Puking My Hockey Rival

Chapter4

Luca

He was in my head before I even got to the rink.

I would be eating breakfast and something would remind me of the way he had said I counted, like it was the most natural thing in the world to sit across from a rival for three years cataloguing his habits. I would be in a team meeting staring at play diagrams and hear his voice: you smile for cameras like it hurts. I would wake up at three in the morning from dreams I could not fully remember and lie in the dark knowing he had been in them and feeling the particular frustration of a man who cannot locate the origin of his own problem.

This was a problem. I was two weeks into preseason training when I started to notice the other thing.

The Bruins were using the adjacent facility for their own camp. Scheduling overlap that nobody had flagged as significant, because on paper it was not. Two rosters crossing paths in the weight room, the corridor between buildings, the parking structure, normal and professional athletes from rival teams shared facilities all the time. Nobody made it strange unless you made it strange.

I made it strange actually,not deliberately. The first time, I was finishing a conditioning session when I heard Ronan's voice from the corridor and found myself holding very still against the wall with a water bottle in my hand, just listening. Not to anything he was saying. Just to the fact that he was there. I stood like that for eleven seconds. I counted.

I left through the side exit.

The second time was worse. I was crossing from the main building to the ice facility when I spotted him on the far side of the parking lot, standing with two of his defensemen, laughing at something. Genuine laughing, the unguarded kind he never showed on the ice or in press conferences. The kind that changed his whole face. Something moved through my chest that I immediately and firmly categorized as irritation at his presence in a space I considered mine.

I walked faster and said nothing to anyone and spent the next forty minutes drilling with a focus that my linemates later described as unsettling. The first real game of the exhibition season brought us face to face across the ice again.

Nothing had been announced. No press event, no promotional rivalry narrative. Just two teams on the same ice doing the thing they did. Except within the first five minutes, the entire arena understood what kind of game it was going to be.We found each other the way we always did. Without looking for it.

The collision came in the second period, both of us going for a loose puck in the corner. Shoulder to shoulder, then chest to chest, then the barrier stopped us both and we were pressed against it with his hand gripping my jersey and my forearm across his chest and neither of us moving. The play had ended. The whistle had gone. We both knew it and neither of us pulled away.

Three seconds or maybe four, Long enough that I became aware of the noise from the crowd changing texture, becoming something specific and pointed. Long enough that his eyes dropped to my mouth for a fraction of a second before coming back up to hold mine..

I skated to the bench for a line change and kept my face completely neutral and tried to remember what composure felt like from the inside. It felt like something I was performing rather than something I actually possessed.

Later that night, I checked my phone on the way out of the arena. The clip was already everywhere. People had slowed it down the same way they had slowed down the fight footage. The same conversation, louder now, sharper. One account with a significant following had posted a side-by-side of every collision we had been involved in over three seasons and the caption just read tell me this is just hockey. The post had forty thousand shares by the time I put my phone back in my pocket.

My coach caught me before I reached the exit. Brief, quietand unambiguous. The league was watching. Management was watching. Whatever was happening between me and Calloway needed to stay on the ice and look like hockey from every possible angle. He did not need to say the rest. I had been in this league long enough to hear what was underneath the words.

I drove home alone and sat with the city spread out below me and tried to convince myself I was in control of this.

My phone buzzed and it was an unknown number, a single image attached.

I opened it..

The photo was of the two of us in the corridor outside the weight room. Timestamped two weeks ago, eleven forty-three in the evening. We were standing closer than I remembered standing. His head was turned toward mine. My hand was half-raised in the space between us, caught mid-gesture, the meaning of it unclear and somehow worse for being unclear.

Below was the image in one line of text.

Careful, Captain. Secrets don't stay buried forever.