Power Play

The locker room went quiet the way rooms go quiet right before a fight. Rae Callahan had learned to read that silence the way other people read weather — the particular density of it, the way it pressed against her eardrums half a second before twenty-two guys' worth of conversation just stopped. She didn't look up right away. She'd found, over two years of doing this, that looking up too fast made it worse. Better to keep lacing her skate, keep her face bored, let them think she hadn't noticed that the room had gone still around her like water closing over a stone. She noticed everything. "Nice of you to join us, Callahan." Beckett Vance's voice arrived before he did — low, flat, carrying easily across the concrete and steel of the visiting-team-sized locker room Ironbrook had given her because there hadn't been anywhere else to put her. A room built for four that she occupied alone, tucked behind a partition that didn't quite reach the ceiling, close enough to the men's room that she heard every word of every conversation they thought she couldn't. "I've been here twenty minutes," she said, not looking up. "You're the one who's late." "I'm not late." He rounded the partition into her narrow slice of the room like he owned it, which, in every way that mattered here, he did. Captain. Star. The kind of player scouts flew in for. He had his stick in one hand and his jaw set in the particular hard line he wore whenever he had to acknowledge her existence in front of the team. "I'm making sure you know today's drills aren't optional." "They're never optional. I've never once treated them like they were optional." "Yesterday you cut the last rep of transition short." "Because Coach called it. Ask him." She stood, finally, lacing done, and had the brief, familiar satisfaction of watching Beckett Vance have to look up half an inch to meet her eyes. It wasn't much. On a six-foot-two hockey captain built like something poured into a mold labeled NHL first round, half an inch was nothing. But she'd take what she could get. He didn't blink. He never blinked first. "You get one pass for missing a rep because Coach called it. You don't get a pattern." "There's no pattern, Vance. There's you, watching me for one." Something moved behind his eyes — not quite anger, something colder and more controlled, filed down to a fine edge over twenty-two years of being groomed for exactly this: captaincy, pressure, the weight of a legacy with his last name stapled to it. He was, Rae had decided months ago, the single most controlled person she had ever met, and it made him terrifying in a way that had nothing to do with size. "I watch everyone," he said. "That's what captains do." "You watch me like I'm a leak in the hull." That almost got something out of him — the corner of his mouth twitched, some ancestor of a smile that died before it fully arrived — and then Jonah Kowalski's head appeared over the partition, grinning like he'd walked in on the good part of a movie. "Whitfield wants everyone on the ice in five," Bear said. "And Vance, my man, quit terrorizing our left wing before practice, save it for the drills." "I'm not terrorizing anyone." "You're doing the voice." Bear pointed a finger at Beckett's face. "The captain voice. The one you use right before you make somebody run suicides." "I haven't made her run suicides." "Yet," Rae said, and grabbed her stick, and walked past both of them into the tunnel, because if she stood there one more second she was going to say something about the way Beckett Vance's eyes had tracked her the entire length of the room, and she didn't have a name yet for what that particular attention felt like, and she wasn't in a hurry to find one. Founders' Arena at six in the morning belonged to nobody. That was the thing Rae loved most about early practice — before the boosters arrived, before the local paper's beat writer set up in his usual seat, before the whole apparatus of Ironbrook hockey clicked into its daytime gear, the ice was just ice. Cold and blue-white and quiet except for the hum of the compressors and the scrape of blades, and for forty minutes, give or take, nobody on this team looked at her like a headline. She loved the ice the way she'd loved it since she was six years old, standing on double-bladed skates in the parking lot behind her dad's bar because there hadn't been money for lessons, only for a stick and a used pair of skates a regular's kid had grown out of. She loved it with the kind of desperate, structural love that holds a person together when other things are falling down — and other things, over the years, had fallen down plenty. Nobody here knew about the accident. That was the deal she'd made with herself the day she signed with Ironbrook: nobody finds out. Not Coach Whitfield, not Dr. Reyes, not the trainers, and absolutely not the six-foot-two captain currently gliding lazy figure eights at center ice like he had all the time in the world and none of it belonged to anyone but him. "Callahan." Whitfield's voice cracked across the rink, and she skated over, falling into formation with the rest of the line — three forwards, two defensemen, running transition drills that would have been easy if her right knee weren't currently sending up its usual low, grinding protest against the cold. She ignored it. She'd gotten very good at ignoring it. "Vance, work the boards with her. I want to see if that stance correction from Tuesday stuck." Rae felt her stomach drop half a foot before her brain caught up to why. Tuesday. Three days ago, during a routine drill, she'd taken a hit against the boards from Beckett — clean, textbook, nothing dirty about it — and had come up with her weight wrong, her hips angled a few degrees off from where they needed to be to absorb contact without her knee eating the force of it. Whitfield had noticed. Whitfield noticed everything; it was why he was still coaching Division I hockey at fifty-eight instead of running a rec league somewhere warm. He hadn't said anything about the knee, because there was nothing to say — as far as he knew, it was just a stance issue, a small correctable flaw in an otherwise excellent player. He'd assigned Beckett to fix it because Beckett was captain, and because Beckett, infuriatingly, had one of the best defensive reads on the team. "Coach, I've got it," she said. "I don't need—" "You do need," Whitfield said, not unkindly, already skating off toward the other line, "or I wouldn't have said it. Vance. Boards. Go." And