Chapter 6
six
Luke
The visitors' locker room in Minnesota rattled with noise bleeding through the walls from a building full of wild fans who wanted us gone.
Cinderblock walls the color of old dishwater.
Taped-up schedules, scuffed floors, the industrial cleaner losing its battle against sweat.
We were in enemy territory, the fans reminding us exactly whose ice this was.
Eli found me by my stall while I taped the stick I wasn’t going to use tonight, a habit I couldn't break even on nights I knew I'd be watching from the bench.
Eli stopped in front of me, already half-dressed for warm-ups.
“You good?” he asked.
“I’m good.” I kept my eyes on the tape.
“You sure?”
I looked up. “I’m locked in.”
Something in his shoulders eased. He clapped once on the top of my pad.
“You’ve been the most consistent guy in this room all year. I don't say that to blow smoke. I say it because it's true, and I don't think you hear it enough."
I didn’t know what to say, so I just nodded, throat tighter than I expected.
Warm-ups were loud. Real loud. The kind of building-shaking noise that Minnesota crowds specialized in, and tonight they'd clearly saved up something special for the West brothers.
Traitors, someone's sign read, right behind our bench. Another one, cruder, aimed at Eli specifically, about choosing a losing team over a winning one.
Eli skated past it like it wasn't there. Wyatt's jaw was tighter than his brother's. I caught his face going taut as he circled past center ice, ignoring a chant that had started up in the corner section, something ugly directed at both of them.
Products of the Wolves' system, standing in the visitors' tunnel now. That kind of thing cut deep in a hockey town, whether either brother admitted it or not.
I found Maya in the family section before puck drop, and she caught my eye and gave me a thumbs-up, bright and certain, like she had zero doubt I'd be fine sitting the bench tonight.
It made me think of Dani immediately. Lily too, probably home right now demanding a bedtime story from someone, blissfully unaware that halfway across the country, a building full of strangers wanted to shred her mom's boyfriend's teammates into confetti.
Boyfriend. I turned the word over in my head and didn't hate it.
The puck dropped, and I watched as if I were the one in net—tracking releases, reading rebounds, clocking every save Bryan made and every one he didn't quite finish clean.
Bryan was shaky early. Not bad, exactly, but he was half a beat slow on his post-to-post movement, a couple of pucks that should've been smothered instead squirting loose into scrums he had to fight to clear.
He held it together through the first period. Barely.
Eli and Finn couldn't find any room to work with. The Wolves had clearly done their homework, collapsing the neutral zone every time either of them touched the puck, daring someone else to beat them instead. The chants kept building every time Eli or Wyatt so much as breathed near the boards.
At one point during a stoppage, I watched Wyatt catch Eli's eye. Eli held his gaze for a second, then looked away. Wyatt's shoulders dropped half an inch. They both knew. This was going to be ugly.
Minnesota scored midway through the second. Then again with four minutes left in the last period, a scramble in front that Bryan should have frozen and didn't.
2-0. Final.
The team was quiet on the way through the tunnel, every eye fixed on the floor. It was made worse by a crowd still chanting on the way out. Nobody looked at anyone.
In the locker room, I found Bryan at his stall, helmet off, staring at the floor as if staring hard enough would tell him what went wrong.
"Refs missed a hook on the second one," he said, not quite to me, not quite to anyone.
"Could be," I said, sitting down beside him. "You'll get it back next game."
"I never got settled. All night. Just—off."
"You'll bounce back." I meant it. I always meant it, with him, even on nights it cost me something to say it. "Game Two's ours."
He nodded, not quite looking at me, and I let it go. Everybody had off nights. I'd had plenty myself, back when anybody bothered to notice.
The bus ride to the hotel felt longer than it was. I sat near the back, helmet bag between my feet, running my own mental postmortem on saves Bryan had missed and wondering, privately, uselessly, what I would've done differently.
Nobody talked much. Losing on the road carried a particular kind of silence. Eli sat a few rows up, head tilted back against the seat, eyes closed. Wyatt stared out the window. Bryan had his headphones in and his hood up.
I pulled out my phone once the bus started moving.
Made it through. We lost. Miss you guys already.
I didn’t expect an answer right away. It was late in New York and Dani had Lily to manage alone tonight—so I was surprised when three dots appeared almost immediately, then a text.
Putting Lily to bed. Call you in 30?
Thirty minutes felt like an eternity, but it was just enough time for the team to check into the hotel and for me to settle into my room.
I sat on the edge of the bed, staring at my phone like it might ring through sheer will alone.
It rang at the twenty-nine-minute mark. I answered on the first ring.
“Hey.”
“Hey yourself. Tough loss.”
“Tough game. Tougher loss.” I lay back against the headboard. "Bryan wasn't right out there. I don't know what it was. He just wasn't tracking pucks the way he usually does."
"Are you okay? I noticed you didn’t get put in."
"I'm fine." A pause. “Mostly fine." I paused. "I know I should be used to this by now. But sometimes I wish I could just get a few minutes. You know? But I get it. Team needs what's best.”
"I know you'll get your chance soon," she responded with compassion. “Any symptoms showing up?”
"No headaches. The light sensitivity’s gone completely,” I said. “I think you fixed me, Nurse Cormac."
"Don't get used to the nickname."
"Too late."
There was a pause on her end—longer than the joke warranted—and something in the silence shifted.
"Do you regret it?" I asked, before I could think better of it. "The pool?"
The silence stretched again. I could picture her exactly—standing in some quiet corner of Eli's kitchen, phone pressed to her ear, working out how honest she wanted to be with me tonight.
"I don't know how to answer that," she said finally. "I've got a new job starting this week. A brand-new ER, brand-new team, and I need to be sharp for it, not distracted by—" She stopped herself. "By whatever this is."
"That's not a no."
"It's not a yes either."
"I'll take it," I said, and meant it.
I took a breath, the kind you take before saying something you can't take back once it's out.
"I've never felt like this before," I said.
"Ever. Not even close. I know it's complicated.
I know you've got Lily, and I've got a career hanging by a thread, and neither of us has good reasons to jump into anything.
But I'd like to try. Slow. However slow you need.
I just don't want to pretend the pool didn't happen, because it did, and it mattered. "
The line was quiet long enough that I wondered if I'd said too much, moved too fast, scared off the one good thing that had happened to me all season that had nothing to do with hockey.
"Okay," she said finally. "Slow."
Something loosened in my chest that had been wound tight since the final horn.
"Keep the determination up," she said, and I could hear the smile creeping back into her voice. "Burn bright, Bennett. You'll get your shot."
"I hope you're right."
"I usually am. Occupational hazard."
We talked another twenty minutes about nothing important—Lily's dragon dreams, the hotel's terrible pillows, whether Bryan's off night meant anything or just meant he'd had an off night—and by the time we hung up, some of the ugliness of Minnesota's building had faded into something manageable.
I lay in the dark a long time after, thinking about pools and blanket forts and a woman who kept telling me to slow down while making it very hard to want to.
I smiled at the ceiling, alone in a hotel room one thousand miles from her, and felt lighter than I had all night.
Game Two, I thought. One game at a time.