Puking My Hockey Rival

Chapter5

Luca

I did not sleep, I sat with the photo on my screen until the city outside my window went from dark to that particular gray that is not quite morning. I enlarged it, studied the angle and the timestamp and the framing, and tried to read the context from every direction.

The corridor was recognizable, the time was real. The way we were standing was real, and that was the part I could not dismiss because the image looked like something even if I insisted nothing had happened.

What I could not determine was who had taken it.

The media would have published it already. Management would have come to me directly. That left teammates, facility staff, someone from the Bruins organization, or a person with building access I had not accounted for. Every option had a different set of consequences and I spent the gray hours before practice cycling through all of them without arriving at anything that felt like a plan.

By the time I stepped onto the ice, I was running on nothing.

Practice was bad from the first whistle. I was in my head and my body knew it. My passes were half a beat late. My reads were wrong, I took a poor angle in a defensive drill and my coach ran it back three times without comment, which was worse than if he had said something..

Then Marcus Vega opened his mouth.

Vega was a winger, third line, the kind of player who filled space and occasionally made the right play and never understood when to stop talking. He turned to the two players beside him during a water break and said it loud enough for the bench to hear. Something about Calloway and the exhibition game clip. Something about the way we had looked at each other against the barrier. The specific words were the kind that get used when a man wants to be funny and does not care what he breaks to get the laugh.

I was moving before I had made the decision to move.

"Watch your mouth."

The bench went quiet. Vega looked at me with the expression of a man trying to calculate whether I was serious. I was standing between him and the boards with my stick in my hand and apparently something in my face closed the question quickly because he took a step back.

"It was just a joke, Cap."

"It wasn't."

Nobody said anything for a long moment. I could feel my teammates looking at each other behind me, reading the room, trying to understand what they had just witnessed. Luca Devereaux, composed and professional and twelve seasons without a scandal, had just silenced a teammate for mocking Ronan Calloway, with heat in his voice..

Practice ended early. I was still in my gear in the corridor beneath the arena when I heard his footsteps. The long maintenance tunnel that connected the two ice sheets was empty except for me, and I recognized the rhythm of his walk before I looked up from the equipment crate I had been sitting on with my head in my hands.

"I heard what you did," Ronan said.

"Then you heard enough. Leave it alone."

He did not leave it alone. He came all the way down the tunnel until he was standing in front of me and his expression was not the one I had been expecting. It was not the controlled, strategic face he wore on the ice. Something underneath it was moving, something unsteady and unplanned, and I had the disorienting sensation of watching Ronan Calloway not know what to do with himself.

"Why?" he asked.

"Because it was wrong."

"That's not why."

I stood up. "You don't get to tell me why I do things."

"You've been doing this for weeks." His voice was low and the steadiness had gone out of it in a way I had never heard from him before. "Looking at me like I'm pulling something apart inside you. Playing out of your mind and then coming undone the second I'm in the same building. Defending me in front of your whole team." He stepped closer. "What is happening with you?"

"You," I said, and the word came out raw, nothing composed about it, nothing managed or considered. "You are what is happening with me. You get inside my head and you ruin my focus and you make me feel things I do not have room for and I have been carrying that for three years and I cannot figure out how to put it down."

The tunnel was very quiet. He stepped closer and his voice dropped until it was almost nothing.

"Then stop," he said, "looking at me like you want me."

The silence lasted about half a second.

I kissed him.

There was nothing soft about it. Nothing careful or considered or built from the slow accumulation of feelings I had been pretending not to have. It was three years of friction and competition and every early morning I had woken up from a dream I refused to name, compressed into a single moment that tasted like exhaustion and anger and the specific relief of a thing you have been holding back for so long that letting go of it feels like falling.

He kissed me back like he had been waiting for exactly this. Both hands in my jersey, pulling me forward, and I had my hands against the tunnel wall on either side of him and we were breathing hard when we finally pulled back, both of us at the same moment, like we had reached the edge of something and needed one second to understand where we were standing before we stepped off.

The tunnel lights came on, all of them. Every fluorescent overhead flooded the corridor from one end to the other with the flat white brightness of maintenance lighting, the kind that left no shadow anywhere.

I looked up, at the far end of the tunnel, fifty feet away, someone was standing completely still.

Watching us.

Neither of us moved. The figure did not move. For three long seconds the only sound in the tunnel was the hum of the lights and the distant echo of the building around us.

Then the figure turned and walked away.

I did not recognize them before they disappeared into the dark, beyond the tunnel exit. I did not know if that was better or worse. I stood with my back against the wall and Ronan beside me and the lights above us buzzing with indifferent brightness and understood, with the cold clarity of a man who has just watched something irreversible happen, that nothing about this was going to be simple from here.