5. Ryan
RYAN
The locker room before the first game was the loudest it had been since training camp, which was saying something given that Cole Westbrook treated silence as a personal offense.
I sat at my stall and taped my stick and let the noise happen around me.
This was my process. Not isolation, not headphones, just stillness inside the chaos.
I’d learned it early, the ability to be in a room and also slightly outside it, and it had served me well across nine seasons and two cities and more pregame routines than I could count.
This one felt different. I’d known it would.
My phone buzzed on the shelf above my stall.
Anna: I’m watching the broadcast. The arena looks half empty
Ryan: Thanks for that
Anna: I’m just saying. Also the uniforms are very orange
Ryan: It’s burnt orange. It’s the brand
Anna: It’s very orange, Ryan. You look like a traffic cone
Ryan: Are you texting to be supportive or…
Anna: I’m texting to tell you I’m watching my little brother play his first game as captain of a desert hockey team which is a weird sentence I never thought I would say. I am being extremely supportive. Also Mom is here and she’s crying
Ryan: Tell her to wait until after the game
Anna: You know her, she doesn’t take requests
I put the phone down and stared at the Sidewinders logo on my jersey. Burnt orange and black, the rattlesnake coiled and ready. It was, admittedly, very orange.
Across the room, Cole was holding court, doing an impression of the opposing team’s goalie.
Full body, the guy’s hitch on the left side, his habit of talking to the post between whistles.
He had three of the younger guys doubled over and Danny Hart literally sliding off his stall.
Eli was at his stall with his headphones on, eyes closed, present and absent at the same time.
Theo was taping his stick with focused efficiency, much like me.
“The post,” Cole was saying, in a dead-on recreation of the goalie’s muttered cadence. “We’ve talked about this. You have to hold the angle—”
“That’s not what he sounds like,” Kasperi said.
“You don’t know what he sounds like.”
“I played against him in the World Juniors.”
Cole gestured at the room. “Who’s seen the tape? He literally talks to the post. Every stoppage. Full conversation.”
“My cousin does that,” Danny said.
“With a hockey net?”
“With his car.”
“Your cousin,” Cole said, “is living his best life and I respect that completely.”
Novak, who had said maybe fourteen words since training camp began, kept his eyes on his gear. “The post thing is real. I scored on him twice in juniors. He reprimanded me both times.”
The locker room was briefly delighted.
“Novak speaks,” Cole announced. “Mark the date.”
“I speak when there’s something worth saying,” Novak said, and went back to his laces.
Cole wrapped up his impression, took a bow, and turned to Griffin with three weeks of something banked behind his eyes. “Hey. Your sister’s coming out tonight, right?”
Griffin looked up slowly and glared at Cole. “Why?”
“Just asking.”
“Cole.”
“I’m making conversation.”
“I will put you through that wall.”
“I’ve been a professional gentleman about this for three weeks,” Cole said. “She works here. I see her every day. I have been nothing but respectful and appropriate. I am simply asking if she is coming to the bar after the game with us.”
“The answer is yes, and the rest of the answer is that do not forget she is my sister. And everyone knows the rule about sisters.”
Everyone did know the rule about sisters. You stay the fuck away from them. But I did that once already. Surely the man’s best friend could get a pass. Who am I kidding? The sister rule applies to me too.
“Noted.” Cole turned to the room. “Callahan’s sister is coming to The Rusty Nail tonight.”
There was immediate and predictable interest from the younger players. Griffin pointed at the room. “All of you. No.” He turned back to Cole. “Especially you.”
Griffin leaned back against his stall. “Brooke from PR asked about you, by the way.”
“No.”
“I’m just passing along information.”
“Griff.”
“She’s great. Very fun. Completely non-serious.” He said the last part like it was a selling point, which for Griffin it absolutely was.
“No,” I said again.
Griffin shrugged, entirely unbothered. “Your loss.” He stood and grabbed his helmet. “I’ll tell her you’re very focused on hockey.”
“Tell her whatever you want.”
“I always do.”
Cole glanced between us, delighted. “This team is so fun.”
Griffin dropped into the stall next to me. “How are you feeling?”
“Good.”
“You’re doing the thing.”
