Blindside

Two: Captain Ashford

Levi

The world had gone sideways for about half a second — boards, ceiling, boards again — and then Levi was upright, mouthguard out, ears ringing, mad enough to see through walls.

He'd asked for it, a little. He knew that even climbing back to his feet. You didn't cut across the middle of the ice against a guy built like Ronan Draven and expect a polite tap on the shoulder. Knowing you'd asked for it and being okay about getting it were two very different things, and Levi had never been good at the second part.

He'd grown up the kind of poor where you learned fast that nobody handed you anything, least of all an easy pass through a rival's zone, so he did what he always did: got up, found the puck again, and made Draven work for the rest of it. If the big i***t wanted a war, Levi could give him one for two and a half more periods.

His linemates noticed. So did Ironbay. By the second period, someone on Draven's bench had clearly said something between whistles, because the hits kept coming but they'd gotten noticeably more textbook — no more finishing checks a half-second late, no more using the boards for anything they weren't strictly required for. Levi almost respected the discipline of it. Almost. Mostly it just made him angrier that he couldn't find a single clean reason to hate the guy's game, even while he was hating everything else about him.

He found the same dangerous seam through the middle twice more before the night was over — once well enough to set up Meridian's only goal, once badly enough that he missed a shot he should have buried. Ironbay won anyway, 4–2. Levi's night ended on that missed breakaway, because for exactly one second — right as he cut toward the net — he'd looked over at the Wolves bench and caught Draven watching him with an expression Levi didn't have time to name before he had to actually, you know, shoot the puck. He missed high. He was going to be thinking about that for a week, and not entirely because of the shot.

In the room after, his coach didn't yell — coach never yelled, which was somehow worse — just looked at him a beat too long and said, "Get that looked at," meaning the ribs, and "get your head on straight before the cameras," meaning something else entirely. Levi took the second part about as well as he usually took advice he already knew was correct.

The scrum had a flavor to it Levi had never quite gotten used to, even four years in — a room full of people waiting for you to say something stupid so they'd have a headline. He'd learned to give them almost nothing. Almost.

"Levi, walk us through the hit in the second—"

"Clean hit. Nothing to walk through."

"You two have history. Is this personal at this point, or—"

"Ask him." He reached for his water bottle, hoping that would be the end of it. It was not the end of it.

"Some are already calling it the hit of the season. Your reaction?"

"My reaction is my ribs are going to feel it tomorrow, and Draven's not going to think about it again until the next time we play. That's the whole difference between us, honestly." He heard himself say it and immediately wished he hadn't, because it was more honest than the question deserved.

"Word is Draven's been chippy with you specifically since your rookie year. Any idea why he's got it out for you?"

Here was the thing about Levi Ashford: he was very good, most days, at the careful non-answer. Tonight, with a headache blooming behind his left eye and his pride still smarting from the boards, he wasn't feeling careful.

"Honestly? I think Ronan Draven's spent three years mad that I'm better than him and there's not a damn thing he can do about it except try to put me through the glass." He heard it land in the room, heard a couple of pens move faster than they should have. "That's not rivalry. That's just a guy who doesn't like losing to somebody who came from nothing."

It was, he would think later, an incredibly stupid thing to say to a room whose entire job was repeating things.

By the time he got back to the hotel it was the top clip on three different sports sites, and came from nothing was doing numbers as a hashtag he hadn't asked for and didn't particularly want.

He read maybe thirty replies before he made himself stop. The ratio of people cheering him on to people telling him to be careful what he wished for was about even, which felt like as good a metaphor for his whole career as any. Self-made had a nice ring to it in interviews. It felt different at eleven at night, alone, watching strangers argue about whether he'd earned the attitude he'd apparently been broadcasting for three straight years without meaning to.

Alone in the hotel room, ice pack going soft against his ribs, Levi called his mother out of habit more than anything — she wouldn't be up, she had first period at seven-fifteen every day of her life — and got voicemail, which was fine, which was normal, which did not usually make his chest feel tight like this.

"Hey, Ma. Nothing's wrong. Just — long night. Call you tomorrow."

He sat with the phone in his hand a while after that, replaying the hit instead of the interview, because at least the hit made sense. Big guy, open ice, that's hockey. What he couldn't fully explain, even to himself, in the dark of a hotel room three hundred miles from anyone who actually knew him, was why the thing he kept circling back to wasn't the impact.

It was the half-second right before it. The look on Draven's face — not satisfaction, not even real aggression. Something closer to relief. Like he'd been waiting all night for a reason to close that distance.

Levi didn't know what to do with that. So he did what he always did with things he didn't know what to do with.

He decided not to think about it, and thought about it anyway, the whole rest of the night.