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And the only problem in my entire well-run life is that none of it feels like a strategy anymore, and I can’t tell anyone, least of all her.
We’ve got a game tonight. Real one — conference, counts for the standings, first of the season that means something. It’s the UMass Minutemen, who finished ahead of us last year and have not let us forget it, and who knocked us out of the conference tournament two seasons back in a game I still think about more than is healthy. O’Grady runs a light morning skate and an early team meal and sends us home to rest, and the whole day I’m doing the thing where the game is supposed to be the only thing in my head and it mostly is, except for the part of it that’s checking my phone.
She texted at four.
Sloane
Margo’s dragging me to your game. For appearances. I’m bringing a book for intermissions.
Sloane
Same seats?
Same seats. Behind the bench.
Sloane
Don’t do anything stupid trying to impress me. It’s a conference game. Be a professional.
I don’t get stupid on the ice. The ice is the one place I never get stupid.
Sloane
Famous last words, Sorensen.
And I put the phone in my bag and I get on the bus and I make myself leave her in the parking lot of my own attention, because she’s right, it’s a conference game, it counts, and the ice is the one place I’ve never once let anything follow me.
We’ll see if that holds.
The Nest is full and loud by the time we hit the ice for warmups, and I don’t look for her.
I don’t look for her the way you don’t look at the one thing you most want to look at — with effort, with discipline, with the whole front of my attention pointed at the puck and the boards and the pre-game routine and the back of it screaming behind the bench, she’s behind the bench. I carve my warmup laps. I take my shots. I do not look.
I look once. Halfway through. Can’t help it.
She’s there. Of course she’s there — platinum hair down, which I’ve learned by now means something, the cream sweater, Margo beside her already on her feet feeding off the crowd. Sloane’s not on her feet. Sloane’s sitting very composed with a paper cup of something, watching the ice with the still attention I now know means she’s reading the whole rink the way she reads a room.
And then she finds me finding her.
For one half-second neither of us does anything about it. The whole loud building drops away and it’s just the thirty feet of cold air between her seat and the ice, her eyes on mine through the glass, and I forget I’m supposed to be skating. Then she lifts one hand off the cup and gives me a small wave — barely a wave, just her fingers, the kind of thing you’d miss if you weren’t looking right at her, and I am looking right at her — and a beat behind it the color comes up in her cheeks. High and warm and unmistakable, even from here, even under the arena lights.
She’s blushing.
Sloane Beckett, who told me an hour ago to be a professional, who sits composed through everything, who has a face like a closed door — is blushing at me across a hockey rink in front of nine hundred people, and trying to look like she isn’t by lifting the cup to her mouth to hide it.
It doesn’t hide it. Nothing hides it. I’ve seen it now and I’m going to be thinking about it through the anthem.
I put my head down and skate, and I’m smiling into my cage like an idiot, and I don’t care.
The puck drops at 19:03.
I win the faceoff clean — back to Theo, who moves it up the boards to Wyatt, and we’re in their zone inside six seconds, and the building gets loud. This is the part of my life that’s never been complicated. Out here I’m not performing anything. There’s no Beau-who-everyone-needs on the ice; there’s just the read and the body and the puck, the geometry of it, four teammates I can find blind and five opponents I have to account for, all of it mapping itself in front of me a half-second before it happens. O’Grady calls it a great head. Sloane would have a better word for it. I’m not thinking about Sloane.
Okay, I’m thinking about Sloane a little.
First period’s a grind. UMass is a better team than the exhibition crowd — disciplined, physical, a big defensive pair that collapses the slot and makes you earn everything inside the dots. We trade chances. Their goalie robs Cash on a two-on-one that should’ve been one-nothing. I take a hit along the boards from their big right-hander, number twenty-two, a clean one but a heavy one, and it lands on the bad shoulder and goes through me white-hot — fuck, a flare so bright it whites out the edges of the rink for a half-second — and I get up slow and skate it off and do not look at the bench and absolutely do not look two rows behind it, because if I let the shoulder show, O’Grady sits me, and I’m not getting sat in the first conference game of the year.
I get back to the bench on the change and Cash drops next to me. “You good? That was a heavy one.”
