2. Buzz
BUZZ
NOW
The locker room smelled like sweat, damp gear, stale coffee, and the sharp metal bite of freshly sharpened steel.
A couple of stalls down, somebody had hijacked the speaker again. Heavy bass rattled through the room loud enough to vibrate the metal nameplates above the lockers while trainers moved between bodies with tape rolls and ice packs like overworked battlefield medics.
Milo sat half-dressed at his stall working through the sports section of the paper with the concentration of a seventy-year-old retiree.
Across from him, Boris was arguing with Cam about defensive zone coverage in three different languages and somehow losing in all of them.
“Because your gap was shit,” Cam snapped.
“My gap was fine.”
“It absolutely was not.”
“You got walked by a rookie.”
Cam pointed at him. “You were on the ice too.”
“Unfortunately.”
That earned a few tired laughs.
Not because it was funny.
Because everybody in the room was exhausted and pissed off and trying not to say it out loud.
Rebuild teams felt like this halfway through the season.
Too talented to be terrible.
Too inconsistent to trust.
Everybody irritated.
Everybody bruised.
Everybody waiting for somebody else to figure it out first.
I dropped into my stall and untied one skate while Zee flew past the middle of the room in socks chasing Marco with a roll of stick tape.
“You touch me with that and I swear to God,” Marco warned.
“You deserve it.”
“For what?”
“Your entire personality.”
Marco looked genuinely offended. “Jealousy is ugly on you, rookie.”
Zee whipped the tape anyway.
Marco caught it one-handed without looking and fired it back hard enough to nail Zee in the chest.
“Jesus Christ,” Zee barked.
“Hands,” Marco said smoothly. “You’re welcome.”
I snorted and leaned down to retape my stick while Jonah walked past muttering motivational quotes to himself like a serial killer trying therapy for the first time.
“Pressure creates diamonds,” he said under his breath.
Milo lowered the paper slightly. “Pressure also creates pipe bombs.”
“Mindset matters.”
“Sleep matters more.”
Near the trainers’ area, Alois sat getting his wrist wrapped in silence while nobody bothered him.
That was another thing about struggling teams.
Everybody started separating into camps without meaning to.
Guys they trusted.
Guys they tolerated.
Guys they blamed when things went sideways.
Alois existed in his own category entirely.
The room bent around him even when he said nothing.
Cam glared at a whiteboard across the room like he wanted to fistfight the penalty kill percentages personally.
The media stuff around Müller had made everything worse lately. Reporters camping outside morning skate. Cameras waiting near the player exits. Endless questions about discipline and control and culture every time somebody lost two games in a row.
Everybody was sick of hearing about it.
Especially because we kept losing ugly enough to feed the narrative.
“Burns.”
I looked up.
One of the Player Operations assistants stood near the locker room entrance holding a tablet against his chest. Young guy. Nervous already.
That wasn’t usually a good sign.
“What?”
“You gotta report upstairs. Executive Conference Room B.”
A few heads lifted immediately.
Marco leaned back in his chair nearby, water bottle dangling from one hand. “Ooooh. Bureaucratic summons.”
“Shut up.”
Cam looked over from across the room. “What’d you do now?”
“Nothing.”
“That sounded dishonest,” Boris muttered.
I pointed at him. “Nobody asked you.”
“You answered too fast.”
Fair.
The ops kid glanced down at the tablet like maybe the answers lived there. “Player Operations requested you immediately.”
Fantastic.
I sat back slightly trying to remember the last thing I’d ignored. Which narrowed absolutely nothing down.
Marco watched me for a second too long before speaking. “You forgot something.”
“I didn’t forget.”
“You definitely forgot.”
“I probably intentionally ignored.”
“There it is,” Milo said without looking up from his newspaper. “Personal growth.”
A couple guys laughed under their breath.
I rubbed a hand over my jaw and exhaled slowly.
Then it hit me. The community outreach prep meeting. Sarah Yu had sent three emails about it with increasingly threatening subject lines.
I missed the first one because we landed late from Denver.
Missed the rescheduled one because Cam decided we needed an impromptu players-only meeting after practice.
The third one I might’ve blown off because the email used the word optional in the second paragraph.
Marco pointed at me immediately when my expression shifted. “There it is. That’s the face.”
“What face?”
“The ‘I absolutely deserve this meeting’ face.”
“I didn’t think the thing mattered.”
“You never do.”
“That’s because half the shit doesn’t matter.”
