9. Zach
ZACH
She’s got her fingers on my belt buckle, looking up at me and every cell in my body is screaming at me to let her keep going, but I wrap my hand around her wrist and hold it still.
“Wait,” I say.
“Why?” She’s breathing hard and flushed. “You were into it thirty seconds ago.”
“I’m still into it. That’s not—” I sit up straighter and try to rearrange my brain into something functional. “I don’t want our first time to be like this.”
“Like what? On your couch?”
“After a day where we bought a fish and you almost killed us with your driving. Isn’t your mom expecting you home with the cat food?
” I push her hair back from her face, the gesture feels so natural it scares me a little, like my hands already know what to do with her even when the rest of me doesn’t.
“I want to remember every second of it. Not rushed before you have to get home.”
She stares at me with her mouth slightly open. “That’s either the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me or the most frustrating.” She drops her head against my chest and groans. “You’re killing me, Almardon.”
“I’ll make it worth the wait.”
“That’s a big promise.”
“I’m a big guy.”
We don’t speak for a second and then she starts giggling and whatever was building dissolves into laughter between us.
“I should go, but I don’t want to go,” she whispers.
“I know. But if you stay I’m going to stop being noble about this and then I’m going to hate myself in the morning.”
She kisses me again and stands up, snagging her shirt and bra off the floor, and stops at the bathroom door, turning back to me. “Hey, Zach?”
“Yeah?”
“Next time I’m not going to let you stop me.”
“I’m counting on it.”
She shows up at the practice facility the next day.
I’m in the players lounge waiting for Rodriguez to finish his PT session. I’ve been sitting here for fifteen minutes doing what I always do when I’m not in the crease, watching film on my phone, memorizing release points, running saves in my head. Glove side, blocker side, five-hole. Reset. Again.
“Boo.”
I jump so hard I nearly fall off the couch. My phone goes flying and I’m already grabbing for it before I register who’s sitting next to me.
“Mackie, what are you doing here?”
“Hi to you too.” She’s grinning, completely at ease, sitting with a backpack over her shoulder like she visits NHL practice facilities everyday of her life.
“How did you get in here? You can’t just walk into a—”
“Security buzzed me in.” She motions in the direction of the entrance like this is obvious. “I told him I needed to interview a player for my journalism class and he said go ahead.”
“Hank let you in?” Hank who I’ve never seen let anyone through without a credential check, including, one time, a guy who actually played for us.
“It’s for a player profile piece. First-person interview, background, game analysis.” She pulls her phone out of her pocket and waves it at me. “I’m picking you for my subject.”
“You could have texted. We could have done this at my apartment.” Where I would have had time to shower and possibly rehearse answers and definitely not be sitting here in a sweaty under-armor with helmet hair.
“That’s no fun. Isn’t this where you’ll be totally in your element?” She looks around the room. “Besides, I wanted to get the full picture.”
“The full picture smells like feet.”
“I know. It’s nostalgic.”
I lead her to a spot in the empty stands above the rink.
The ice is white and bright below us and she sets her phone to record, placing it on the seat between us.
I’m mentally running through my prepared script of answers to standard questions about how I got into hockey and what it’s like being a backup.
She starts with: “If you could only save one item from a burning building and it can’t be a person or a pet, what is it?”
“What does this have to do with my player profile?”
“I’m establishing your character. Answer the question.”
“I don’t know. My goalie pads?”
“Wrong.” She says it with such confidence that I almost believe there was a right answer.
“This answer reveals everything about a person and you chose equipment. That tells me you define yourself by what you do, not who you are.” She scribbles something in her notebook and I try to read it upside down but her handwriting is terrible.
“Next question. What’s your most embarrassing food opinion? ”
“I don’t have embarrassing food opinions.”
“Everyone has embarrassing food opinions. Mine is that I think ketchup belongs on literally anything that isn’t a dessert and I will die on that hill.”
“That’s actually disgusting.”
“See? That reaction tells me more about you than ‘what’s your pre-game routine’ ever would.” She’s leaning forward, pen moving, and I realize she’s not writing down what I’m saying, she’s writing down how I’m reacting. She’s scouting me. “Your turn. Embarrassing food opinion. Go.”
