Puck You Both (Melting Ice #4)

Chapter 1

WALL

THE FIRST SIGN that tonight is going to go sideways is forty feet of Jumbotron deciding my hair is the main event.

I'm midway through warmups, mask up, doing the thing I do every single game in every single building in this league—left post, right post, five butterfly reps, sip of water at exactly seventeen minutes to puck drop—when the arena goes dark for the player intros and the big screen above center ice fills up with a close-up of my own head.

Specifically, my hair, which is not the dark blond it has been for twenty-eight consecutive years, but a color best described as stop sign red.

Across the top of the screen, in letters the size of Becker’s ego: BIG TOMATO ENERGY.

The crowd in Milwaukee, eighteen thousand people who already don't like me on a good day, loses its shit. Someone three rows up from the glass starts a chant. It’s “KETCHUP.” Someone else has a sign. The sign has been laminated. They planned this. I respect the preparation and hate everything else.

Somewhere in my own bench, I hear Ace's voice rise above the noise. "OH MY GOD. THEY MADE A GRAPHIC."

I do not turn around. Turning around would imply I care, which I totally don’t.

I do, however, privately revisit, for the nine-hundredth time in seventy-two hours, the chain of decisions that led to me standing in enemy territory where I’m sure some Vipers marketing intern is crafting fresh insults as we speak: the hair is not a cry for help. It's the honored settlement of a debt.

Two weeks ago, Becker bet me that Petrov's word-of-the-day app would produce a word ambitious enough, and Petrov would deploy it confidently enough, to accidentally insult Coach Martin within a calendar week. I said coach was insult-proof. I said Petrov would never. I said it out loud, in front of witnesses, with confidence of a man who’s never met Petrov.

It took four days. The word was “decrepit.” Petrov used it in a full, grammatically correct sentence. The sentence was, “Coach is wise, because he’s decrepit.” Two hours later, I was sitting in a salon chair, nineteen year old stylist asking if I was “Sure-sure.”

So. Red hair. A bet is a bet, and honoring bets is the cornerstone of civilized society. Becker says I look like an emergency flare. Becker can die.

"Wall." Speak of the defenseman. Becker skates past my crease, slow, savoring. "The jumbotron guy DMed me. He wants to know if he can use 'Big Tomato Energy' on a shirt."

"Tell him yes and demand royalties."

"Already did. We're splitting it sixty-forty."

I squint. "Whose sixty?"

Becker's already gone, cackling, which answers that.

***

THE MILWAUKEE VIPERS' net, two hundred feet away from mine, currently has a six-foot-four, too-many-consonants-in-a-row, half-Polish problem in it named Patrick Grze?kowiak, and I have spent eight professional seasons trying to figure out exactly how much I hate him.

We were drafted the same year. We met for real in the juniors final—double overtime, both of us standing on our heads for way longer than should have been humanly survivable, until his team scored on a deflection so fluky it bounced off a stick, a skate, someone’s ass, a lineman’s soul, and what I have always suspected was the hand of a vengeful God, and went in over my glove with four seconds left on the clock.

It was a crime against goaltending, one which I have processed completely and moved on from, which is why I can describe the trajectory from memory nine years later.

Some things you carry.

For eight pro seasons, we've traded shutouts and save-percentage leads back and forth like a couple of accountants fighting over a report nobody else is reading, and at some point a TV crew mic'd us both and captured the following exchange, which now has eleven million views on a platform I refuse to name out of spite:

"Nice pads. Did they come with the five-hole?"

"Nice hair. Did it come with an apology?"

That was two years ago. My hair was blond at the time. The clip's caption calls us "hockey's most petty feud," which is accurate in the sense that everything in it is true and somehow still manages to miss the entire point.

Tonight, midway through the second period, on a stoppage for an offside review nobody asked for, Patrick skates the length of the ice, ostensibly to talk to the ref.

The ref is nowhere near my net. Patrick's route takes him directly past my crease anyway, which is roughly like walking from New York to Boston via Ohio.

He slows down just enough.

"Red's a good color on you," he says. "Matches the goal light."