“That’s probably not the argument to lead with upstairs.”
I stood and grabbed my hoodie off the back of the chair.
Around me, the room kept moving. Tape ripping. Music pounding. Guys arguing over line changes and missed coverage and who forgot to order postgame food after Winnipeg.
Nobody here hated each other exactly. But trust inside hockey was conditional.
You earned it in layers. Shift by shift. Road trip by road trip. Fight by fight. And once people decided who you were, changing their minds took forever.
I’d been back in Northbend long enough now to understand my role again.
Local kid. Chaos winger. Naturally talented. Chronically unreliable.
Didn’t matter that I showed up every night ready to play. Didn’t matter that I’d matured since I was twenty-one. Didn’t matter that I’d spent the last three years trying to stop acting like hockey was the only thing keeping my life upright.
“Hey, Burns,” Zee called as I headed for the door. “If they suspend you, can I have your parking spot?”
I flipped him off without slowing down.
“Love you too!” he yelled after me.
The executive level upstairs felt like a completely different building from the locker room. Too much glass. Too many people wearing expensive shoes to jobs that involved spreadsheets instead of getting punched in the mouth for a living.
My sneakers squeaked faintly against polished flooring as I walked past framed Frosthawks photos lining the walls. Old playoff runs. Retired captains. Ownership dinners. Smiling faces pretending pressure didn’t eat people alive in this business.
Somebody from sponsorship nodded carefully when I passed.
Another staffer looked away too fast.
Yeah. Definitely getting written up.
I grabbed the conference room handle already annoyed and pushed the door open without knocking.
And the entire world dropped out from under me. For one completely stupid second, my brain refused to process what I was looking at.
Dark green sweater.
Gold hoops.
Hair down.
Calm expression.
Older, but it was her.
Everything inside me locked up so fast it physically hurt.
No way. The thought hit first.
Then the recognition slammed in hard enough to hollow my chest out behind it.
Lucy fucking Thomas sat halfway down the long conference table beside Sarah Yu with an open laptop in front of her and a legal pad lined up perfectly square against the edge of the wood.
She looked up at the sound of the door opening.
And Jesus Christ.
That part was worse.
Because I knew that face.
I knew every version of her face.
Laughing so hard she snorted hot chocolate through her nose sophomore year.
Half asleep in the passenger seat of my truck with Fleetwood Mac playing low through the speakers.
Crying in my driveway the night everything ended while I stood there like the world’s biggest fucking coward pretending that letting her walk away was somehow noble.
I knew her.
But the woman sitting in front of me looked at me like she didn’t.
Not surprise.
Not anger.
Not even discomfort.
Professional acknowledgment.
Like I was just another player walking into another meeting.
It damn near knocked the wind right out of me.
Sarah glanced up from the folder in front of her. “Ty. Thanks for coming.”
I barely heard her. My eyes stayed locked on Lucy.
She held my stare for exactly half a second before looking back down at the papers in front of her with terrifying composure.
No visible reaction.
Not even a flinch.
Sarah frowned slightly. “You okay?”
I laughed once before I could stop myself. Not because anything was funny. My brain just genuinely did not know what else to do.
“No,” I said automatically. “I—” My voice cut off.
Lucy finally looked at me again. Cool enough to freeze the entire damn room. “Mr. Burns,” she said evenly, “please have a seat.”
Mr. Burns. The words hit harder than a stick to the knee.
I stared at her.
This can’t be real.
Not here.
Not in Talon Arena.
Not at a Frosthawks operations meeting.
Not Lucy.
Not my Lucy.
My body moved before my brain caught up. I pulled out the chair across from them slowly, still trying to make sense of what the hell I was seeing.
Sarah continued talking, thankfully unaware she was sitting between the pin and the blast. “As you know, this meeting concerns repeated failure to attend mandatory operations meetings—”
I dropped into the chair without taking my eyes off Lucy. She looked different. Sharper around the edges somehow. More contained. The softness I remembered still existed, but buried deep enough now that I could only see traces of it in the corners of her mouth and the slight tension near her eyes.
Northbend still lived on her face though.
That part wrecked me unexpectedly. Because no matter how polished she looked sitting there in executive lighting with a Frosthawks credentials badge clipped near her waist—I still saw frozen lake bonfires.
Snow in her hair. Ink smudged across the side of her hand.
“You work here?” I heard myself say.
Professional silence.
Sarah glanced briefly between us.
Lucy folded her hands once on the table. “Yes.”