23. Buzz #2
The laugh that hit Victor came from everywhere at once, loud and brutal and relieved.
Marco bent forward, one hand clapped over his mouth like that could contain anything.
Zee nearly folded in half. Even Milo looked down, smiling at the floor.
Someone on the other side of the room muttered, “Holy shit,” with reverence.
Victor swore under his breath and shoved off the wall. “Screw all of you.”
“You cannot,” Alois replied, turning back toward his stall. “You are scratched.”
The room went off again, the whole ugly moment shifting shape before anyone could hold it still long enough to understand what had almost happened.
Victor became the joke. The comment disappeared under the noise.
Dylan escaped through the door like a man fleeing a building collapse.
Coach shouted from the hallway for us to wrap it up.
Everything moved.
The room breathed.
The game came rushing back in.
I stood there with my stick in my hand and my shoulder still burning where Alois had gripped it.
No one looked at me.
No one except Alois.
He sat back down in his stall and picked up his tape like nothing had happened, like he had not just reached into a bad decision before I could skate straight off a cliff.
Around me, the guys kept laughing, chirping Victor, pulling on gloves, slamming locker doors, reaching for helmets. Pregame swallowed everything because hockey always did. Give the room enough noise and it could digest almost any kind of danger.
I bent down slowly and picked up the roll of tape I must have dropped without noticing.
My fingers did not feel quite attached to my hand.
Alois said nothing.
The silence told me he knew exactly what he had stopped. And some part of me knew he had stopped it for her.
Coach barked again from the hallway, louder this time. “Let’s go, boys. Warmups.”
The room snapped into motion.
Helmets came off shelves. Gloves were tugged tighter. Sticks lifted from stalls. Skates hit rubber mats in heavy, uneven rhythm as guys started filing toward the door, all noise and shoulder checks and last-second chirps.
Marco passed Victor on his way out and tapped him lightly on the chest with the butt end of his stick. “Stay warm, amore. The press box is cold.”
“I hope you miss an empty net,” Victor muttered.
Marco looked wounded. “Cruel. Accurate, possibly, but cruel.”
Zee shoved his helmet on crooked and followed Jonah into the hallway still arguing about sodium.
Liam moved past them both with the calm of a man who had played too many road games to waste energy before he had to.
Milo disappeared behind him, smooth and quiet, already somewhere inside whatever version of himself showed up when the lights got bright.
Alois stayed seated.
I pretended to adjust my glove.
Alois pretended to care about the tape on his stick.
Neither of us was doing a very convincing job.
The last equipment assistant cleared the doorway with a crate of extra towels.
The door swung half-shut behind him, leaving the locker room suddenly too quiet.
Not silent. Never silent in an arena. The crowd still pressed through the walls.
Music pulsed somewhere beyond concrete. Skates scraped in the hallway as the team lined up near the tunnel.
Alois stood first. He did not hurry. He picked up his helmet, tucked it under one arm, and looked at me.
I looked down at my stick. “You gonna tell me I’m an idiot?”
“No.” Alois’s face gave away absolutely nothing. “You know already.”
“Comforting.”
“It was not meant to be.”
I huffed once through my nose. The sound almost became a laugh, but there was still too much heat moving around beneath my skin. Too much leftover anger. Too much humiliation, too, now that I had enough distance from the moment to feel it.
I rubbed the back of my neck with my glove and immediately regretted it because hockey gloves were not built for subtle emotional coping. “I wasn’t going to do anything.”
Alois stared at me.
“Fine,” I said. “I was going to do several things.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t.”
“No.”
“Because you grabbed me.”
“Yes.”
I gave him a look. “This conversation is emotionally rich.”
“You prefer I use more words?”
“No, actually. This is awful enough.”
His mouth moved. Barely. On anyone else, it would have been the beginning of a smile. On Alois, it was probably a system failure. He shifted his helmet under his arm. “You are not as hidden as you think.”
I looked toward the doorway, where the hallway flashed alpine green every few seconds as the arena lights rolled through their pregame sequence. The guys were still out there. Waiting. Chirping. Getting ready to become a team instead of a room full of unresolved personality disorders with sticks.
I should have moved. Instead, I stayed in front of my stall with my heart doing something stupid against my ribs. “What do you—” I started.
Then stopped. Because I did not want to know.
Because if Alois said Bea’s name, or Lucy’s, or somehow looked straight through me and dragged eight years of unfinished history into a visiting locker room in Denver, I was going to have to survive that thirty seconds before warmups, and frankly, the altitude was already asking a lot.
Alois watched me decide not to ask. Then, because he was apparently capable of mercy when it was inconvenient, he let it go. “Burns,” he said.
“Yeah?”
He adjusted his grip on his stick once. For the first time since I had known him, Alois Müller looked almost uncomfortable.
Not nervous. That would have been too human and possibly illegal under whatever contract kept him terrifying.
But there was a hesitation in him. A carefulness. Like whatever he had to say mattered enough that even he knew blunt force would not work.
I straightened a little.
He looked toward the doorway, then back at me. “Bea and I are setting the wedding party.”
Something in my brain changed directions too fast. “Okay.”
“I want you to stand with me.”
I blinked.
The crowd outside roared at something. A player banging his stick against the wall, maybe. A camera finding the home bench. The beginning of the show before the game became real.
Inside the locker room, everything narrowed to Alois standing in front of me with his helmet under his arm, asking like the answer was not already obvious and still somehow mattered.
“You want me to be one of your groomsmen?”
“Yes.”
I waited for the insult. The qualifier. The dry little comment that would make the moment easier to hold.
It did not come.
Alois only stood there, steady and serious, like choosing people was not a thing he did casually.
I looked down, adjusted the cuff of my glove for absolutely no reason, and nodded once. “Yeah,” I said, because anything more would have made me sound like I needed medical attention. “Of course. I’d be honored.”
Alois nodded back.
That should have been the end of it. Obviously, my survival instincts were terrible. I lifted my head. “Who is the best man?”
Alois started toward the door. “You don’t know him.”
I followed, because my legs remembered we had a game even if my chest was still being dramatic. “Does he have a name?”
“Bobby.”
“Can I get Bobby’s number?”
Alois stopped in the doorway and turned his head slowly. The hallway light cut across his face in hard green and white, making him look even less approachable than usual, which was impressive considering his baseline was European prison wall. “Why?” he asked.
“To plan your bachelor party.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I said so.”