?
I look at the picture again. A grieving daughter standing inside her dead father’s dream while I swagger into it, demand top-shelf whiskey, call the place a dive, and treat her like some random bartender whose only purpose is making my night easier.
Jesus Christ.
This still doesn’t explain why she hates me. Losing a father doesn’t make a woman look at a stranger the way she looks at me. It just fucks up the convenient version where she’s an irrational asshole and I’m the normal one.
I pull the laptop toward me again.
Several pages in, another article stops me. This one is seven years old.
HOCKEY PRODIGY HAYES COMES HOME TO HELP AT DAD’S BAR
The photo makes me sit straighter. Blonde ponytail this time. And beside her, a healthier version of her father.
Hockey player? That explains the goalie advice she breathed out today. But not why she quit.
I scan the article quickly: Esso Cup Champion Ivy Hayes, 17, has returned to Whistler to help her ailing father run The Penalty Box. Hayes, who played forward for the Calgary Blades, is taking a break from her promising future to support the family business.
I search “Ivy Hayes Calgary Blades” and hit the video tab. A list of highlight reels pops up.
Curiosity piqued, I click the first one and expand it to full screen.
The room is dark except for the bluish glow of the screen, casting long shadows across my bedsheets.
The footage is grainy, a single-camera arena setup shot from the stands, but my eyes immediately lock onto the blonde girl wearing jersey number 19.
She’s fast. Lightning fast. I watch the screen in silence, mesmerized as the seventeen-year-old version of the bartender receives a pass in stride, weaving through three defenders with soft hands before firing a wrist shot dead into the top corner.
“Damn,” I murmur.
I let the reel play out, leaning back against the headboard. Clip after clip of her dominating the ice. It’s the same eyes. The same fierce set to her mouth when she’s driving to the net as when she’s staring me down across the nicked, scarred wood of her bar.
The screen flashes to a freeze-frame of her team celebrating a championship win. The Calgary Blades U18 AAA.
I hit pause. My pulse gives a strange, hard thud.
Calgary. U18.
My mind flashes back to earlier today. The memorabilia wall. The little girl with the braids tapping the glass right over my eighteen-year-old face. The out-of-town MVP trophy I was holding.
It was that tournament. The U18 National Championship in Calgary. I won it with the Capital City Crows. The picture framed in her bar is of the winning teams.
We were at the exact same tournament.
I scroll through more footage, trying to jog my memory. There’s a clip of her celebrating a goal, skating away from the camera with her arms raised. I pause the clip. Something about the angle, the way her blonde ponytail bounces as she moves...
I lean closer to the glowing screen, staring at number 19. Could I have met her there?
Closing the video, I rub my eyes with the heels of my hands. Calgary was before I was drafted into the NHL. I force myself to think back to the post-tournament party. The pub across the hotel. Packed. Loud.
A flash hits my mind. Blonde hair wrapped around my fist. The taste of cheap beer and peppermint.
“Jesus.” My voice sounds strangled in the empty room.
I have met her.
The details, buried under years of road trips and concussions and alcohol, slowly start to claw their way to the surface.
I remember a teammate—I don’t even remember who, just some loudmouthed idiot—cornering her at the end of the bar, already mid-sentence and condescending in that specific way guys get when they’re outmatched and don’t know it yet.
She stood with her arms crossed, an untouched drink in front of her.
I didn’t clock his face. I didn’t clock anything about him except that he was in my way.
I remember the rush of ego I felt when I stepped in, smoothly cutting him off, and the way her eyes lit up in relief.
She let me lead her away. She wanted to be led away. By me.
And then—hockey. That’s the part nobody would believe. Twenty minutes of her taking apart our power-play entry like she’d built it, telling me my one-timer release was a tell, seeing lanes I didn’t know were on the ice.
Whatever. Girls who grow up in rinks talk like that.
The memory shifts, growing warmer. The two of us slipping out of the bar. A quiet hallway. A locked door.
Then her mouth. Her hands were in my hair. Mine under the hem of her shirt. Fire—right up until she caught my wrist, laughed against my jaw, and said Slow down, hotshot. She fixed her ponytail in the mirror by the door. Said the Blades had video review at eight. She left smiling.
I sat on the edge of that bed for a solid minute before I trusted my legs to hold me.
She thought we were good. We were good.
And then...
Walking back into the team suite alone, and two bottles of something cheap and amber making the rounds. “Hickey bought, don’t waste it,” someone says, pushing one of them into my hand. I don’t bother clocking which guy that is—a bottle’s a bottle.
Across the room, somebody’s got a laptop open on the coffee table, Elite Prospects pulled up—Ivy Hayes, forward, mid-stride in a caged helmet on some rink I don’t recognize. Third overall, North America.
“Isn’t that the chick from the bar?” The screen turns my way. Somebody whistles low. “Didn’t peg her for a ranked one.”
The room swarms me, hyping me up, demanding details, because that’s just the ambient noise of a party like that. And I...
My stomach drops.
