31. Zach
ZACH
The lot is empty except for two cars I don’t recognize, which is probably just the cleaning crew.
I scan the windows on the second floor. Dark.
The coaches’ offices are dark. The weight room lights are off.
The only light I can see is the faint glow from the main hallway, which stays on all night, and the security desk near the front entrance.
I get out of the car. Lock it. Check that I locked it.
Check again. Walk toward the side entrance, which is the one Mackie told me to use because it’s keycard-only and doesn’t pass the security desk.
I badge in and the door clicks open and I’m inside the practice facility of the professional hockey team that employs me at almost ten o’clock at night for the purpose of meeting my secret girlfriend in the video room where our coaching staff reviews game film and I am going to hire a therapist or something because this is not the behavior of a well-adjusted person.
The hallway is empty. My sneakers squeak on the floor and every squeak makes me flinch.
I start walking too fast and then I’m walking too slow and then I’m walking at a pace that I think looks normal but probably looks like a man who’s trying very hard to look normal which is worse than just walking fast.
The video room is just past the weight room.
The big one with three rows of chairs facing a screen that takes up the entire wall, the room where we break down game tape as a team.
Barrett dims the lights and runs film and we sit in these chairs and study ourselves failing in high definition.
I’ve spent hundreds of hours in this room.
Mackie
parking now. 2 min
is the coast clear captain paranoia
Me
don’t call me that
Mackie
is the coast clear my darling anxious love
Me
meet me in the video room. End of the hall past the weight room
Mackie
I know where the video room is Zach I’ve been coming to this building since I was seven
Me
please dont remind me how young you are
Mackie
you are so CUTE when you’re committing crimes
I hear her before I see her. Footsteps in the hallway, quick and light, and then the door handle turns and she slips in and I lock it behind her. She’s standing in the dark video room breathing hard and grinning with her hair down and my brain just empties.
“You came,” she says.
“You didn’t really give me a choice.”
“I gave you every choice. You chose this one.” Her fingers curl into my hoodie. “I missed you.”
She pulls me down and kisses me and for the first time in weeks my brain goes quiet.
We stumble backward into the front row of chairs.
The armrest catches her hip and she laughs against my mouth and I catch her and pull her into me.
She wraps her arms around my neck and kisses me like she’s been thinking of nothing else.
I sit down and pull her into my lap so she can straddle me, her knees sinking into the seat on either side of my hips with her skirt riding up her thighs.
I grip her hips and pull her down hard against me and she gasps and rolls her hips and the friction is—fuck.
I’m already hard and she can feel it because she does it again, a slow deliberate grind that drags her center along the length of me.
“Shh,” she whispers against my mouth, grinning.
“Don’t tell me to shh when you’re doing that.”
She does it again, purposely, and I’m losing track of the plan. I had a plan. The plan was controlled and measured and it did not involve me coming apart in the first five minutes because she’s grinding on me in a chair where I watch penalty kill breakdowns.
I slide my hands under her top and up her back.
Her skin is so soft and so warm that I let myself have a moment to rest my hands on her before I find the clasp of her bra and undo it.
She pulls back just enough to let me push her shirt up and the bra with it.
She’s bare from the waist up, sitting in my lap in the video room, the screen dark behind her, and I lean forward and put my mouth on her chest and feel her arch into me so hard the chair rocks back.
She’s pulling my hair and making sounds that are way too loud for this room. Her hips are rocking against me in a rhythm she’s not controlling anymore and I have to stop this or it’s going to be over before we get to the part that matters.
I grab her hips and hold her still.
“Wait, I brought something for you.” I reach into my hoodie pocket and feel nothing.
“The laces,” she breathes. “Where are they?”
Fuck. I can see them on the shelf above my stall where I left them because I was so busy being distracted by Rodriguez noticing brand new skate laces that I didn’t want to grab them in front of him and make a huge thing about it.
“They’re in the locker room,” I say.
She pulls back and looks at me. “You forgot the laces.”
“I didn’t forget. They’re in the building. They’re just not in this room.”
She drops her forehead against my shoulder and starts laughing. “Go get them.”
“Right now?”
“No, next Tuesday. YES right now.” She climbs off my lap and sits in the chair next to mine, crossing her arms over her chest, looking thoroughly kissed and amused. “Go. Hurry.”
“Don’t move.”
“Never. I’m emotionally committed to this chair.”
I unlock the door and slip into the hallway.
The wing is dark except for the glow of the exit signs.
I’m harder than I’ve probably ever been in my entire life walking through a professional hockey facility to retrieve skate laces from my locker for the purpose of tying up my teammate’s daughter in the video room.
