Puking My Hockey Rival

Chapter3

Luca

By morning, the fight was everywhere.

I woke up to forty-seven missed calls and a text from my publicist that was mostly capital letters. The clip had been viewed eleven million times before midnight. Sports analysts were doing frame-by-frame breakdowns of the moment I dropped my gloves. Commentators were calling it a meltdown, a loss of composure, a side of Luca Devereaux nobody had seen in a decade. One panel show ran a fifteen-minute segment titled The Captain Cracks and used photographs of my face mid-fight that I had not known existed until that morning.

And underneath all of that, in the comment sections and fan forums and the place on the internet where people said the things they would not say to your face, another conversation was happening.

People were talking about how Ronan had crouched down beside me.

Not the hit, not the fight but the moment before it, when he had gotten close and said something that the cameras had not picked up. Someone had slowed down the footage and zoomed in on his face and the word they kept using was intense, Too intense. Not how rivals look at each other. More than one account used the word charged and I read that word and put my phone face down on the counter.

My phone buzzed and it was a text from the Management..

++++++

The meeting was short and not particularly warm. Sit down, Luca. We need to talk about the optics. Another incident like this and sponsors start asking questions. The image we have built around you is professional, composed and trustworthy. Last night's footage is not that. We need you to be careful. The word careful landed with the specific weight it always had in rooms like that one, which was not about safety at all but about visibility and what the wrong kind of visibility could cost.

I said yes to all they said and also told them I understood, I said it will not happen again..

Three days later, preseason prep started early. I was the first one on the ice every morning and the last one off. That was not unusual. What was unusual was that I stayed after the last skater left and kept going, drilling the same plays until my legs were unreliable beneath me. I was trying to work something out. I had not yet admitted to myself what that something was.

My shoulder disagreed with all of this.

I had not seen a doctor since the championship game. I knew what a doctor would tell me and I did not want to hear it during the offseason when there was nothing I could do except sit with the diagnosis. So instead I taped it myself every morning, took something for the pain, and pretended I was fine the same way I had been pretending all year.

It was past eleven at night when the blood came through.

I had pushed the drill too hard. A wrenching motion in the wrong direction and something in the joint had given way just enough to split the skin over an old scar tissue area. I could feel the warmth spreading through my practice jersey before I looked down and confirmed it.

I pressed my palm against it and kept skating.

"That's a lot of tape on a man who says he's fine."

I stopped.

Ronan was sitting in the stands directly above the players' tunnel. Just sitting there in street clothes with his arms resting on the seat in front of him like he had been there for a while. The arena was dark except for the ice lights and the silence around us was the particular silence of a large empty building, vast and close at the same time. I had not heard him come in.

"This is a private practice facility," I said.

"I know. I have a meeting with your general manager tomorrow morning about the exhibition schedule. I came early." He stood up. "You're bleeding."

"I'm aware."

He came down the tunnel steps and onto the ice without hesitation, still in his shoes, which was either reckless or completely indifferent to personal safety. I decided it was the latter. He crossed the ice toward me and I did not back away, which said something about me that I chose not to examine.

He pulled the jersey away from my shoulder without asking permission.

"Don't," I said.

"Quiet."

He examined the split for a moment, then disappeared into the tunnel and came back with the first aid kit from the wall mount near the equipment room. He unwrapped a clean bandage with the focused efficiency of someone who had done this before, which made sense because at his level of play, everyone had done this before. He worked without speaking and I let him, which also said something about me.

"Sit down," he said.

I sat on the board like an obedient child, gosh what the heck is wrong with me?

He wrapped my shoulder in silence. Without saying anything, he was just quiet and carefully doing it with care. The kind that had weight to it, that pressed against all the things neither of us was saying. The ice was empty around us and the lights hummed overhead and his hands were steady in a way mine had not been since the championship game. I watched his face while he worked. The concentration there was the same concentration I had seen on the ice, complete and focused and directed entirely at the task in front of him, at me.

"This needs imaging," he said, not looking up from the wrap.

"I know."

"You've been skating on it for three weeks without imaging."

"I know that too."

He tied off the bandage. He did not move away immediately. We were close enough that I could see the cut above his eyebrow from the game, already healing to a thin dark line. The scar was going to be visible for weeks and every time I saw it I would know I had put it there.

"Why?" he asked.

"Because if it's bad, the season is over before it starts."

"And if you tear it completely in October, the season is over and the recovery is twice as long."

"Thank you for the medical advice."

His jaw tightened. He stood up, gathered the first aid wrappings, and for a moment he just looked at me. There was something in his expression that I could not categorize, something that did not fit inside the frame of rivalry or obsession or any of the other words I had been using to describe what this was. It was something more direct than that. More personal.

"If you destroy yourself before playoffs," he said, and his voice had an edge to it that surprised me, "I'll never forgive you."

I went completely still.

He sounded angry, Not cold the way he had been in the locker room after the game, not calculating or strategic. Angry in the way a person sounds when something matters to them that they had not planned on mattering. Concerned. Possessive in a way that had nothing to do with hockey standings.

He left before I could respond.

I sat on the boards in an empty arena for a long time after that, one hand resting on the bandage he had tied, trying to understand why those words had hit me harder than the body-check that had started all of this.