I don't look at him. I'm intently watching the play that isn't happening. "You'd know," I say. "You see yours more."

As he skates away, I catch the corner of his mouth doing something that on a normal person would be a smile. On him it's probably a muscle spasm.

I hope it's a muscle spasm.

Regulation solves nothing. Overtime solves nothing. Which means we go to a shootout, which means the entire game collapses down to the two of us standing at opposite ends of the ice doing the only thing either of us has ever cared about proving we're better at.

Ace scores on him first. Then Patrick stones Groover and I stop one of their first two shooters and now it's Moreau, their last shot, skating in on me with that too-many-teeth grin like he's already celebrating.

He dekes. He dekes again. He's fast and he's shifty, but he telegraphs his release with his bottom hand, which I know because I watch film like it's a religious obligation, and when he finally shoots far side I'm already there and the puck hits my glove with the sound of a door closing.

Moreau screams at the sky. I permit myself one (1) internal smile.

Then Petrov skates in on Patrick, does absolutely nothing fancy, and slides it through his five-hole like a mail slot.

Five-hole.

Poetry.

The Wolves bench empties in my direction, which is the one downside of winning: physical affection.

Becker reaches me first and attempts to climb onto my back like I'm a rental horse, and I keep skating, because acknowledging him would only encourage the behavior.

He rides me for half a lap anyway, narrating into an imaginary microphone.

Petrov is shouting his word of the day at the Milwaukee crowd, which today is apparently "TRIUMPHANT.

" Jinx refuses to touch anyone until everyone has touched him in the right order. Standard procedure.

Ace fishes the game-winning puck out of Patrick's net, a move of breathtaking disrespect that I respect breathtakingly, and hands it to me in the line. "For the collection."

I collect important pucks. Everyone knows this. I have a shelf. The shelf is organized chronologically, then by significance, and I will not be taking questions about the system.

This puck goes on the shelf. This puck is Patrick Grze?kowiak getting beaten five-hole in his own building. This puck might get its own shelf.

***

BECAUSE I’M ANNOUNCED the First Star (obviously), and because the press room is occupied by Coach Berg scrambling to explain to Milwaukee fans why their team sucks, I get shuffled off to do a media piece from the arena's video room.

It's a small dark space up a back hallway, a couple of monitors, a camera on a tripod, and a woman with a headset.

The interviewer asks the obligatory questions (the game, my reads, the season, the do you want to talk about the hair) and then leans in for the one she clearly thinks is clever.

"Do you think the red threw Grze?kowiak off tonight?"

I consider the question with the seriousness it deserves, which is none. "You would have to ask him why he opened his five-hole," I say. "I have theories. They are unkind."

She laughs. Behind me, on the monitor, the broadcast feed is still frozen on the replay: Patrick, sprawled, the puck already past him, his glove a half-second too late and a foot too short. I find the backdrop tasteful. I'd frame it if I could.

The interview wraps. I unclip the mic, wrestle the earpiece cable out of my collar, and walk out, past a hallway, stairs, more hallway and a janitor who does a double-take, down to the loading bay where the bus idles.

Half the team's already on, and Becker is doing a dramatic reenactment of the game, and I do my standard pocket inventory. Phone, wallet, keys, puck—

Puck.

No puck.

I stop at the loading bay and run the tape. Media room. Shelf by the door. I set it down when I was fighting the cables.

Leaving without it is not an option. That puck is evidence.

That puck is the physical proof that Patrick Grze?kowiak opened like a saloon door in his own barn, and if I leave it here, some Vipers equipment guy finds it, and it goes in a bucket with forty practice pucks, and my victory gets democratized. Absolutely not.

I drop my gear, tell the bus driver two minutes, which is a lie, and jog back.

***

THE ARENA'S MOSTLY dark by now, ushers gone, concourse lights at half power, the kind of quiet that makes every footstep sound like an event.

I retrace the hallway without much trouble and find the door sitting open about a foot, the room behind it lit only by the dull blue glow of the monitor, still frozen on the same replay.

Good. Nobody's cleaned it out yet.

