10. Rhett
Rhett
We win the last one, and for three hours I get to remember why I came back.
It’s the fourth city, the storm long gone, and we go in there a tire fire and we come out four–two, the power play finally clicks, Cooke buries two of his own, and Voss scores his first of the year and skates to the bench looking like he just got told he gets to keep his life.
The room afterward is loud for the first time since October.
It’s not a turnaround. One win doesn’t turn anything.
But it’s a night where the building doesn’t hate us, and on a four-and-nine team you take the night.
I look up once, out of an old habit I can’t kill, at the visitors’ owner’s box where ours sits when we travel, and there’s nobody in it.
Brunner flew commercial home after the second period of a game we were losing.
Didn’t wait to see us climb out. There’s a text on my phone when I check it in the tunnel, three words, good.
keep it, which from Hal Brunner is a Hallmark card, and which I read twice trying to find the warmth in it and can’t.
The man hired a legend and watches him like an actuary.
I put the phone away. We won. I’m not going to let a billionaire’s two-word telegram take the one good night.
The veterans organize a thing at the hotel bar, low-key, two drinks and home, a night to put the team back together. I show my face because a coach shows his face. I plan to have one club soda and go up.
She’s at the end of the bar in a dark dress, off the clock, or as off the clock as she gets, and I revise my plan without admitting I’m revising it.
The team peels off in twos and threes, up to bed, early skate tomorrow even on a win.
Tobin holds court till he doesn’t, herds the young guys toward the elevators, gives me a look on his way out that I decide not to read.
And then the bar’s nearly empty, and it’s the bartender wiping down the far end and a TV with the highlights on mute and her and me on two stools with a foot of mahogany between us, which is not enough.
“Good game,” she says.
“Good game.”
“Voss looked like a different kid.”
“He is a different kid. For now. But then he’ll need it again.” I turn the club soda. “That’s the job. You patch them and they tear, and you patch them. Nobody stays fixed.”
“That’s grim, Coach.”
“It’s hockey.”
She smiles into her drink. Off the clock, her smile isn’t the load-bearing one.
It’s smaller, and it’s real which is worse for me by a wide margin.
We’re not talking about anything. That’s the danger of her I keep relearning.
It’s not the big moments, the film room, the bridge.
It’s this. A bar, a win, no fire to put out, nothing to manage, just a woman I like talking to about nothing at midnight.
That’s the one I can’t defend against. I’ve got armor for crisis. I’ve got none for easy.
The bartender drifts to the far end with his rag and his phone.
The ice machine somewhere behind the bar drops a load with a sound like a small avalanche.
Her knee is angled toward me on the stool, and I am aware of it the way you’re aware of a bruise, a low constant signal I keep deciding to ignore.
“Can I ask you something off the record?” she says.
“You don’t have a record. You’re always working.”
“Off the record,” she says again, and turns on the stool to face me, knee almost touching my leg.
“On the bridge. In Boston. You told me all of that, the marriage, the worst of it, like a warning. Like a keep-back sign.” Her eyes are steady.
“Did it work? On you, I mean. Did saying it out loud make you want to stay back?”
I should lie. The professional lie, the kind one, yes, it worked, goodnight. It’s right there.
“No,” I say.
The foot of mahogany stops being a foot.
I don’t decide to move and neither does she, but her knee’s against my thigh now and my hand’s found the bare skin above her knee.
Her breath changes, and I’ve spent two months and four cities not doing this, and I am abruptly, completely done not doing this.
“Rhett.” My name, not a warning, the opposite.
I kiss her.
It’s not the almost. It’s the thing the almosts were rehearsing.
Her mouth opens under mine. She makes a sound low in her throat, her hand fisting in my shirt and pulling, and twenty-five years and a son and a clause and every reason fall straight through the floor.
