Chapter 3
Chapter three
Pickle
The problem with telling yourself to act normal is that you suddenly forget what normal looks like.
Either one could happen.
By the time I pushed through the locker room doors, I was vibrating like hummingbird wings. The familiar smells hit me—old sweat, industrial soap, and the specific scent of rink ice.
Normal, I told myself. You are a normal human man with normal human responses to normal human stimuli.
I covered precisely four steps before I hip-checked a crate of foam rollers, sending them scattering across the floor like oversized pool noodles fleeing a crime scene.
Twelve guys looked up.
"I meant to do that," I announced. "It's a drill. Obstacle training."
Desrosiers snorted. Jake didn't even pause in his conversation with Evan. He reached down and tossed me a roller without looking.
I dropped into my stall and started unpacking my gear, fingers clumsy on the familiar straps. Hog was three spots down, growling at Kowalczyk about borrowed tape—"I label it for a reason, you gremlin"—and the normalcy of it should have settled me.
It didn't.
I knew Adrian was somewhere in the building. With a camera. He could point it at me at any second.
"You okay?"
Hog was beside me, his eyebrows doing a concerned dad thing.
"Never been more okay," I said. My voice cracked on okay like I was fourteen and asking someone to the spring formal. "Peak okayness."
He stared at me. "You're being weird."
"This is baseline weird."
"This is elevated weird."
Movement at the door caught my eye.
Adrian.
He stepped into the locker room with his camera already up, filming slow B-roll of the space. He focused on guys tying skates, then the gear hanging from hooks.
I was mid-stretch when I noticed him, one leg up on the bench, reaching for my toes. I froze.
It wasn't subtle. It was a full-body lock-up, like someone had hit my pause button.
Adrian's lens swept across the room. Toward me. Past me.
I held the stretch. Kept holding it long past the point where any reasonable person would have moved.
My hamstring screamed. My skate lace snapped—just gave up entirely.
The frayed end dangled accusingly.
Normal. Totally, completely, devastatingly normal.
Adrian set up an interview station by the boards—a spot near the bench with decent lighting and a clear backdrop of ice. One by one, guys skated over for their intros. Name, position, hometown, one fun fact. Thirty seconds, max.
Jake went first, leaning into the lens like an old friend: "Jake Riley, left wing, Vegas originally, but Thunder Bay's home now. Fun fact—I once got recognized at a gas station in Manitoba by a guy who'd seen my reality TV meltdown. He bought me a slushie. We're still in touch."
Evan followed, stiff but sincere: "Evan Carter. Defense. Michigan. I make cookies for the team. That's... probably not interesting enough for a fun fact."
"It's perfect," Adrian said.
I watched from across the ice, pretending to adjust my gloves while my pulse pounded in my ears.
"Pickle." Adrian's voice carried across the rink. "You're up."
I skated over. Stopped a little too hard, spraying ice chips in a way I hoped looked intentional rather than uncoordinated.
Adrian had his camera angled up at me. Those blue-gray eyes—I'd noticed them last night, but in the fluorescent rink lighting, they were sharper. Steadier.
"Whenever you're ready," he said. "Name, position, hometown, something about yourself."
I opened my mouth.
My brain—the part responsible for organizing thoughts before they became words—walked out the door, leaving no forwarding address.
"I want to be the kind of player people remember for the right reasons."
The words were too loud, too fast, and too much.
Silence.
Somewhere behind me, Evan's stare bore into my back.
Adrian blinked.
"What does that mean to you?" he asked in a gentle voice. I heard curiosity, like he actually wanted to know.
"It means—" I grabbed the water bottle from the boards, "Hydration! Staying hydrated is very important for—"
I squeezed the bottle.
In my defense, I didn't know it was already uncapped. Water geysered directly into my own face.
I sputtered and stumbled backward, temporarily blinded. My skate blade caught the edge of the puddle I created, and my feet slid out from under me.
Before I could hit the ice, a hand caught my elbow. Firm grip. Warm through my jersey.
Adrian lunged forward, and his fingers wrapped around my arm like he'd done it a thousand times. I didn't fall.
I hung there, suspended in his grip, water dripping down my face, staring at him from approximately eight inches away.
"You okay?" he asked.
His voice was low. Audible only to me.
I forgot every word I'd ever learned. Forgot my own name. Forgot that other people existed, and I was supposed to be a professional hockey player, not a puddle of disastrous gay longing on skates.
"Uh," I said. "Yep. Good. Great. Very... standing."
Adrian's mouth twitched. Not quite a smile, but close.