I push the door open wider, see the puck sitting exactly where I left it on the shelf just inside, and reach for it.

That's the last normal thing that happens to me for the rest of the night.

The room isn't empty.

The frozen game footage casts the whole room in dim blue arena-glow, and in that glow, maybe fifteen feet away, is Patrick Grze?kowiak.

Still in his base layers, the black compression shirt, sleeves shoved up over forearms that have (and I only know that because I saw it once on Becker’s phone) their own fan accounts.

He has his back half-turned to the door.

And he has someone pressed against the desk.

My brain runs the identification protocol before it understands what it's identifying. Brown curls. Number 19's warmup shirt, rucked halfway up a lean torso. Moreau. The loud winger.

There’s a lot about this image that doesn’t make sense.

Why is Moreau’s shirt riding that high? Why am I seeing this much of his throat? Why is his mouth open, his head tipped back against Patrick’s shoulder, and why is Patrick’s hand down in the front of his—

Oh. Oh.

Leave.

That's the protocol here. That is unambiguously the protocol. You walked in on something private, you have your puck, the door is inches behind you, you turn around and you leave and you take this to your grave, next to the junior final and the time you cried at a dog food commercial.

I want to be clear that I issue the command. Legs: retreat. The order goes out. The order is received. The order is ignored.

Here is what I did not know, as of ninety seconds ago: that Patrick Grze?kowiak likes men. That Theo Moreau likes men. That they apparently like each other. Eight years I've studied this man: his angles, his tells, his post-whistle habits, the exact degree his shoulders drop when he's beaten.

This? This was not in the file.

Patrick's hand moves slow. That's the thing that's wrecking me, if I'm being honest, and I would rather not be, but the room's dark and my honesty appears to have snuck in with me.

It's the peace. Moreau is squirming, hips chasing, hands white-knuckled on the desk edge, clearly begging for faster with every part of his body.

And Patrick just doesn't give it to him.

He keeps that same steady rhythm, wrist rolling, thumb doing something on the upstroke that makes Moreau's breath punch out of him in these small broken sounds.

Patrick's other hand is flat on Moreau's chest, pinning him back against the desk.

Immovable. Built like a door and using it.

It's the calmest I've ever seen him.

Moreau, by contrast, is losing his mind quietly.

Patrick's saying something. I can't make out the words. His voice is low, a steady quiet current of it against Moreau's ear, and whatever it is makes Moreau's whole body arch off the desk like a bow, his hands scrambling back to grip Patrick's thighs.

My heart is doing something silly, reminding me to get the hell out of here.

I should have left ninety seconds ago. There is no version of this where I'm supposed to be here.

This is private, this is theirs, this is two men in a dark room who checked that the hallways was empty, and I'm the variable they didn't account for, six-foot-seven of variable pressed into the shadow of a doorframe.

Except…watching is what I do. My job is to stand at the back of the play and read bodies, track hands, predict what someone wants a half-second before they know they want it. This is a study, then.

Even I don't buy that, and I'm the one selling it.

Grze?kowiak does something with his wrist. Moreau's knee buckles and Grze?kowiak just takes his weight. Absorbs it, without shifting his stance, he holds Moreau up against the desk one-armed like it's nothing.

I should be disgusted with myself. I'm waiting for the disgust to arrive. What arrives instead is the same thing that arrives in overtime when the puck's in my zone and everything goes slow and sharp and I can see all of it, every lane, every option, every twitch.

I have never felt this at any point in my life that did not involve hockey.

I don't know what to do with that. I file it. I'll deal with it never.

Moreau's getting close. You don't need film study to see it.

His rhythm's gone, his heels are sliding on the floor, his voice is climbing with every stroke, louder, louder, and Grze?kowiak's free hand comes up and covers his mouth.

Big hand. Whole jaw. Moreau moans into his palm, eyes screwed shut, hips stuttering, right on the edge.

And over Moreau's shoulder, calm as a save he's been tracking all night, Patrick Grze?kowiak lifts his eyes and finds mine in the doorway.

I don't breathe.

And he doesn't stop.