“I like pineapple on pizza.”
“Zach, that’s not embarrassing. That’s just Hawaiian pizza. Give me something real.”
“I put ranch on spaghetti one time and it wasn’t bad.”
“RANCH on SPAGHETTI?” She writes something in her notebook, underlining it twice. “That’s going in the article.”
“Please don’t put that in the article.”
“It’s totally going in the article and it’s going to be the headline. ‘Backup Goalie Puts Ranch on Spaghetti: A Profile in Chaos.’”
Her laughter is infectious and I realize I’ve never been this happy about anything that wasn’t hockey.
She does eventually get to the real stuff.
Where I grew up, how I got into hockey, the path from juniors to here.
She asks about my first save in an actual game and I tell her about a night in front of maybe three hundred people, a breakaway where the forward deked left and I dropped and threw my glove out and somehow caught it.
I can still feel the puck hitting the pocket. Some things your body just keeps.
I end up telling her more than I planned because she has a way of listening where she doesn’t push, but she circles back to things I say in passing, pulling on threads until the whole thing unspools.
I mention my grandparents once, briefly, and she doesn’t ask a follow-up question but twenty minutes later she comes back to it from a different angle and suddenly I’m talking about things I haven’t told anyone about in years.
“So you left home at sixteen?” she asks.
“Yeah. Went to a billet family in Michigan.”
“How old were you when you got called up?”
“Twenty.”
“I’m eighteen, but I’ll be nineteen soon,” she says, not looking up from her notebook. “In case you were wondering.”
I do the math automatically. Four years. I’m twenty-two and she’s eighteen and my brain is already doing the thing where it calculates every possible way this could be a problem.
“I figured you’d want to know before you spiraled about it privately,” she says.
“I wasn’t going to spiral.”
“You just did a little bit.” She glances up. “I watched you do it. Your whole face went weird.” She looks back at her notebook. “My parents are three years apart. It’s fine.”
She moves to the next question like she didn’t just detonate something and leave me sitting in the rubble.
“What’s the hardest part about being a backup?” she asks.
I give her the professional answer, a canned response about mental discipline, staying ready, not knowing when you’ll play. The words are smooth because I’ve said them before, to myself in the mirror on bad days.
“That’s the answer you’d give a reporter,” she says. “What’s the real answer?”
I look at her for a while. The recorder on her phone is running. Below us the rink sits silent, waiting for the next practice. She tilts her head and watches me, the pen still in her hand but not moving.
Then she reaches forward and taps the red button to stop the recording.
“The hardest part is feeling like you don’t belong,” I say. “Like everyone’s waiting for you to prove that calling you up was a mistake.”
I’ve never said that out loud before. Not to Rodriguez, not to my agent, not to anyone. And I just handed it to a girl I barely know and I should feel exposed but I don’t. I feel like I just took off equipment I didn’t know I was wearing.
“That’s not for the article,” she says quietly. “That’s just for me to know.”
She leans over and kisses me on the cheek, quick and light, and I can feel the warmth of it spread across my whole face, down through my chest and I’m going to be thinking about this for the rest of the week. Just the cheek. Just the press of her lips in a cold arena.
“I should go.” She stuffs her phone and notebook in her bag. “I picked up an afternoon shift at Pucks. But do you want to do dinner tonight? Your place?”
“Yeah. Okay.” I want to say more than that. I want to say I’d do dinner every night. I want to say I’ve been counting down hours between seeing her. But “yeah, okay” is what comes out because I’m me and I’m working on it.
“I’ll bring food. You provide the ambiance. Feet smell and all.”
She’s gone before I can come up with a response, slipping down the stairs and through the tunnel exit without hesitating.
I sit in the stands for another minute before following. Rodriguez finds me hovering in the hallway of the PT wing.
“Hey, did I see Mackie here earlier?”
“Yeah. She needed to interview me for a class.”
“Oh nice. Haven’t seen her in a while. She used to come by all the time.”
“Why?”
Rodriguez gives me a puzzled look. “Why what?”
“Why did she used to come by all the time?”
He stares at me for a second. “She grew up around here, man. You know how it is.” He grabs his bag. “You coming or what?”