The locker room is dark when I enter and I make my way to my stall at the far end, grabbing the laces from the shelf above my helmet—new, unwaxed, and soft.
I’m rounding the corner past the coaches’ offices on my way back to the video room when a door opens.
I stop so fast I almost trip over my own feet.
Coach Barrett is carrying a laptop under his arm and he’s wearing a coat like he just walked in from outside, which he did, because he’s supposed to be at home but instead he’s here, in the building, approximately forty feet from the room where Mackie is sitting half-undressed in a chair waiting for me to come back with skate laces.
“Almardon,” he says. “Forgot something?”
“Mouthguard,” I say, and my voice sounds completely normal, which is a miracle.
He nods and I take three steps past him almost in the clear when he says, “Hold on—what’s that?”
I follow his eyes down to my hand. “Skate laces,” I say.
“I can see that.” He studies me for what feels like four hundred years but is probably three seconds. “What kind of knot are you planning to use?” he finally asks.
I open my mouth but nothing comes out. Because there is absolutely no version of this conversation that I prepared for and my brain, which has been running worst-case scenarios all day, did not include the scenario where my head coach asks me about knot selection in a hallway at ten o’clock at night.
“I—haven’t decided.”
Barrett puts his laptop on the ledge next to his office door and takes the laces out of my hand. I let him take them because what am I going to do, play tug of war with my head coach while my girlfriend is topless forty feet away.
“Is Mackinnon in the video room?”
I don’t say anything, which is the same as saying everything.
Barrett exhales long and slow through his nose with his eyes closed, the exhale of a man who has been coaching professional athletes for decades and is no longer surprised by any of it but would very much like to be.
He loops the lace with a series of precise, fast movements and holds it up. “This is a quick-release bowline.” He tugs the tail and the knot opens, the laces falling apart.
He does it again, slower this time. As I watch his hands my brain is splitting into two completely separate processes: one is memorizing the knot because I’m going to need it in approximately three minutes, and the other is trying to understand how I arrived at a point in my life where my coach is teaching me bondage knots in a hallway.
“Over, under, through the loop, pull tight so the free end stays accessible.” He hands the laces back. “If you had used a square knot I would’ve had to kill you. Square knots cinch under load. You’d hurt her.”
“Yes sir.”
“And leave enough slack that she can make a fist for blood flow.” He unties the knot and reties it in maybe three seconds. “Do it once.”
“Coach, I really don’t think—”
“Do it once, Almardon.”
I take the laces with shaking hands, looping them in the way he showed me and tie the knot. It takes me three tries because my fingers aren’t working but I get it and he tugs on it and it holds and then he pulls one end and we both watch it unravel.
“Good. That’s safe.” He hands the laces back. “I’m going to pretend I did not see you, or these laces, or anything that is happening in this wing tonight.” He takes a step past me and stops. “Two things.”
“Yes, Coach.”
“One: tell Jack. Before someone else does. I’m not going to, but I’m not going to lie to him if he asks me directly. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Two: keep it out of my building after tonight. I mean it.”
I walk back to the video room, step inside, and lean against the door. My head drops back with a thunk and I shut my eyes. She’s in the chair where I left her, legs tucked under her, and she takes one look at my face and stops moving.
“Why do you look like that,” she says. “Like you just watched someone die. You’re white.”
“Barrett’s here. He saw me.”
“He SAW you?”
“In the hallway. With the laces.”
“Oh my god.”
“He taught me a knot.”
Mackie stares at me and the silence drags out between us. “I’m sorry,” she says slowly. “He did what?”
“A bowline. Non-binding, won’t tighten under tension, comes apart clean with one pull.” I’m reciting it from memory like it’s a play Barrett drew up on the whiteboard.
She gasps so loud that I startle. “SO THE RUMORS ARE TRUE! He didn’t even HESITATE? He just went straight into teaching mode. He had NOTES. That man has DONE THIS.”
“Please stop—”
She laughs, falling backward in the chair with her hands over her face and her shoulders shaking, and I’m still standing by the door holding laces that my head coach just quality-tested. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry or possibly request a trade.
I cross the room and drop to my knees in front of the chair she’s sitting in because I don’t think my legs will hold me up any longer.
I let my head fall into her lap and I feel her hands scrape through my hair.
“Do you still want to do this here?” I ask, and it’s muffled against her skin and I look up at her thinking there’s no way she wants to see this through.
She holds her wrists out toward me.
“Show me the knot,” she says.