MY HOCKEY SECRET

Not Most Rookies

The locker room smelled like sweat and rubber and fear.

Riley kept her back to the wall, stripping her pads layer by layer, timing every movement to the second.

Jersey off.

Shoulder pads off.

Undershirt next, but only halfway, only enough to look like she was doing what everyone else did.

Around her, guys stripped down without a thought in the world. Towels slung low. Jokes flying about someone's girlfriend, someone's grades, someone's terrible slap shot.

Riley laughed when she was supposed to laugh.

She kept her eyes on her own stall.

This was the part nobody warned her about. Not the hits. Not the sprints. This. The thirty seconds after practice when every guy on the team forgot the world was watching and she couldn't afford to forget for even a second. She'd learned to change in stages, to always have a reason to duck into the bathroom stall, to keep a towel in her hand like a shield even when she wasn't using it. It has become a kind of choreography. One wrong beat and the whole routine fell apart.

She'd practiced it in her head so many times it barely felt like thinking anymore. Turn away from the room. Keep the towel high. Move fast, but not so fast it looked like she was hiding something. It was exhausting in a way none of the drills on the ice ever were, because out there she only had to be strong. In here she had to be someone else entirely.

"Rey."

Her stomach dropped before she even turned.

Marco stood there, holding out a roll of tape.

"You're bleeding through your lip. Figured you'd want this before Coach sees and makes you sit out."

Relief nearly buckled her knees.

"Thanks."

"Don't thank me yet." Marco grinned. "You still have to survive the captain's mood tonight."

"He's always like this?"

"Worse, usually." Marco leaned against the stall next to hers, way too close for someone who didn't know what she was hiding. "You really stole that puck off him last week. First week on the team, and you did that. Nobody does that."

"Guess I got lucky."

"Nobody gets that lucky."

Riley busied herself retying her skate laces that didn't need retying, buying herself a few more seconds with her shirt half down.

Marco's eyes flicked to her stall.

Not to her.

Just past her shoulder.

"You keep everything locked up like that?"

Her whole body went cold.

"Like what?"

He nodded at the small padlock she'd clipped onto her bag, the one thing in the room that wasn't standard issue.

"Just seems like a lot of security for a hockey bag."

"Bad experience with a roommate back home." The lie came easier than she expected. "Guy went through my stuff. Never again."

Marco shrugged, already losing interest, already turning to holler something at another teammate across the room.

Riley let out a breath she'd been holding since he'd said her name.

That was the third close call in four days.

She couldn't keep counting them and expect the number to stay small forever.

Across the room, Jackson sat alone, unwrapping his hands, saying nothing to anyone. He hadn't looked at her since practice ended. But she'd felt him looking the entire time she talked to Marco. She was sure of it, the way you can feel someone's eyes on the back of your neck even in a crowded room.

It didn't make sense. This was a man who'd made it clear from day one that he wanted nothing to do with her, who'd hit her into the boards twice just to prove a point. And yet lately his silences had started to feel less like dismissal and more like something else entirely, something she didn't have a name for and wasn't sure she wanted one.

By the time she made it back to Room 314, her whole body ached in places she didn't know could ache.

Jackson was already there, sitting at his desk, a textbook open in front of him that he didn't appear to be reading.

Riley dropped her bag by her bed.

Neither of them spoke.

The silence had a texture to it tonight, thick enough to touch.

She grabbed her toiletry bag and headed for the bathroom, the one place in this room that still belonged only to her.

"Rey."

She stopped in the doorway.

"You've got a bruise coming up on your jaw."

"I noticed."

"You didn't flinch when I hit you today."

It wasn't a compliment. It sounded more like an accusation.

"Should I have?"

Jackson finally looked up from the textbook he wasn't reading.

"Most rookies do."

"I'm not most rookies."

"No." His eyes stayed on her, longer than comfortable, longer than safe. "You're not."

Riley's pulse climbed into her throat.

"Something on your mind, Captain?"

For a second, just a second, something shifted behind his eyes, like he was doing math that wasn't adding up right. Like he'd noticed a hundred small things about her that made no sense on their own, and tonight they were starting to add up to something.

Then he shut the textbook.

"Lights out in twenty."

"Yes, sir."

She closed the bathroom door behind her and pressed her back against it, waiting for her heart to slow down.

It didn't.

Not for a long time.

She sat on the edge of the tub in the dark, knees pulled to her chest, and tried to remember why she'd thought this would be easier than losing the sport she loved. Some nights, lately, she wasn't sure it was.

Through the wall she could hear him moving around the room, the soft thud of a textbook closing, the creak of his mattress as he lay down. Ordinary sounds. The kind of sounds that would mean nothing if she were anyone else's roommate. But every one of them made her flinch, made her recalculate how much time she had left before four fifty, before five, before the next moment she'd have to be perfectly, carefully Rey again.

She thought about calling Dani. It was late back home, but Dani would pick up anyway, the way she always did.

Instead she just sat there, listening to the quiet on the other side of the door, until her own breathing finally matched it.