Power Play

The first time Cole Ashford touched her, it was to tell her she was doing everything wrong. "Wider stance." His voice cut across the rink before Reese had even finished her first stride of the drill and she felt every head on the ice turn toward them. Twelve pairs of eyes swinging from the puck to her like she was the more interesting show. "You're standing like you're waiting for a bus, Kellan. Wider." She widened her stance. It wasn't wide enough, apparently, because that was when he skated up behind her coming very close. So close that she could feel the cold coming off his practice jersey. Cole gripped her waist with his hands. "Here." He turned her two degrees, like she was a mannequin in a shop window and not a human being with a spine. "Your center of gravity is too high. You will fall over if I hit you like this —" He didn't hit her. He leaned forward with one shoulder into her shoulder blade like he was testing her. But Reese locked her knees and held herself from falling on the ground at the very instinct alone Adrenaline was doing what six years of conditioning couldn't do in that half-second of surprise. He made a low sound that might have been approval or might have been irritation that she hadn't gone down. "Better," he said, and skated off without looking back, already barking the next drill at Marchetti. Reese stood there for a second longer than she should have. Her hips are still feeling warm where his hand had been and her pulse doing something stupid and traitorous in her throat. He is the captain, she told this to herself. He's allowed to fix your stance. That's literally his job. It didn't feel like a coaching correction. It felt like something with teeth. Reese Kellen was the only girl on the Northbridge University men's ice hockey team. This was a fact that the athletic department's press release had described as "historic". But her new teammates had, almost to a man, described it as "a mistake, and not a small one, and definitely not something we asked for." She had heard variations of that sentiment many times and everywhere like in the locker room, in the hallway, in the weight room and even in the parking lot at six a.m. Till then, Devon Marsh, the lead spokesperson hadn't realized that she was already inside the building and could hear him through the door. Cole Ashford hadn't said it to her face. He didn't have to. He communicated it in the particular flatness he reserved for her during line drills. His coldness was seen in the way that he never once, in three weeks of training camp, called her anything but her last name and in the way his jaw did a small tight thing whenever the coaches praised her shot. She told herself that she didn't care. She was very good at telling herself things. She has been playing hockey since she was four years old. Since then, her dad had put her on double-bladed skates in their driveway in Duluth and told her that a puck doesn't know the difference between a boy and a girl and neither should anybody watching it move. As she wanted real competition, she had to play boys' leagues her whole life because the girls' leagues thinned out to nothing by the time she hit fifteen. She had learned, early, that the hardest part was never the game because she was so pro that she could win the game in her sleep also. The hardest part was always the fifteen minutes on either side of the game — the locker room, the bus, the bar where the team went after a win, were all the places where she had to prove, over and over again, that she belonged there because she has already earned the right to be standing there with everyone else. Northbridge had recruited her on her shot and her vision on the ice. A scout named Denise Ruiz — one of the women among four scouting D1 men's hockey in the country — told the athletic director in a meeting that Reese was the best two-way defenseman in the region regardless of what locker room she changed in. The athletic director had apparently liked the sound of "historic" a great deal more than the actual mechanics of what it would take to make it work. So finally Reese was in the team. What it took, so far, was Reese arriving forty minutes before every practice so she could dress up in the trainers' room instead of the team locker room, because nobody — not the coaches, not Cole, not Reese herself — had figured out a version of the alternative that didn't feel like a public referendum on her presence. What it took was eating lunch alone for more days than not eating. What it took was a captain who looked at her like she was a scheduling error the universe hadn't gotten around to fixing yet. And still. Still, when his hands had been on her hips and his voice had dropped low enough that only she could hear it, some i***t part of her had leaned back into it instead of moving away. Now, she has to keep an eye on that i***t part of herself.