Chapter 53
Jamie
The locker room before the game is the loudest silence I've ever been in.
Guys talking, gear going on, music playing — all of it present and all of it somewhere behind glass.
I move through the pre-game routine on autopilot.
Jersey. Skates. Tape. The muscle memory of too many years taking over because my head is not here.
My head is on Rhys.
All I am, everything I have, is Rhys.
He's across the room at his stall and he hasn't looked at me once and I've been counting the hours the way you count something that's running out.
Too many hours of existing in the same space and being nowhere near each other and tonight we have to get on the same ice and play the game that has been coming for us since September.
I look at him.
He's sitting with his elbows on his knees and his head down and his hands gripping his helmet and he's very still in a way that has nothing to do with focus.
I've seen Rhys focused. I know what it looks like.
This is not it. This is a person holding themselves together with both hands.
His knuckles are white around the helmet.
Every few seconds his eyes move to the door and then back to the floor like he's calculating exits.
Like some part of him is still trying to find a way out of this room and this game and this night.
He probably looks like the kid who showed up at Eldridge with a corner locker and a chemistry textbook and nobody.
I cross the room. I don't think about it. I don’t think about the silence or what I did at the bar or whether he even wants me here. I just cross the room and crouch down in front of him until I'm at his eye level and he has to see me.
He looks up at me and his eyes are raw. Not crying — Rhys doesn't cry where people can see.
Just — raw. Stripped of everything. The armor gone and underneath it just a person who is terrified and exhausted and has been carrying this for too long and is now being asked to walk out that door and face it all over again.
"Rhys," I say.
"Don't." His voice is tight.
"I'm not—" I stop. "I'm not going to say anything about last night. Or us." I hold his gaze. "Just this."
"You're ready," I say. Light touch on his shoulder.
His breath catches.
Just that. Just my mother's words, the only truly good thing I was ever given, offered up in this locker room to the one person I know needs them right now. His eyes do something familiar, a reminder of what we had.
"You're ready, Rhys," I say again. Just for him.
He holds my gaze for a long moment. Then his shoulders release. Not all the way. Just enough. He nods once.
I stand up and walk back to my stall, leaving him to his pre-game prep.
The arena is packed. The noise hits when we come out of the tunnel — both teams, both student sections, the electric charge of a rivalry game that has been building since the schedule dropped.
The ice is bright under the lights. I can see Eldridge already on their side, moving through warmup, and my eyes find Marcus before I tell them to.
He's at center. He looks the same as last night. Same easy way of moving. Same way of owning whatever surface he's on. He's warming up and going through his drills and every few passes his eyes drift to our side of the ice.
To Rhys.
The cold and the pressure behind my sternum build.
I redirect. Focus on warmup. Focus on the game plan. Focus on the things I can control. That's what you do. That's always what you do. Except I keep finding Rhys in my peripheral vision.
He's moving. Going through his drills. Technically present and technically focused and if you didn't know him it would look fine.
If you didn't know the way he moves when he's locked in versus the way he moves when he's somewhere else inside himself — the fraction of a second too long before he makes decisions, the way his feet are slightly off the rhythm he usually has — you'd never see it.
I see it all.
He's still spiraling. He's out here on the ice and his body is going through the motions and his mind is somewhere in the past at Eldridge and Marcus is forty feet away and I can see the effort it's costing him to stay in this moment.
Marcus drifts closer on a warmup drill.
His eyes find Rhys and stay there.
My stick tightens in my hands.
First period.
We come out hard. Rhys at center, me on the right, the game plan Fitch drilled into us all week running exactly the way it was drawn up.
The first few shifts are clean — fast, physical, both teams feeling each other out.
Their defensive structure is what we expected.
Their goalie is better than film suggested.
Rhys wins his first three faceoffs. Muscle memory. The ice being the one place it doesn't reach him. I start to think he's going to be okay. Then Marcus lines up across from him at the faceoff dot.
They're two feet apart.
I watch Rhys's jaw tick. Watch him stare at the ice in front of him and not look up.
