11. Ryan
RYAN
Dallas in November was cold in a way Phoenix had made me forget was possible.
Not Minnesota cold—nothing was Minnesota cold except maybe Canada—but cold enough that the walk from the bus to the arena had me pulling my collar up and Griffin making exaggerated suffering noises at my shoulder. Our breath came out in small clouds.
“You played in Seattle for eight years,” I said.
“And I left for a reason.” Griffin hunched his shoulders against it. “I have thin blood now. I grew up with thin blood. This is your fault somehow.”
“I didn’t talk you into anything.”
“You were very convincing by existing near me.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Captain of the team,” Griffin said solemnly. “Should really be more inspiring, Lindy.”
I pushed through the arena doors. The warmth hit immediately and Griffin made a sound behind me like a man returning from the sea.
We lost three-two in overtime. Not a bad loss, the way road losses went—we’d been the better team for fifty minutes, gone up two, given it back in the third on a bad line change I was going to be thinking about for the next forty-eight hours.
Calloway kept the postgame tight and professional.
I showered and changed and sat in front of my stall longer than I needed to, running the sequence back.
The second turnover in the neutral zone.
The coverage miss. The way the change had broken down before I could stop it.
Cole dropped onto the bench beside me. “You’re doing the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where you sit here and personally accept responsibility for the rotation of the earth.” He pulled on his jacket. “We gave up two goals in three minutes, Ryan. It happens. We’re still three points up on the wild card.”
“The change was bad.”
“The change was bad,” Cole agreed. “It won’t happen again because everyone in this room saw it and nobody wants to look at your face or ourselves for that matter when we blow a lead.” He stood. “Team dinner. You’re coming.”
I looked up at him. Cole was twenty-five and from Malibu and had never in his life spent more than six consecutive minutes being serious about anything, and yet he had a talent for appearing at exactly the right moment and saying the one thing that punctured my self-imposed pressure before it calcified into something worse.
It was deeply annoying and I was grateful for it in equal measure.
I went to dinner.
The restaurant was good—somewhere Cole had researched with the same dedication he had for his pre-game rituals, a steakhouse near the hotel with low lighting and booths deep enough to hold the whole group, which at our size overall, in person and quantity, was a feat.
The post-loss energy was quieter than a win but not fractured.
Men eating, talking, letting the game settle into the category of things that had happened and couldn’t be changed.
I was two bites into something excellent when Griffin appeared at my shoulder with the expression I’d learned meant he was about to ask for something.
“So,” Griffin said.
I kept eating.
“There are two women at the bar.” He sat down in the empty chair beside me. “They recognized Westbrook. He’s in his element, but there’s two of them and one of him and I thought—”
“No.”
“You haven’t even—”
“No, Griffin.”
“She’s lovely. I talked to her for ten minutes—”
“You talked to her for ten minutes and now you want me to take her off your hands because there’s someone else who has your attention.”
Griffin had the grace to look slightly caught.
“I talked to her for ten minutes and she’s lovely and I think you’d like her and, yes, I would also like to continue talking to the other one without my best friend sitting here staring at his steak when there is a beautiful southern woman who likes guys like you. ”
Guys like me. What does that even mean? A hockey player? Where any one of us would do? I wanted to tell him I wasn’t single. As far as I was concerned, I wasn’t.
“Isn’t she talking to Westbrook?” I asked, hoping to pawn off this situation on the pretty boy himself.
“Westbrook is like Mr. GQ, Lindy. There’s a bar full of women that want to talk to the best looking guy in the league.”
Cole really was the best looking guy in the league. But that was neither here nor there.
He fixed me with the open, earnest expression he’d been deploying since sophomore year at Minnesota State to get me to agree to things that were not in my best interest. Like being his wingman. It had worked then. It had an embarrassing track record overall.
“Twenty minutes,” I said.
Griffin was standing. “That’s all I’m asking.”
“Twenty minutes. I owe you one.”
I pushed my steak aside and went.
Her name was Amber and she was exactly as advertised.
Warm and funny, worked in marketing, had grown up in Fort Worth and had strong opinions about Dallas versus Houston I found myself actually listening to for a full eight minutes.