They wanted a story, so I gave them one. I had one loaded before I’d finished crossing the room. Inspired by the playbook all the boys bragged about.
The “bible.”
It came out of me like a line change—automatic, clean, no thought in it anywhere.
And then I kept going.
“Fuck.” The word is a raw, ugly sound.
I was a complete dick. Struck out and invented a story to save face. That makes me a liar and an ass, not the architect of her destruction. Something is missing.
I look at the clock at the top of my screen. It’s past two in the morning. I’ve been sitting here in the dark for over an hour.
With a growing, sickening unease, I open a new tab and type her name. I hesitate, my fingers hovering over the keys before I add my own.
Nothing on the first page. Just old game stats. I click to page two. Page three. Digging through dead links and archived local sports blogs.
Then, halfway down page four, a title makes my blood turn to ice: “Leaked Audio: Jr. Hockey Star Exposes Female Prospect After Hookup.”
I click the link. Dead. The thread was taken down years ago, removed by moderators.
I could stop here. Should stop here. Get some rest before hitting the road tomorrow.
Instead, I copy the URL, paste it into the Wayback Machine, and pick a date. The page loads slowly, bringing up an archived Reddit thread.
The thread’s body loads first: Since you’re all asking about the Hayes girl—the full story, from the guy who’d know ??
It’s written like me. The winking little flourish I used on ProspectTalk back when I owned every room I typed in.
The original poster is “HockeyGOD93.” I don’t even finish reading it before my stomach drops.
My old handle. Had to be. I stopped keeping track years ago of what that account could still come back and bite me for.
The draft came two months after that national tournament, and everything after it ran at lightning speed. Contract with the NHL, the parties, the traveling, the girls. If I ever logged out of that account, I don’t remember doing it. Couldn’t tell you the password if you paid me.
Below it is an embedded audio player.
My hand is visibly trembling as I move the cursor over the play button. Every instinct I have is screaming at me to close the laptop, to go to sleep, to leave it buried. But I click it. I need to know.
The file crackles to life. It’s the team suite. I can hear the heavy bass of the music through the walls, and the raucous laughter of my teammates.
A voice cuts through first—wet, needling, close to the mic. “So c’mon, Cas. The Hayes girl. She as elite as her ranking says?”
And then... my own voice. Drunk. Slurring. Vicious.
“Oh, she’s ranked, all right. Ask the scouts how she got there.” The room howls. I ride it, showman to the bone. “Puck bunnies chase players, boys. This one goes straight for the brass. She’s a—what do you even call that—a Brass Bunny.”
The room detonates. Somebody repeats it, delighted, and it bounces around the suite like a chant.
My recorded self keeps feeding on it. “...thinks she can fuck her way onto the national team. Hockey’s a man’s game, boys. These puck sluts need to learn their place...”
The audio cuts off.
The silence in my bedroom is deafening.
The comments below the audio player are a cesspool. Hundreds of them, an avalanche of misogyny calling her every name in the book, dissecting her body, destroying her character. Someone tags her full name. Her team. Her hometown.
Halfway down, the thread stops being comments and starts being content.
A close-up of Ivy’s caged face from her Elite Prospects photo, a caption underneath with the dictionary entry Brass Bunny (n.)—her full name in the example sentence, my words quoted under it like a citation. Four hundred upvotes.
The room physically spins. I grip the edge of the mattress to ground myself.
Someone recorded it. I don’t remember the recording. I don’t remember posting it.
And a thought comes up, clean and useful, the way they always do when I’m cornered.
I didn’t post this. I couldn’t have. I try to rationalize with myself.
Maybe I did it in a blackout. Maybe one of the boys grabbed my phone and did it for me.
It doesn’t matter.
That offensive, vile shit... it came from my mouth. No wonder she hates me.
My fingers are stiff as I scroll through more search results that branch off the leak.
News articles about Ivy leaving the Blades for “personal reasons.” Forum discussions speculating about the “real story,” spreading the audio further.
A brief, cold statement from her coach. The meme again, on a different board, someone else’s watermark in the corner.
The last thing I find is a recruiting site’s class rankings, cached.
March of that year: Hayes, Ivy—third overall, North America. Six D1 programs listed as actively pursuing.
The summer update loads slower. I scan it twice. Her name isn’t there. No lower slot, no asterisk. Gone—like a line item somebody deleted.
I ease the laptop down carefully. Like it’s live.
Just correlation. Not a confession. No offer pulled, no paperwork, nothing to point to. Rankings shuffle. Kids fall off lists for a hundred things. Grades. Money. Injuries. A drunk kid running his mouth at a party doesn’t end a track. That’s not how it works.
I close the laptop, its click loud in the cold bedroom.
I lie down. Leave the lamp on. Wait for the version of me that always shows up—the one who finds the angle, wins the room.
He doesn’t come.
Just her voice, looping in my thoughts. You don’t even remember, do you?
I remember now.
I reach over and kill the lamp. Ten seconds of dark. Maybe less.
I turn it back on.