15. Beau #2
I don’t look for her the way you don’t look at the one thing you most want to look at — with effort, with discipline, with the whole front of my attention pointed at the puck and the boards and the pre-game routine and the back of it screaming behind the bench, she’s behind the bench.
I carve my warmup laps. I take my shots. I do not look.
I look once. Halfway through. Can’t help it.
She’s there. Of course she’s there — platinum hair down, which I’ve learned by now means something, the cream sweater, Margo beside her already on her feet feeding off the crowd.
Sloane’s not on her feet. Sloane’s sitting very composed with a paper cup of something, watching the ice with the still attention I now know means she’s reading the whole rink the way she reads a room.
And then she finds me finding her.
For one half-second neither of us does anything about it.
The whole loud building drops away and it’s just the thirty feet of cold air between her seat and the ice, her eyes on mine through the glass, and I forget I’m supposed to be skating.
Then she lifts one hand off the cup and gives me a small wave — barely a wave, just her fingers, the kind of thing you’d miss if you weren’t looking right at her, and I am looking right at her — and a beat behind it the color comes up in her cheeks.
High and warm and unmistakable, even from here, even under the arena lights.
She’s blushing.
Sloane Beckett, who told me an hour ago to be a professional, who sits composed through everything, who has a face like a closed door — is blushing at me across a hockey rink in front of nine hundred people, and trying to look like she isn’t by lifting the cup to her mouth to hide it.
It doesn’t hide it. Nothing hides it. I’ve seen it now and I’m going to be thinking about it through the anthem.
I put my head down and skate, and I’m smiling into my cage like an idiot, and I don’t care.
The puck drops at 19:03.
I win the faceoff clean — back to Theo, who moves it up the boards to Wyatt, and we’re in their zone inside six seconds, and the building gets loud.
This is the part of my life that’s never been complicated.
Out here I’m not performing anything. There’s no Beau-who-everyone-needs on the ice; there’s just the read and the body and the puck, the geometry of it, four teammates I can find blind and five opponents I have to account for, all of it mapping itself in front of me a half-second before it happens.
O’Grady calls it a great head. Sloane would have a better word for it. I’m not thinking about Sloane.
Okay, I’m thinking about Sloane a little.
First period’s a grind. UMass is a better team than the exhibition crowd — disciplined, physical, a big defensive pair that collapses the slot and makes you earn everything inside the dots.
We trade chances. Their goalie robs Cash on a two-on-one that should’ve been one-nothing.
I take a hit along the boards from their big right-hander, number twenty-two, a clean one but a heavy one, and it lands on the bad shoulder and goes through me white-hot — fuck, a flare so bright it whites out the edges of the rink for a half-second — and I get up slow and skate it off and do not look at the bench and absolutely do not look two rows behind it, because if I let the shoulder show, O’Grady sits me, and I’m not getting sat in the first conference game of the year.
I get back to the bench on the change and Cash drops next to me. “You good? That was a heavy one.”
“I’m good.”
“You came up slow.”
“I came up fine.”
He looks at me a second — Cash and his sharp eyes — and lets it go, because there’s a game on and you don’t push a guy mid-period. But he files it. I watch him file it. Everybody’s filing things about me lately and I’m running out of places to put the things I don’t want filed.
We go into the first intermission scoreless.
Second period, we break it open.
It starts on a faceoff — they always start on a faceoff, the whole game lives and dies on the dot and the dot is mine.
I win it back to Theo, Theo holds the line, walks it, and instead of shooting he sends a seam pass that splits their big pair, and I’m already moving, already where the puck’s going to be because I read it two strides ago, and it’s on my tape in the slot with the goalie still sliding across—and I bury it.
Top shelf, glove side, the net snapping back.
The Nest comes apart.
I don’t do the big celebration. I never do. I wheel out of the slot and Theo grabs me and Wyatt grabs me and Cash arrives like a freight train, and over the boards the bench is up, and I let myself — one time, one half-second — look two rows up behind it.
She’s on her feet.
Sloane Beckett, who brought a book, who told me to be a professional, who sits composed through everything, is on her feet with the rest of the building, and she’s not lifting a cup an inch this time, she’s clapping, and there’s something on her face she hasn’t decided to put there, the unguarded thing, the studio thing, and our eyes catch for the length of a held breath—and then she catches herself.
I watch her catch herself. The composure comes back down like a curtain, and she sits, and picks the cup back up, and goes back to being a woman at a hockey game.
But I saw it.
I file it — grinning into my glove on the way back to center — with all the other things I’m keeping about her, the list that has no system, the growing pile. She forgot herself for a second. Watching me. She forgot.
I know exactly what that’s worth, because I wrote — no. Because I read — the rule she keeps reminding herself of. The one she doesn’t know I’ve seen.
Do not, under any circumstances, forget that this is fake.
She just forgot. In front of nine hundred people. For me.
We score twice more before the period’s out. I get the second one and an assist on the third, and by the time the horn goes for the second intermission we’re up three and the building’s loud and O’Grady actually almost smiles, which for O’Grady is a parade.
I should be thinking about the third period. About closing it out, about not getting complacent, about the conference standings and the big defensive pair and number twenty-two who’s going to be looking to take a piece out of me.
I’m thinking about a woman two rows behind the bench who forgot it was fake.
A beat late, I notice the obvious thing, the thing that should scare me more than it does:
So did I.
I forgot it was fake somewhere around a dark studio yesterday afternoon, and I haven’t remembered since, and I’m not sure I want to.
I pull my helmet back on.
Third period. Close it out. Be the captain.
I can do all of that with the part of me that’s never gotten stupid on the ice.
The rest of me is already up in the seats, and has been since 7:03, and isn’t coming back anytime soon.