Chapter 22
Lex couldn't skate.
The puck found her stick and she lost it.
A routine pass from Camille, tape to tape, an exchange they'd executed a hundred times in practice and games, and Lex's stick was in the wrong position and the puck skipped off the blade and into the neutral zone where a Connecticut defender collected it and sent it the other way.
The crowd groaned. Behind the bench, Mara's voice cut through the arena noise.
"Landry! Read the lanes!"
The instruction was professional. Correct.
Delivered with the sharp, commanding authority that made Mara one of the best coaches in the league.
It was also the voice of the woman who had let Lex walk out of her office ten days ago without saying she loved her back, and hearing it through the arena speakers sent a jolt of pain through Lex's chest that made her next stride falter.
She was playing the worst hockey of her season.
Her timing was off. Her reads were late.
Her feet were heavy and her hands were slow and the connection between her brain and her body, the seamless neural highway that made elite athletics possible, was disrupted by grief.
Every shift on the ice was an exercise in pretending.
Pretending she could focus. Pretending the sound of Mara's voice from the bench didn't make her stomach clench.
Pretending that the empty space inside her chest where Mara had been wasn't swallowing everything she had left.
The Valkyries were losing 3-0 to the last-place team in the conference.
At home. In front of a sellout crowd that had come to see the playoff-bound juggernaut they'd been reading about in the papers, the team with the electrifying rookie and the genius coach, and instead they were watching a disjointed, uninspired performance that looked nothing like the squad that had dismantled Boston.
The crowd's energy had shifted from excitement to confusion to the restless, unhappy murmur of paying customers who were not getting what they'd paid for.
Lex sat on the bench during the line change and stared at the ice.
The arena pressed in on her. The new building was beautiful, state-of-the-art, everything Astoria's money could buy, and right now it felt like a cage.
The lights were too bright. The noise was too loud.
Behind the bench, she could hear Mara conferring with the assistant coaches in clipped, professional tones, adjusting the strategy, trying to salvage the game, doing her job with the same discipline she brought to everything, and the sound of Mara's voice so close and so unreachable made Lex's chest feel like it was being compressed by a vise.
Her next shift was worse. Midway through the second period, Lex lost another puck.
A carry through the neutral zone, clean ice ahead of her, and she telegraphed the pass so badly the defender read it before Lex's arms had finished the motion.
The turnover led to a two-on-one the other way that only Frankie's save prevented from becoming 4-0.
The crowd booed. Not at Frankie. At Lex.
"Landry!" Mara's voice again, sharper now. "Off! Elise, you're in."
Lex skated to the bench. She dropped onto the wood and stared at the ice through the glass and felt the humiliation press down on her. Pulled. Benched in front of the home crowd by the woman she loved.
The worst part was that she deserved it.
She was playing terribly. Mara was right to pull her.
Every coaching instinct Mara had would have been screaming to make this change ten minutes ago, and the fact that she'd waited, that she'd given Lex extra shifts and extra chances and absorbed extra turnovers before finally making the call, might have been favoritism or might have been a coach trying desperately to believe that her best player would figure it out.
Either way, the coaching decision was correct and professional, and Lex hated herself for making it necessary.
She sat on the bench for the rest of the second period and the entire third.
Elise slotted into her position and played solid, workmanlike hockey that was nothing like Lex's brilliance and nothing like Lex's disaster.
Mara was behind the boards, making adjustments, calling plays, managing the bench with the composure of someone who had compartmentalized so effectively that the woman and the coach might as well have been two different people.
And she sat there and burned, because she could not do the same, could not separate the ice from the ache, could not skate through the grief that was eating her from the inside.
The Valkyries lost 4-1. Their lone goal was a Camille power play marker in the third that felt like consolation rather than comeback.
When the final horn sounded, the crowd filed out in near-silence, a quiet that was worse than booing because it meant disappointment, the heavy disappointment of people who had believed and watched it fail.
The locker room afterward was a tomb. Helmets hit stalls.
Pads dropped to the floor. Tape was ripped off shins and wrists with the vicious economy of frustrated athletes.
Nobody spoke. Dani sat in her stall staring at the wall.
Frankie pressed a bag of ice to her shoulder and said nothing.
Rowan caught her eye from across the room and mouthed You okay?
Lex shook her head. Rowan crossed the room, sat beside her, and said quietly, "I know it's not my business.
But whoever's making you feel like this, they're an idiot.
" She paused. "And before you say anything, I got over the crush.
Weeks ago. You're my friend now, which is better. Friends last longer."
The kindness of it nearly broke Lex. She bumped Rowan's shoulder with her own and managed, "Thanks, Rowe."
The loss wasn't just bad; it was a loss that could shift momentum, that could turn a playoff push into a spiral, and every player in the room knew it.
The standings were tight. Every game mattered.
And the Valkyries' best player had just turned in the worst performance of her career because she couldn't stop thinking about the woman behind the bench.
She didn't have to look at the owner's box to know Astoria had been watching.
A loss like this—to the conference's last-place team, at home—was the kind that generated questions.
Questions about the team, about the system, about the coaching.
She'd created a problem that was going to land on Mara's desk whether Mara wanted it to or not.
Lex sat in her stall and unlaced her skates with hands that were steady on the surface and shaking underneath.
Elise appeared beside her, wordless, a water bottle extended.
Lou walked past and squeezed her shoulder, a brief, grounding touch that said I know.
We know. It's okay. Camille caught her eye from across the room and gave her a small nod.
The solidarity of women who understood what she was going through without needing to be told.
The rest of the team filed out for their cooldowns and stretches.
Lex waited until the room was empty, then stood up and walked to the showers.
She turned the water to hot, as hot as it would go, and stood under the stream and let the heat pound against her back and her shoulders and her skull, and the tears she'd been holding since the first period came.
She cried standing up, forehead pressed against the tile wall, the hot water mixing with the salt on her face and streaming down the drain.
She cried for Mara. For the look on Mara's face in the office when Lex had said I love you and gotten silence in return.
For the feel of Mara's body against hers in the morning, the warmth and the weight and the absolute rightness of it that she might never feel again.
For the way Mara's hand shook when Lex touched her face, every time, as if the tenderness was still new, still astonishing, still a gift she almost couldn't believe she was allowed to have.
She cried for herself, for the girl who had spent her whole life looking for someone who would match her strength and hold her tenderness and see both without flinching, and who had found that person and lost her because the person was afraid.
She cried until her throat was raw and her eyes burned.
Until the hot water turned lukewarm and there was nothing left to feel.
The water ran until it started to cool. Lex shut it off and stood in the steam-filled shower room and pressed her palms against the tile and breathed. The crying was done. The ache where Mara had been remained.
She toweled dry after the loss, dressed in jeans and a black long-sleeve and her leather jacket, and walked out of the arena through the back exit with her hair wet and her eyes swollen and the cold evening air hitting her face.
The parking lot was mostly empty. The ocean was audible in the distance, its rhythm constant and indifferent.
The sky above Phoenix Ridge was clear and crowded with stars, and Lex stood in the cold and breathed the salt air and tried to remember what her life had felt like before Mara.
Elise was waiting in the parking lot, leaning against Lou's car. Lou was behind the wheel. Camille was in the back seat.
"Get in," Elise said.
"I'm going home."
"No, you're not. You're coming to Lavender's. It's lesbian night. You're going to drink something that isn't your own tears and you're going to sit with your friends and you're going to let us take care of you for one evening."