Power Play

Chapter 3 - Roommates

The apartment was more aesthetically pleasing than Reese's dormitory would have been, which exacerbated the situation, as it implied that she could not harbor any resentment towards the space itself, but rather towards the individual with whom she had to share it.

Cole conducted the tour in a manner reminiscent of an individual reciting hostage demands from a prepared script.

"Bathroom is down the hall, we'll figure out a schedule. Kitchen is shared, obviously. My room's here—" a nod at the closed door near the living room. "—yours is there." Another nod toward a door at the end of the hall, next to a laundry closet. "House rules: no using my gear, no touching my protein stuff in the fridge, and if you have people over, give me a heads up."

"I'm not going to have people over," she said. "I don't know anyone."

A fleeting expression crossed his face — she noted it and set it aside without a clear understanding of its significance — and then it vanished, supplanted by the impassive demeanor of the captain to which she had become accustomed on the ice.

"Fine. Same rule applies to me, then. Fair's fair."

"Indeed," she remarked, placing her duffel bags at the entrance of what was evidently her designated room. "A complete sentence in which you did not convey a desire to exchange me for a fourth-line grinder. This indicates progress."

"Don't get used to it."

"Wouldn't dream of it, captain."

He left her to unpack, which she appreciated more than she was willing to acknowledge, as it afforded her twenty minutes of solitude in a room with a door that could be closed, allowing her to breathe and to allow her facial expressions to manifest without the presence of an audience.

She had spent three weeks holding her expression like a shield. It was exhausting in a way nobody who hadn't done it could understand — the constant, low-grade vigilance of being the only one of something in a room, the way you learned to read a hallway before you walked down it, the way a joke that wasn't about you could still somehow be about you.

Her room had a bed, a desk, a window that looked out over the parking lot, and absolutely nothing else, because Petrov had apparently taken his life with him back to Slovakia and left behind a space as blank as a hotel room.

She put her stick bag in the corner. She put a photo of her dad and her at the outdoor rink in Duluth on the desk, propped against the wall, because if she was going to have to live here for three months she was at least going to look at something that made her feel like a person instead of a controversy.

Through the wall she could hear Cole moving around his own room, the low murmur of a phone call, and then, more clearly than he probably intended, his voice saying, "No, it's fine, it's temporary, it's not — Dad, it's not a big deal, I've got it handled."

She wasn't trying to eavesdrop. The walls were just thin. But something about the strain in his voice on the word *handled* snagged at her, because she recognized it — the specific tone of a person trying to convince someone else, and mostly failing to convince himself, that everything was fine.

She was unaware of the stakes he had associated with this season. She lacked knowledge regarding the draft boards, the ankle he had injured during his sophomore year, and the eleven months of physical therapy that had gone unnoticed by anyone outside the training staff. Furthermore, she was unfamiliar with the specific calculations of a hockey father who equated affection with ice time. All she recognized was that the young man who had placed his hands on her hips as if she were a challenge to be resolved had, on the other side of a thin apartment wall, a voice that resembled someone quietly struggling rather than an individual who had everything under control.

She told herself it wasn't her business. It turned out that she was very good at telling herself things too.

The next morning practice was worse than usual, which she hadn't thought was possible.

Word had gotten around — of course it had, it was a locker room, information moved through it like it moved through nowhere else on campus — that she'd moved in with the captain, and the guys had opinions about it that ranged from smirking silence to Devon Marsh loudly asking Cole, in the equipment room, whether he'd need "noise-canceling headphones," a joke with an implication ugly enough that Reese felt her whole face go hot before she'd even fully parsed it.

She expected Cole to let it slide. Laugh it off, maybe, the way captains sometimes did to keep the room loose, at somebody else's expense.

He didn't.

"Marsh." Just the one word, but it landed in the equipment room like a body check, and every guy within earshot went still. "You want to run that joke again, or you want to run suicides until Coach makes me stop?"

Marsh's expression underwent a complex transformation — initial surprise, followed by an attempt to dismiss the situation with laughter, as if he had been joking, clearly joking, urging others to relax — and Cole refrained from making any further comments, feeling no need to do so, instead maintaining eye contact until Marsh averted his gaze first and muttered what could have been an apology directed toward the equipment rack in general.

Reese stood there with her stick in her hand and had no idea what to do with her face.

Cole didn't look at her. He picked up his gloves and ordered, "Two minutes, on the ice," to the room at large, and walked out. Reese found herself reassessing an entire working theory regarding the identity of this individual, as the person who had effectively silenced Devon Marsh with a mere eleven words did not correspond with the individual who had corrected her position as though she were an inanimate object. She remained uncertain, unable to ascertain which version of him she was genuinely living with.

Later, while fastening his shoes, Marchetti leaned forward and stated in a low voice, "For what it is worth, Ashford is not as unfavorable as he portrays. He is merely—" he sought the appropriate term, "—tense. He has exhibited this demeanor since the ankle."

"What ankle?"

Marchetti's expression reflected the universal reaction observed when individuals become aware that they have disclosed information that was inappropriate to share with her specifically, the newcomer, the outsider.

"Ask him yourself," he said, and skated off before she could respond. Reese was left with one more piece of puzzle she hadn't agreed to start putting together, and the uncomfortable, inconvenient awareness that she wanted to.

She told herself it was just curiosity. Team chemistry. It's just knowing your captain well so that you could read him on the ice.

She was, it became evident, going to continue deceiving herself for some time. It appeared to be a familial characteristic they shared, he and she — that particular aptitude for confronting the truth directly and labeling it something less daunting.