She was pretty and easy to talk to and laughed at the right moments, and at some point she touched my arm when she made a joke, and when I registered it I felt exactly nothing.
Not polite restraint. Not professional distance.
Nothing. A flat, complete absence where there should have been at least the low-grade flicker of interest I used to be able to produce on command in a situation like this.
I sat in a nice restaurant in Dallas next to a perfectly fine woman and all I could think about was a parking lot in Tempe on a Saturday afternoon, the way Maren had closed the distance herself and understood with the clarity I usually saved for game film exactly what had happened to me.
I stayed the full twenty minutes. I was a decent human being.
When Griffin reappeared, visibly pleased with himself, I excused myself with genuine warmth and went back to my steak.
I did not examine the fact that the whole time I’d been sitting across from Amber, my phone had been in my pocket and I’d been conscious of it the way I was conscious of things I was waiting for.
I finished my food. Said my goodnights. Went back to the hotel alone.
The room had that hotel room silence—not peaceful, just empty.
I showered, changed into sweats, and sat on the edge of the bed with my phone in my hand and the game film I’d meant to review still queued on my laptop.
I opened a text to Maren and then closed it.
It was late. She had work tomorrow. I’d texted her after the loss, just three words, did you see, and she’d sent back two words, rough one.
I put my phone on the nightstand and didn’t pick it up again.
I stared at the ceiling thinking about a parking lot in Tempe and the way she’d kissed me back and the sound she’d made against my mouth.
I didn’t sleep well.
Nashville the next night was different.
The locker room after the win had the loose energy of men who’d been holding their breath for weeks and finally didn’t need to.
The chirping started before the showers, kicked off—inevitably—by Danny Hart’s third goal, a deflection off his shin that had technically gone in off his ankle, which Danny had celebrated as if he’d scored a clean wrist shot from the circle, full arms-up, full lap around the net.
“The ankle,” Cole said, in the postgame. “We’re celebrating the ankle.”
“It counts,” Danny said.
“We know it counts. We’re asking about the celebration.”
“I’ve waited my whole life for a playoff goal.”
“It’s a regular season game in November.”
“A career goal,” Danny amended. “Against a contender.”
“Against their backup.”
Danny pointed at him. “Still counts.”
Cole scanned the room for support. Theo had his eyes closed against his stall. Eli was pulling off his pads in order, buckle by buckle, not thinking about it. Kasperi was on his phone.
“Kovac,” Cole said. “Backup or not. Does it count the same?”
Eli looked up. “The puck goes in or it doesn’t,” he said. “Everything else is noise.”
“That’s very zen.”
“It’s hockey.”
Danny pointed at Eli now. “See? That’s the quote I’m putting in my highlight reel.”
“Please don’t,” Eli said.
Griffin, from the far end of the room, said, “He’s going to make a highlight reel.”
“Obviously I’m making a highlight reel. I scored a goal. Two of the bounces were good.”
“Two of the—” Cole stopped. Looked at the ceiling. “How many bounces were there total?”
“Four,” Danny said. “But two of them were intentional.”
The room erupted. I sat at my stall and let myself laugh—the real kind, no managing it—and thought about the team I’d played for before this one and how long it had been since a locker room felt like this.
We’d won 4–1. Theo had his fifth of the season and accepted everyone’s congratulations with the flat expression he held for things he considered the bare minimum, which was so perfectly Theo I almost said something warm to him and then decided against it. Some things you didn’t disrupt.
The team went out. A bar near the hotel, close enough to walk, warm inside with the low noise of men who had earned their drink.
I went with them and had one beer and sat with Eli at the end of the table while Cole held court at the other end with the volume he brought to every room he’d ever walked into.
Griffin found me on the walk back and grabbed me around the neck from behind, said something in my ear that was mostly profanity and entirely affectionate—something about the redirect goal I’d scored off a Westbrook shot in the second, about how I managed to make every good play look like I’d rather be filing taxes.
I caught his arm and held on for a second the way I had after San Jose. I couldn’t afford to lose this either.