Page 25 of Slashed Bonds

The first six months, it made my skin crawl. I told him so. He said okay, and kept doing it, and told me to say the word if it stopped being okay.

I never said the word.

Somewhere in year two I stopped minding.

Somewhere after that I started liking it.

Having someone’s attention. Any kind. That’s how low the bar has sunk, apparently.

My jacket’s on the floor by the chair, and when I pick it up, something in the inside pocket shifts against my ribs.

The card.

Matte black. Violet and teal lettering. A viper stamped in the corner like a threat with good graphic design.

It’s been in that pocket for two days. I haven’t called the number. I’ve read it maybe forty times, which is a diagnosis in itself.

Because taking it means Blackridge. And Blackridge means the national tournament, and the tournament means standing across a faceoff dot from four men who threw me out a window and then went home and slept.

It also means I’ve been up at three in the morning watching Vipers game film on a cracked phone screen like a woman with a problem.

And they are, irritatingly, magnificent.

Their center runs the whole sheet like an accountant with a grudge. He doesn’t skate to where the puck is. He skates to where the puck will have to be once he’s removed every other option, and he sets up plays four passes deep that only make sense in hindsight. Twice I watched him drift into a lane that looked lazy, and twice the opposing defenseman moved to punish it, and both times that movement was the entire point.

He wasn’t lazy. He was fishing.

Their number four on the blue line is a wall with a legal team. He never lunges. He takes away ice by standing in it, angles forwards into the boards where their options die, and rides them out of the play with his stick flat on the ice and his hands so quiet the officials have nothing to call.

And their goalie.

He’s the one who kept me up.

Aggressive. Athletic to the point of showing off. He challenges shooters halfway to the hash marks and dares them to beat him with speed, and his rebound control is sloppy in a way that should get him scored on more than it does.

Then I watched the third period of the Ashford game four times and understood.

He leaves a gap open.

Deliberately. Blocker side, low, an invitation the size of a mail slot, and he holds it there while the shooter’s eyes drop to it, and the instant the release starts he’s already moving.

He isn’t guessing. He’s choosing the shot for them.

It’s the single most arrogant thing I’ve ever seen a goaltender do, and it works, and I hated how much I admired it.

Then I put the phone down and lay in the dark and thought about the fact that the man in that net is twenty-something and free and playing in front of eight thousand people, and I’m playing beer-league money games in a converted barn with two hundred dollars on the line.

Every night, that thought.

Every night, it lands the same way.

“You’re quiet.”

His voice pulls me back into the room.

He’s still watching me. Mask on. It covers everything from the bridge of his nose down, matte and featureless, and the hood he never takes off hides his hair.

Which leaves the eyes.