“What thing.”
“The thing where you go quiet and your face does nothing and everyone thinks you’re fine but you’re actually—”
“I’m fine, Griff.”
He held my glare for a moment. Then he nodded, because he was a good enough friend to know when to push and when to let it be. “City’s nervous,” he said. “I can feel it in the building. They want to want this.”
“I know.”
“So let’s give them something to want.”
I turned my stick over. The jersey. Thought about what Calloway had said on the first day of training camp—we have to earn it—and about my father’s voice on the phone, and then, without meaning to, about Sunday dinner.
About a small kitchen and a coffee maker beeping and Maren looking up at me with an expression that had stopped me completely, and the distance I hadn’t crossed, and Griffin’s voice from the garage that had made the decision for me.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I’d been actively not thinking about it for days and all that had accomplished was thinking about it constantly.
I stood up.
“All right,” I said, loud enough that the room shifted. Heads turned. Cole stopped mid-gesture. Even Eli opened one eye. “Let’s talk.”
The speech was short. I’d agonized over it for three days, thrown out everything I’d written, and said the true things that came to mind in the moment and felt like they mattered.
Nobody had given us this. The city had every right to be skeptical.
The only answer to skepticism was showing up and doing the work and doing it again tomorrow, and again, the day after that.
I reminded them this team, this collection of people in the room, and in the building, was something worth watching.
That I believed it. And I needed them to believe it too.
When I finished the room was quiet for a beat.
Griffin started banging his stick on the floor and the whole room followed, and Cole let out a sound that was somewhere between a war cry and a golden retriever discovering a tennis ball, and even Theo, in the back, gave a single sharp nod I was choosing to interpret as enthusiasm as he tapped his stick too.
Calloway, from the doorway, chirped, “What he said. Let’s go boys.”
The arena was half full, which in the context of an expansion team’s first game was either discouraging or a starting point. I chose starting point. The crowd was loud as the team took the ice for warm-ups, all-in and unembarrassed about it.
I did my warm-up lap and took inventory in the same order I always did before a game .
Griffin in net, somewhere else mentally already, pads on, game face locked.
Calloway behind the bench. And then Maren at the far end of the bench in staff gear, clipboard in hand, talking to Reyes, and I let myself look for two full seconds before I stopped.
She was standing with her weight on one hip, nodding at something Reyes was saying, a pen tucked behind her ear.
She hadn’t noticed me yet. I had one second of watching her, watching how she tilted her head while she was listening, noting the easy authority she had in her own body, and I felt the pull of her so clearly it was almost embarrassing, before she glanced up and found me looking.
Neither of us reacted, and I dragged my gaze back to the ice like a man with somewhere important to be.
I skated my warm-up and kept my eyes off the bench.
Still, I found the bench twice more.
Both times she was already watching me. Neither of us did anything about it. It was fine. It was completely normal and fine.
We lost 4–2, which wasn’t the story I’d wanted on opening night.
Calloway said afterward, in a voice that left no room for argument, that it was a game we could build on.
I had an assist on the first goal, a clean feed to Cole in the slot that he buried with calm certainty.
Theo had the second, a power play that was frankly beautiful, and Theo accepted the congratulations with the flat expression he wore all the time, as if nothing was a big deal.
The locker room after was subdued but not broken.
I said the things a captain said; or at least what I thought a captain should say after a tough loss.
The effort was there, the competition level was there, a loss in game one of an expansion season was not the same as a loss in April. I meant all of it.
Griffin found me after. “Drinks.”
“Yeah.”
The Rusty Nail was exactly what we needed. A dive bar with a patio, string lights, misting fans working overtime against the September night, which in Phoenix still meant pretty fucking hot, something I still wasn’t used to. The team took up most of the patio inside of twenty minutes.
I got a beer and found a spot at the edge of things, close enough to be present and far enough to breathe.
Cole was telling a story that required both hands and the participation of two bystanders.
Eli sat at the end of the bar with a club soda, making visible peace with being somewhere he hadn’t quite agreed to attend but felt the obligation as part of the team.
I knew he was a single dad and probably wanted to get home, but I appreciated his effort to be part of the team socially, something I thought was important.