Page 78 of Slashed Bonds

She thinks she’s a set of damages with a body attached.

Flaws, defects, a bond scar under a tattoo she’ll show you before she’ll show you her bare face. She’s got the whole inventory memorized and she’ll recite it to you flat, like a weather report, so you can’t use it on her first.

And every single line on that list is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever put my hands on.

Watching her in the locker room tonight was something I have to make a ritual.

That’s decided. Malice duty, Roz called it, and Roz has no idea what she’s authorized.

I sat on that bench for eleven minutes and watched her come out of her gear one strap at a time, and it was the same thing I do after we’ve fucked for hours in a room with no windows. I lie there. I don’t touch. I look.

A diamond in a dark room. You don’t put your hands on it. You let your eyes adjust.

Only tonight the lights were on, and I wasn’t the only one who could see.

And she’d been in my net.

Third hour. Halloran put me back in for the last of the scrimmage, once the Switch had burned off and Cash had stopped watching me like I might climb the glass, and the first time the blacks came down my end of the ice, she was carrying.

Top of the circle. Left side. My blocker side.

I set it. Same as always. Blocker high, a lane open low along the ice no wider than a mail slot, and I held it while she came, and I watched for her eyes to drop.

They didn’t.

She looked at the gap. I saw her see it. And then she looked at me, at my face, through the cage, the way a person looks at somebody across a table who’s tried to sell them something.

She knows.

That was the whole thought. Not surprise. Recognition. Two and a half years of a woman who reads me from four inches away, and it never occurred to me she’d read me from forty feet.

She didn’t shoot.

She pulled up.

Dead stop, edges hissing, and she held the puck on her forehand with the gap sitting there open and waiting, and she waited too. A full second. Long enough that Okonkwo closed on her and I had to make a choice about what to do with my weight.

I committed.

Because somebody had to, and it wasn’t going to be her.

And the moment I went down, she slid it through my legs, between the pads, five-hole, the one place I’d stopped covering because nobody in four years has been patient enough to make me open it.

Five of five. That’s what she did to me tonight. Four I stopped, and every one of those four she was learning something, and the fifth was the exam.

Pruitt got the shooter-tutor cracked in the first scrimmage. I got worse. I got beaten by a shooter who declined my invitation and made me RSVP to hers.

I’ve never wanted anyone more in my life. I’m aware of how that sounds.

Afterward, skating back to the bench, she passed my crease without looking at me, and she said one thing, low, for me alone.

“You hold it too long.”

The gap. She meant the gap.

Nobody’s ever told me that.

Not a coach, not an analyst, not Cash, who’s watched more of my tape than I have. Everybody sees the trap. Nobody sees that the trap has a cost, that every tenth of a second I hold that lane open is a tenth of a second a patient shooter can use.