Chapter 5
Chapter five
Pickle
Iwas early.
That was wrong. I was never early. Evan was early. Coach was early. I was the guy who slid in two minutes before puck drop with my laces half-tied and granola bar crumbs on my jersey.
But here I was, forty minutes before anyone else, sitting at the bar while the bartender gave me a look that said we're literally still cutting limes.
She handed me a water anyway. Because it was Thunder Bay.
I fished out an ice cube and crunched it. Then another. Then a third one, too fast—a bright flash of pain erupted behind my eyes.
Deserved that.
The stack of menus by the register was crooked. Just a few millimeters off. Barely anything.
I straightened them.
Better.
The coasters were fanned out wrong. I fixed those, too. The little Please Tip Your Bartender sign had a smudge. I turned it so the smudge faced the wall.
"You reorganizing, or just killing time?"
I jumped hard enough to knock my knee on the bar.
Jake stood in the doorway, grinning. "You're being weird."
"I'm always weird."
"Weirder than usual." He dropped onto the stool next to mine. "Adrian's coming tonight."
My stomach flipped. "Cool. Yeah. For the documentary thing."
"I told him to come hang. Get footage of us being normal."
"We're not normal."
"He doesn't know that." Jake's grin sharpened. "Well, he might know that about you. After the whole—" He mimed spraying himself in the face.
"That was a defective bottle."
The Drop filled up the way it always did—bodies crowding the bar, voices fighting the jukebox, and smells of beer and fryer grease. I followed Jake to a corner table.
The floorboards by the pool table had a sticky patch that had been there since before I joined the team. Nobody knew what it was. Nobody wanted to know.
Home turf. Except Adrian was coming.
Adrian, who'd caught me singing to a dog in the snow. Adrian, who'd watched me spray myself in the face and then held my arm like it was nothing. Adrian, who'd called me someone worth watching in a voice that made my ribs feel too small for my lungs.
The door opened.
I didn't look.
I absolutely, definitely, one hundred percent did not look…for thirty seconds.
When I finally peeked through my fingers, I saw Adrian scanning the room until his eyes landed on me.
I looked down at my water glass.
Jake steered him toward our table. Adrian looked different at The Drop—no camera, no equipment bag. He was careful, the way you move through someone else's house when you're not sure which rooms you're allowed in.
Jake ran through introductions. Evan shook Adrian's hand a second longer than necessary—measuring something, the way he measured everything. Adrian didn't flinch.
He moved toward my side of the table. Plenty of open seats remained that weren't directly beside me.
He sat next to me anyway.
Close enough that I could smell him—clean soap and cold air still caught in his jacket—and close enough that when he shifted, his shoulder brushed mine.
My skin registered it through two layers of fabric. Held onto it.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey." My voice came out normal, which was a miracle, because my entire left side had apparently decided to secede from the rest of my body.
"You're not teaching a dog to sing."
"Night's young."
He laughed—short and surprised—and I liked that I could make him laugh. I also liked the way his knee hovered near mine under the table, and approximately thirty-eight other things I shouldn't have been thinking about a man here to do a job.
I reached for my beer.
The chair wobbled.
Not a big wobble. Most wouldn't notice.
I did.
I shifted left. Tilted. Shifted right. Same thing.
Ignore it, I told myself. It's just a chair.
Jake's monologue moved from a Hog knitting incident to the time Evan organized the equipment room by color and cried when someone moved a roll of tape.
"I didn't cry," Evan said. "I expressed firm disappointment."
"Your eyes were wet."
"Indoor allergies."
Everyone laughed. I laughed a half-beat late, because the chair had wobbled again.
I stayed in place about thirty more seconds.
"Okay," I announced, and dropped to the floor.
"Pickle. What are you doing?" Jake's voice.
"Structural assessment."
Two loose screws on the front left leg. I didn't have a screwdriver, so I used my thumbnail, pressing into the groove and twisting. It hurt. I didn't care.
"Nobody's making you do this," Jake said. "The chair's fine."
"The chair is a liability. Gravity is relentless. It's always waiting."
"Is he okay?" Heath's voice was quiet and uncertain.
"He's fine," Evan said. "This is just a thing he does."
"Is he always like this?"
"Yes."
The second screw caught. I shook the leg. Solid. No wobble.
My chest relaxed. I could breathe again. One thing in the whole evening was fixed, right, and done.
I crawled out. Everyone stared. Jake had his phone out—this was going on the group chat.
Adrian watched me with his head tilted, like I was a puzzle he was still solving.
"Better?" he asked.
"Much. You're welcome. I just saved everyone from certain death."
Heath hovered at the edge of the group.
I reached across and grabbed his sleeve. "You're too far away. Hovering is illegal. Team rules."
He let me pull him into the seat on the opposite side of me from Adrian.
"I don't want to intrude—"
"You're not intruding. You're sitting."
"You're on the team," Evan said. Simple. Factual. "So you're here."
I remembered what that felt like—the first time someone said you're one of us and meant it.
"Evan's right. You're stuck with us now. No returns. We're like a bad tattoo."
Heath stared at me.
"The kind you get at 2 a.m. because it seemed like a good idea, and then you wake up and you're like, oh no, this is permanent, but also you kind of love it because it's yours."
He laughed—a real one. "I think I get it."
"Good. Welcome to the tattoo."
Adrian got up for another round. The moment he was out of earshot, Evan leaned toward me.
"He watches you a lot."
Heat crawled up my neck. "It's the documentary. I'm good footage. Jake said so."
"Jake says a lot of things."
"I crawled under a table just now. Of course he's watching—I'm a disaster magnet."
Evan looked at me with that gaze that saw straight through to my skeleton.
