14. Maren #5
The seats were four rows off the glass, and I had forgotten how much you could see, smell, and feel from that close as a spectator.
I had watched hockey since I was old enough to hold a juice box.
I had watched it from the stands at Griffin’s youth games and from the family section in college and from the training room monitors and from a folding chair at the end of a bench.
I had never watched it from four rows off the glass in the section where the players put the people who belong to them.
I got there early because I could not decide what to wear and then hated myself for the twenty minutes I lost to that.
In the end I wore a sweater that was not team colors and jeans and no jersey at all, which felt like the most conspicuous choice available.
A woman in her fifties two seats down was in a Lindqvist sweater with rhinestones on the seventeen.
She smiled at me and asked if it was my first time in these seats and I said yes before I thought about what the honest version of that question was.
“You’ll love it,” she said. “You can hear everything.”
She was right, which I already knew. That was the part nobody tells you. From the family seats you could hear the boards, and the sticks, and a man forty feet away telling another man exactly what he thinks of him. The glass contained all of it.
They came out for warm-ups and I made myself look at the whole ice like a normal person, not the way I would if I were doing my job, tracking who favored what and whose stride was short. I got through eleven players before I let myself find seventeen.
He was at the far blue line running through a passing drill with Cole, and he was not looking at me, and then he was.
It lasted less than a second. He came around the top of the circle, glanced up into the stands the way anyone does, found me four rows off the glass, and his shoulders dropped half an inch.
Not a wave. Not a smile. He just held it a beat too long and then went back to the drill like nothing had happened.
I felt it in my face. I turned my head and studied the scoreboard clock like it had personally offended me.
They won 4–1. He got two assists. I stayed until the horn and then took the long way around the concourse to avoid the tunnel, and I was almost out to the parking structure when someone said my name.
Jenna Brooks was leaning against the wall outside the media room with a tablet against her hip and her lanyard turned around backward. Comms and social. She had started the same week I did.
“Hey,” she said. “I didn’t know you came to games and sat in spectator seats.”
“I don’t. Usually. Unless I’m working, obviously. ” My voice came out fine. “Griffin’s been on me about it.”
“You should. It’s more fun in the seats for sure.” She glanced down at her tablet, thumbed something, glanced back up. “Where were you sitting?”
There was nothing in it. She asked the way you’d ask anyone anything. She had a tablet in her hand and eight things to do and she was making conversation in a hallway.
“Down near the glass,” I said.
“The family section?”
“I think so. I don’t really know the sections.”
“Mm.” She was still looking at her tablet.
“We ran the warm-up feed tonight. I pull stills off it for the socials.” She turned the tablet toward me without any particular ceremony, and there it was, a frame from the warm-up camera, Ryan at the top of the circle with his head up.
Looking at something above the glass. “I like this one.”
I looked at it for what I hoped was a normal amount of time.
You could not see me. The frame ended at the boards.
There was no version of that photograph that showed the woman he was looking at four rows up.
But you could see exactly where he was looking, and you could see how long he had been doing it, because the camera had held on to him and he had not looked away.
He was fucking hot in the photo, because of course he was.
“It’s a good picture,” I said, trying my damn hardest not to have an expression.
“Right? I’m going to run it Thursday.” She tucked the tablet under her arm. “Anyway. Next time let me know and I can come join you, or you can come up to the box with me. Nice to see you out of the treatment room.”
She went back through the door and I stood in the concourse with the cleaning crew moving through the rows behind me, and I did the math I had been carefully not doing for two months.
There was a camera on him during warm-ups. There had been a camera on him during warm-ups at every home game since October.
Jenna’s whole job was noticing what a camera caught.
I got to my car and sat in it without turning the key. I had said yes to those seats without thinking about it once, and I had sat in them for two and a half hours, and a woman with rhinestones on her sweater had asked me if it was my first time.
Nobody had caught us. That was the part I kept coming back to on the drive home.
Nobody had caught us yet, and I had not once thought about what would happen if they did. I was becoming less sure I cared.