She tastes like the one good night in a bad season, and she's kissing me back like she's been starving for it as long as I have. My hand slides higher, finds the warm skin on the inside of her knee, and her thighs press together around the touch like she can’t decide whether to trap my hand there or chase it up. She shifts toward me. The bartender’s forty feet away and I have stopped, entirely, caring, which is exactly the stupid that ends careers.
“Coach. Phone.”
Tobin. Back at the doorway, loud, deliberately loud, holding up his own phone like a prop.
We break apart. Clean, fast, a foot of mahogany again in half a second.
The bartender glances over at the noise and sees nothing worth seeing: a coach and a staffer, two stools apart.
Tobin gave us that half-second on purpose, which means he saw.
And if Tobin saw, then he left this bar and walked all the way back to it for exactly one reason — to make sure nobody else did.
“Bus is six-fifteen, not seven,” Tobin says, to me, easy, like that’s why he came. “Wanted you to know before you turned in.” His eyes hit mine and there’s nothing in them but a man covering for another man. “Night, Coach. Night, Maren.”
He goes. The bus is at seven, same as it's been all week. He invented the six-fifteen so he'd have a reason to cross the room and be loud. I'm going to owe Tobin Pratt for the rest of my life, and he's never once going to mention it.
Maren has both hands flat on the bar like she’s holding it down. Her mouth is still red from mine. When she speaks her voice is wrecked and trying not to be.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay. That, okay.”
“Maren.”
“He saw. Tobin saw.”
“Tobin won’t say anything.”
“That’s not the point and you know it.” She turns to me, and the fear in her face isn’t about Tobin, it’s bigger, it’s the whole shape of what we almost just did in a public room.
“Tonight it was Tobin. Next time it’s a phone, a fan, a bartender who recognizes you, a guy with a grudge and a Twitter account.
You’re the most photographed man in this city, and I’m the woman whose job is your reputation, and we just made out at a hotel bar because we won a hockey game.
Do you understand what that is? That’s not a feeling.
That’s a headline that ends both of us and takes Caden down with it. ”
She’s right. She’s always right; it’s the wall I keep walking into. And the thing she’s right about is the one thing I can’t argue, because I’ve already done the version of this where a Mercer man takes everything down with him and calls it love.
“You’re right,” I say.
“I hate that you agree. I wanted you to argue.”
“I’m not going to argue you into a fire.”
She laughs, once, with no humor in it, and presses the heels of her hands to her eyes the way she does. Then she drops them, and she’s got the daylight face halfway back on, brick by brick, but it’s not catching the way it usually does, and we both know it.
“New rule,” she says. “We don’t do this on the road.
We don’t do this in the building. We don’t do this anywhere a person with a phone exists, which is everywhere, which means we don’t do this.
” She stands, smooths the dark dress. “I’m going to bed.
Alone. You’re going to drink your club soda.
And tomorrow we’re going to be so professional it’s boring. ”
“Okay.”
“Say it like you mean it.”
“I can’t,” I say. “That’s the problem. I’ve never been able to say a thing I didn’t mean, and I find I can’t start with you.”
It lands wrong, or right, I can’t tell anymore, and she stands there a second with the dress smoothed and the rule made and her mouth still red, and what crosses her face isn’t relief that I agreed.
It’s the opposite. It’s a woman realizing the rule she just made is going to be the hardest thing she’s ever tried to keep, because the man she made it with just told her, plainly, that he won’t pretend.
She goes up. I stay. I drink the club soda I don’t want, and I watch the muted highlights loop Voss’s first goal three times, the kid’s face cracking open with joy on a silent screen, and I think about how I came back to this city to feel that again and instead I’m sitting at a bar at midnight feeling something with no banner attached to it at all.
A rule’s a real thing. I’ve coached inside rules my whole life; I respect them.
But I knew the bus was at seven when I let Tobin lie about it, and I kissed her anyway with a bartender forty feet off, so I already know exactly what kind of man I am about this particular rule.
It isn’t going to save us. It’s just going to be the thing we break, and the only mercy left is that we haven’t broken it yet.