"Okay," he said.
I looked toward the bar. Adrian was waiting for drinks, the light catching his jaw and the line of his shoulders.
As if he felt me looking, he glanced over.
Our eyes met. Two seconds. Three. Long enough for my heart to skip a beat.
We both turned away.
I drank half my beer in one go.
The group reshuffled. Jake and Evan migrated to the jukebox. Hog cornered Heath to discuss yarn weights.
And somehow Adrian and I ended up alone at the corner booth. Just us. The space was small enough that our knees almost touched.
Usually, I would have said something funny. That was my move—fill the silence before it gets uncomfortable. Nothing came out.
Adrian didn't seem to mind. "Your team's good. You weave in and out around each other."
"Some of us have been here a while."
"What about Heath? You're good with him. He looks at you like you're the only person who makes sense."
"Then he's in trouble, because I make zero sense."
Adrian smiled. "You make more than you think."
I kept talking. "Heath's just scared. A new team and a two-way contract that could evaporate at any second. He's trying so hard to be perfect that he's tripping over his own feet." I shrugged. "I remember what that was like."
"Do you still feel it?"
"What, scared?" I laughed—too sharp. "Every day. I keep waiting for someone to figure out I don't belong here and send me back to wherever guys like me end up when they wash out."
I hadn't meant to say that last part.
"Guys like you," Adrian repeated.
"Chaos gremlins. Players good enough to keep around but not good enough to build around." I took a long pull of beer. "I read the scouting reports. 'High motor, low consistency. Flashes of brilliance buried in unforced errors.' That's a nice way of saying fun to watch, but don't bet on him."
"Is that what you think you are?"
"It's what I am."
"It's what someone wrote about you. That's not the same thing."
I looked at him. He was leaning forward, focused entirely on me. No phone. No glancing around. Listening.
"You do that thing," I said. "The listening thing. Most people wait for you to stop talking so they can say their thing. You actually listen."
Something flickered behind his eyes. "Occupational hazard. Documentaries are mostly listening."
"Is that all it is?"
The jukebox switched to something slow and synthy.
"No," he said. "That's not all it is."
Adrian's hand moved across the table. Slow. Deliberate. His fingers stopped a centimeter from mine.
Neither of us closed the gap.
Neither of us pulled away.
The bar noise faded to static. I saw nothing except that centimeter of space and how much I wanted to erase it.
"PICKLE." Jake's voice cut through. "We need a tiebreaker on the playlist."
Adrian's hand moved back. Casual. Like it hadn't just rewired my entire nervous system.
"Duty calls," I said.
"Go. Save them from themselves."
At the jukebox, Jake explained the crisis: Evan wanted The Cure, and he wanted Bon Jovi.
I picked something else entirely to annoy them both.
I felt Adrian's gaze on my back the whole time.
The night wound down slowly, then picked up speed.
Hog left first. Heath went with him. Desrosiers and Kowalczyk disappeared. Juno hugged everyone twice. Jake made a production of leaving—hugging me, Adrian, the bartender, and a chair for reasons he refused to explain.
And then it was just us.
I slid back into the booth next to Adrian.
"You're still here," I said.
"So are you."
"I live close. What's your excuse?"
"I'm not ready to go back to the hotel. It's quiet there. I've had enough quiet lately."
The bartender turned off a light. We ignored her.
"Tonight was good," Adrian said. "You're different here from how you are on the ice. Softer. Less like you're performing."
I drummed my fingers on the table. "I don't perform. It's just me."
Another light went off. The booth got darker.
"What do you see?" I asked. "When you watch me."
It was a dangerous question.
"Someone trying very hard to be what everyone expects," he said finally. "And someone else underneath. Someone scared those layers aren't enough."
My throat tightened. "That's a lot to see in three days."
"I told you. I'm good at watching."
The bartender cleared her throat. Keys in hand.
Outside, the cold hit my face like a wall. I shoved my hands in my pockets. Adrian stood close but not touching.
"Which way are you?"
"Hotel's left." He nodded. "You?"
"Opposite."
Neither of us moved.
"I should go," Adrian said. "Early morning."
"Yeah."
He still didn't move.
"Pickle." His voice was lower. Rougher.
"Yeah?"
"Goodnight." He shook his head and turned.
"Goodnight."
Adrian walked away. I watched him go and stood there in the parking lot until he disappeared.
Then I walked home. Eight blocks.
The chair was fixed. The bar was familiar.
Adrian was not.
And something inside me—something that usually filled every silence with noise—slowed down.
It wanted.
I let myself into my apartment and didn’t turn on the lights.
I stood there for a second, keys still in my hand, listening to the quiet press in from all sides. The kind that made room for thoughts you’d been successfully outrunning all night.
This was bad. He was leaving in a few days. He probably made everyone feel like the only interesting person in the room. That was his job. That was his trick.
It didn’t mean anything.
I told myself that while I kicked off my shoes, dropped my keys on the counter, and noticed the chair by the table sitting slightly off square.
I nudged it with my foot.
It didn’t wobble.
I stood there anyway, staring at it, waiting for the feeling to pass.
It didn’t.
I pulled out my phone. Adrian’s name sat there in my messages—three texts about schedules and locations. Neutral. Harmless. Nothing that could get me into trouble.
My thumb hovered.
I could type something small. Something safe. Something that would let me pretend this was restlessness and not want.
I didn’t type.
I didn’t put the phone down either.
I stood there in the dark, holding it, feeling the urge coil tighter instead of loosening—like whatever I’d fixed tonight had shifted somewhere else.
The chair was solid. The apartment was quiet.
And I had no idea what would happen if I moved.