that was that. Nobody argued with Whitfield twice, not even her, not even on the days she wanted to more than anything. Beckett skated over with the unhurried economy of a man who'd never once in his life had to rush toward something he didn't want to do. Up close, in the low light of an empty arena, he looked less like a captain and more like something carved — jaw, cheekbones, the flat winter-colored eyes that never quite gave anything away. He stopped a few feet from her, spraying a controlled fan of ice that stopped just short of her skates. Show-off. "You heard the man," he said. "Boards." "I know how to take a hit, Vance." "Clearly, since you came up wrong on Tuesday." "I came up wrong because you hit me at an angle nobody drills for." "I hit you exactly the way we drill for. You compensated wrong." He said it flatly, without cruelty, the way he'd correct a stat error — and that was somehow worse than if he'd been an a*s about it, because it meant he'd actually watched the tape, actually cared enough about her mechanics to notice the millimeter of difference between right and almost-right. "Get against the boards." She skated to the boards. Turned. Set her skates. Told her knee, silently, not today, and braced. He came at her slow the first time — a demonstration hit, controlled, more push than impact, his shoulder catching her chest and pinning her lightly to the boards while his skates found the ice on either side of hers. It was nothing. It was the kind of contact she took forty times a practice from guys twice her size. It did not feel like nothing. Maybe it was the quiet of the empty rink. Maybe it was the way his voice dropped when he wasn't performing for an audience of twenty-two teammates. Maybe it was just proximity — the plain, animal fact of a body that large, that warm, pressed against hers in a place built entirely of cold. Whatever it was, Rae felt it land somewhere it had no business landing: low in her stomach, a hot coil of something that had nothing to do with hockey. "Your hips are turned wrong," Beckett said, close enough that she felt the words more than heard them, his breath a warm shock against the cold air between them. His hand came down on her hip — not gentle, not rough, just certain, the kind of touch that assumed permission because it had never occurred to him that permission might be a question. He angled her a few careful degrees, and even through two layers of padding she felt the exact pressure of his palm like it was printed directly on her skin. "There. Feel the difference?" She felt several differences, none of which she planned on naming out loud. "Yeah," she managed. "Got it." "Again." He backed off half a foot, reset, came at her again — a little harder this time, testing the correction, and she held it, hips angled right, weight low, knee screaming distantly under the ice and the adrenaline and the fact that Beckett Vance's forearm was braced against the boards an inch from her collarbone, his face close enough that she could count exactly how dark his eyes went when he was concentrating on something. "Better," he said. "I know." "You're welcome." "I didn't say thank you." Something shifted in his expression — not quite a smile, but the ghost of the shape one might take, gone as fast as it arrived, replaced by the flat captain's mask he wore for the rest of the world. He pushed off the boards, put three clean feet of ice between them like he'd only just noticed how little there'd been a second ago. "Do it right in the game Saturday," he said, "and I won't have to keep doing this." "Do what right? Getting hit against the boards by you specifically?" "Fixing your stance." His jaw ticked. "That's what we were doing." "Sure," Rae said, skating backward, putting distance between them that felt, suddenly, urgently necessary. "That's exactly what we were doing." He didn't answer. He didn't have to; Whitfield's whistle cut across the ice, calling the lines back together, and the moment dissolved into the ordinary machinery of practice — sprints and passing drills and Bear's running commentary and the particular ache in Rae's knee that she taped tighter than usual after, alone, in the narrow slice of locker room that was hers and nobody else's. She sat on the low bench, unwinding athletic tape from a roll gone soft with use, and thought about the exact weight of Beckett Vance's hand on her hip, the exact heat of his chest through two layers of padding, the exact way his voice had gone low and unbothered like touching her was the easiest thing in the world. Rivalry, she told herself, wrapping the tape tighter than the injury strictly required. That's all that was. Rivalry and a stance correction. She did not, even for a second, believe it. Across the rink, in the coaches' office that doubled as film review, Beckett sat with his elbows on his knees and stared at a blank monitor he hadn't turned on yet, replaying — against every instinct he had toward discipline — the exact half-second his hand had settled on Rae Callahan's hip like it belonged there. It hadn't meant anything. It was a stance correction. He'd made the same correction a hundred times, on a hundred players, in four years of increasing captaincy responsibility, and none of those corrections had ever made his pulse do the thing it had just done, low and insistent, some unwanted animal awareness he did not have room for. Not this season. Not with scouts already circling, not with his father's calls increasing in frequency and specificity, not with a fraternization clause sitting over the whole roster like a loaded g*n that Whitfield had made very, very clear he was prepared to use. Reyes Callahan is not a variable I can afford, he told himself, and believed it exactly as much as she'd believed her own lie thirty feet away. His phone buzzed against his thigh. He didn't need to look to know who it was; only one person called him at six-forty in the morning with that particular impatient double-buzz. Dad: Heard you had a good showing at the combine invite. Don't get comfortable. And don't let that girl story become a distraction. The scouts are watching how you handle it. Beckett looked at the message for a long moment, then set the phone face-down on the bench beside him, and did not answer it, and told himself that the tightness in his chest had nothing to do with the boards, or the hip beneath his hand, or the fact that for one unguarded half-second, hockey had not been the only thing on his mind. It was going to be a long season.