Watch the effort of that not looking — the complete stillness of someone who is refusing to be present in their own body because present means feeling what's six inches away.
Remembering everything you tried to bury.
The ref drops the puck.
Rhys wins it.
I take the pass and move it up and the shift goes the way it's supposed to go and I tell myself again that he's going to be okay.
Second period.
We're down one — a power play goal in the last minute of the first that shouldn't have happened. The bench is tight. Fitch is controlled the way that means he's furious. Rhys comes off a shift and sits beside me on the bench and he's breathing hard and his eyes are somewhere I can't reach.
"You good?" I ask.
He doesn't answer.
He's too busy watching the ice, so I follow his gaze.
Marcus is talking to their bench, laughing at something, perfectly at ease in the way of someone who knows this rink is his. He looks up and finds Rhys on the bench and holds it for a second.
Rhys looks away first.
I've been watching Marcus all night. The way he plays.
Clean, controlled, exactly as good as his reputation.
The way he keeps drifting, putting himself into Rhys's orbit without making it obvious — their lines don't match up often but when they do he's always there.
Always close. Always with those eyes that say too much.
I know what Marcus is doing.
He's reminding Rhys he exists.
Like he forgot. Like Eldridge and the loneliness and the shower weren't enough to make his presence felt, as if he needs to be right here, right now, on this ice, making sure Rhys knows he's watching.
The rage is very quiet. Very cold.
Eight minutes into the second period Marcus gets on the ice the same shift as Rhys.
I watch it happen. They're behind the play, a loose puck battle along the boards, and Marcus comes in and instead of going for the puck he goes for Rhys.
Not a hit. Something else. Something that looks incidental and isn't — his body against Rhys's, his mouth moving, close enough that only Rhys can hear it.
I stop moving.
Rhys goes rigid.
Then he shoves Marcus off him. Hard. Both hands flat against his chest. Not a hockey play. A get the fuck away from me.
The ref calls it.
Minor penalty. Rhys to the box.
He glances at me. Just once. And I don't know what he sees on my face but he looks away fast.
I make the decision in that moment.
Not a complicated one. Not weighed against career and scholarship and future and everything my father taught me about what matters and what doesn't. Not argued over or reasoned through.
Just — clear.
I choose Rhys.
So I watch Rhys go to the box.
Defeated. His eyes down. His whole body carrying the weight of a person who just had the worst thing that ever happened to him whispered directly into his ear in front of everyone and had to absorb it alone.
Again.
Alone.
Again.
I stand on the ice and I watch the door of the penalty box close behind him and Marcus skates back to his bench and something inside me empties.
Not the bad empty.
Not my father's — the controlled composed silence of a man deciding how to manage damage. Not the empty that means stand still and give them nothing.
The other kind. The kind that comes at the end of a very long argument with yourself when you finally stop pretending there are two sides. Because there’s no other choice here. It’s the freeing kind.
I look at the scoreboard.
Down one. Second period. Eight minutes left.
I look at the bench. At Fitch with his arms folded watching the ice. At the guys on the boards doing their jobs. At the game that is happening the way games happen, the world turning on its axis, twenty-one years of my life aimed at this exact ice on this exact night.
The scholarship.
The draft.
The career.
My father's voice: this is the whole of it. This is the only thing. Don't be soft. Don't let anything in that doesn't belong there. You do not get to be this.
I look at Rhys in the penalty box. Sitting with his elbows on his knees and his head slightly forward and his eyes on the floor. Not the ice he plays on. The floor of the box. The look of someone who has retreated so far inside himself he can't find the way out.
And Marcus is out there right now skating free because I have been standing still my whole life and I stood still at the bar and I stood still every time moving felt like too much and Rhys has been paying that for me every single time.
I think about my father.
He's dead.
He never made it to a world where any of this was worth surviving for. He drank himself quietly to death and I carried him everywhere I went afterward like I owed him.
I don't owe him this.
I don't owe him Rhys.
I don't owe him one more second of standing still.
I gave him too much of myself already.
I’m not lost anymore.
The penalty box door opens and Rhys steps back onto the ice.