Page 30 of Her Rival

When they finally cleared the ice he looked up one more time, on his way down the tunnel. Last man off, the way the captain's always the last man off. He didn't say anything. He just found me in the seats and tapped the blade of his stick twice against the boards, the way you knock twice on a doorframe to say a thing you don't have the words for, and then he went down the tunnel into the noise.

I drove home with the heat on and the radio off.

I had a piece to write. And sitting in the passenger seat of my brain where I could see it, I had the beginning of the actual piece. The real one. The one about the loud boy in the barn full of noise. And underneath the piece, in the place the piece couldn't reach, I had the other thing. The thing I wasn't going to write down. That I'd watched Jett Sturgill be completely himself out in the open for ninety minutes, and I'd wanted, for the first time in my adult life, to know what that felt like from the inside.

I didn't call Brynn. I didn't tell anyone.

I added it to the box.

The first game I covered, they lost.

I had a press credential by then. Victoria's office walked it through in a morning, and on a Tuesday night I rode the elevator up to the press box two levels above center ice and took a seat behind the long glass with a row of beat writers who'd been covering this team since before it won anything. The box was warm and high and quiet, the safest seat in the building, and I understood inside the first period that it was also the worst seat for the thing I'd come to do. From up here the game was a diagram. Clean. Bloodless. Two levels down it was happening to actual bodies, and I'd left the part that mattered on the ice with them.

So I watched him instead of the game. That was the whole reason I'd come.

I'd seen him at practice. I knew now what the man looked like when the ice belonged to him. The loud one. The point of the diamond. The hundred and ninety pounds of joy. I came up to the press box expecting to watch that man play a game, and instead I watched a stranger wearing his number.

It wasn't that he played badly. A beat writer wouldn't have written that he played badly. He back-checked. He won his battles on the boards. The shape of him was all still there, the speed, the reads, the body in the right place. But the joy was gone, and once I'd clocked its absence I couldn't stop seeing it. At practice he'd skated like the ice was a thing he owned. Tonight he skated like a man who'd borrowed it and knew the bill was coming. There was a half-second in everything. A brace. He'd get to the right spot and then hold, just slightly, the way you hold when some part of you is bracing for a hit that isn't in the play.

In the second period he got the chance. A turnover at the blue line, a two-on-one, the puck on his stick in the slot with the whole net opening up the way I'd watched it open for him on tape a hundred times. The building came up out of its seats before he even shot, because the building knew what this man did with that chance. I came up with it. I had a pen in my hand and no memory of standing.

He fanned on it.

Not a save, not a block. He just didn't get all of it, the puck rolling off the toe of his blade and dribbling wide, and the building sat back down in one long groaning exhale. Jett skated to the bench with his head down and his jaw set, and the beat writer beside me said, to no one, "there's the slump," and wrote it down, and I did not write anything at all.

Because the beat writer was wrong, and I knew he was wrong the way I knew the weight of a right sentence. A man at the top of this sport does not forget how to finish a two-on-one in November because his legs went. He misses it because somewhere in the last little while something has gotten into the room he keeps locked, and the locked room is riding in his chest while his body tries to play a hockey game around it. The slump wasn't the story. The slump was a symptom. I had three weeks of notes on a man's career and I'd just watched the actual piece happen in the time it took a puck to roll off a stick. Here was a man who was very good at carrying a thing nobody could see, and tonight, for the first time, the carrying was starting to cost him on the ice, where everyone could.

They lost it in the third. A soft goal with four minutes left, the kind a defending champion is not supposed to give up. The horn went. The building emptied out quiet. Down on the sheet the captain, Stone, the one who said about a third of what he was thinking, skated a slow loop and tapped a few guys on the shins with his stick, and Jett stood at the blue line longer than anyone, looking at the scoreboard like it had said something to him personally. Then he went down the tunnel last. Not because he was the captain. Because he was the one who couldn't stand to leave it.

I sat in the warm safe press box until the cleaners came.

I hadn't written a single word. I had the whole piece.

A week of interviews had taught me one thing. Jett Sturgill could weaponize courtesy.

We'd done three more sessions since the video review room. He showed up to all of them on time. Wore the team polo. Gave me hockey content the way a chef gives a critic a tasting menu, small precise plates, beautifully arranged, each one designed to fill me up without telling me anything about the kitchen. He handed me the play breakdowns I needed. He gave me the kind of quotes a magazine could run.

He had not looked at me again the way he'd looked at me at the end of that first video room session.

Not once.

He gave me the polite version of every session since. The polished version. The cold-war truce we'd both apparently signed on Thursday afternoon in a room with a wall-sized screen. And I'd spent the week working harder than I'd worked in years to act as though I hadn't noticed the truce was being held in place by a thin glass wall both of us were terrified to put a hand against.

I was failing. The work was good. I had ten thousand words of usable material and a clear path to the first draft. And I was failing.

The third session had been at his place. He'd let me come up to the big glass house in the hills, which I hadn't been prepared for in any of the seven ways I should have been. We did the interview at his kitchen island while the sun set on the valley behind him through a wall of windows the size of a movie screen. I took notes. He answered questions about Coach's adjustments to the second-line forecheck. He put a glass of water in front of me without asking and refilled it twice. He did not stand within three feet of me at any point. When I left, around eight, he walked me to Brynn's SUV in his driveway, past the Pontiac sitting under the floodlight on the far side of the gravel, which I recognized for what it was even in the dark, even from twenty paces. A frame-off restoration of one of those, done right, is a six-figure car wearing a weekend hobby like a disguise. He didn't say anything about it and I didn't ask, and I filed the not-saying next to all his other not-sayings. He opened my door with the same controlled distance he'd been operating with for a week, and he said drive safe, Hartley, and he shut the door. That was Wednesday.

It was Friday now.

I was sitting at Brynn's kitchen island while she diced an onion the size of a softball and tried to figure out how to ask me the thing she'd clearly been working herself up to for two days.

"You're avoiding the team events," she said, finally, to the cutting board.

"I'm working."

"You're working from the guest room. Twelve hours a day. You haven't come to The Hideout with me on a Friday night in three weeks and I've stopped pretending I think that's a coincidence."

"Bry."