He continued to hold my arm.
"Hydration's important," he said, deadpan.
Behind me, Jake's laugh echoed across the rink.
Practice setup was supposed to be simple. Cones out, pucks distributed. I'd done this a thousand times.
But my autopilot was broken, rewired by the ghost of Adrian's hand on my elbow, and my brain needed somewhere else to go.
A sound from the Zamboni bay saved me. It was faint and metallic, a grinding noise that hit my ear wrong, like a fork scraping a plate.
Probably just a belt, the rational part of me suggested.
The other part—the part that had straightened napkin holders at The Drop last night and needed something to control when everything else went off the rails—came up with other explanations.
I skated over and crouched beside Old Greta's front blade assembly, tracing the bolts with my fingertips.
"Something's off," I called. "The blade energy is... wrong."
I didn't know what blade energy meant. But my mouth spat the words out anyway.
"Are you hexing the Zamboni?"
Jake stood beside me, arms crossed over his chest.
"I'm saving it. There's something wrong with the blade. Listen."
We both listened.
Old Greta sat in silence, refusing to perform her symptoms on command.
"Camera guy's watching," Jake whispered.
I started to sweat.
"Piatkowski."
Coach Rusk's voice cut through the bay. He stood in the doorway, expression radiating disappointment.
"Coach, the blade—"
"Away from the machinery."
"But—"
"Away."
I backed off with my hands raised. "Trying to help. Proactive maintenance. Team spirit."
I retreated to the ice before Coach could assign me punitive drills.
Warm-ups usually cleared my head. If I skated hard enough, the static burned off, and all that remained was the ice and the puck.
I threw myself into the action. Focused crossovers, edges sharp. I pushed harder than I needed to.
For thirty glorious seconds, it worked.
Then Adrian shifted his position near the boards, lifted his camera, and I felt it—a spotlight sensation between my shoulder blades.
I nearly collided with Desrosiers. He swore at me in Quebecois French.
"Sorry! My bad. Didn't see you."
"You have eyes!"
"They're decorative today!"
Coach's whistle cut through everything.
"Bring it in. We've got a visitor today. Two-way contract from Chicago. Donnelly—get in here."
A figure emerged from the bench area, skating toward us with careful, slightly stiff motion. He was very aware that everyone was watching.
Heathcliff Donnelly.
Age twenty-one and looked nineteen. Tall, all elbows and angles, like someone had built a hockey player out of pipe cleaners and anxiety. He clamped his mouthguard so hard between his teeth that I could see his jaw muscle twitching from ten feet away.
Oh, I thought. That's what I looked like. First practice, two years ago.
Pure terror plus a desperate need to belong. I believed everyone could see straight through me to all the ways I wasn't enough.
"Donnelly, you're with Piatkowski for drills," Coach said. "Pickle, try not to break him."
Hog, somewhere behind me, muttered: "God help the kid."
I chose to interpret that as a compliment and skated over.
"Hey, Heathcliff." I stopped in front of him, spraying a little ice. "You gothic or just nervous?"
He blinked at me. Up close, I saw freckles scattered across his nose and a tiny scar through one eyebrow.
"Is that... a real question?"
"Both is also an option. Gothic and nervous. Very Victorian. Very consumptive-poet-on-the-moors."
His mouth twitched. Not quite a smile, but the ghost of one.
"Just nervous," he admitted. "Really, really nervous."
"Good. That means you care." I clapped him on the shoulder, the way Hog had done for me a hundred times. "Come on. I'll show you where we're doing passing drills. Try not to trip over anything—that's my job."
Adrian's camera tracked us as I led Heath across the ice.
I didn't preen, but I might have stood a little straighter.
The passing drills were simple. Heath made them look like advanced calculus.
His passes were technically fine, but everything else was a disaster. He second-guessed every motion half a beat before he committed to it, which meant he was always a half-beat behind.
Halfway through the rotation, Heath's pass went wide. Not a little wide—catastrophically wide. The puck skittered across three lanes and clipped Coach's skate.
Coach turned. I knew that turn. That was the turn that preceded the voice, and the voice preceded the skating drills that made rookies cry.
"Hey Coach!" I banged my stick against the boards. "I think the Zamboni blade's off again! The ice feels weird right here, like there's a—"
"Piatkowski, I swear to God—"
"It's a texture thing! A vibe! The puck's not rolling true!"
Coach stared at me with the expression of a man calculating whether prison time was worth it. By the time he finished deciding against homicide, Heath had reset. The drill resumed. Coach's attention stayed on me—where it belonged, where it always belonged.