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We play it boring. Boring is a skill. We chip pucks deep and forecheck in waves and kill the clock in their end, and every time twenty-two comes looking for me I move the puck a half-second before he arrives, because I’ve spent the whole game learning his timing and now I’m spending it back on him. He doesn’t like that. He tells me he doesn’t like that, in the language of the boards — calls me a soft little golden boy and worse, a whole monologue about my mother in there somewhere — and I let him say all of it, because a guy running his mouth is a guy not watching the play, and the puck’s already gone.

They get one back at twelve minutes — a scramble, a lucky bounce off a shin pad, their bench finally with something to stand up about. Three-one. The Nest gets tense the way a building gets tense when a lead that felt safe stops feeling safe.

I win the next faceoff.

I win it on purpose and with feeling, back to Theo, and we settle it down, and we run ninety seconds off the clock without giving them a sniff, and the tension bleeds back out of the building. That’s the thing nobody tells you about being captain. It’s not the goals. It’s the ninety boring seconds after the other team scores, the ones where you put your body between the game and the panic and you just — hold. Until everyone remembers we’re fine. I’m good at the holding. I’ve been holding things my whole life.

With four minutes left twenty-two finally gets his shot at me — a late hit along the wall, after the whistle, a forearm that catches me high and drives the bad shoulder into the glass.

It goes through me like a current. White, total, the kind of pain that turns the lights off for a half-second. Fuck. My whole left side lights up and the rink goes to static at the edges.

I do not go down.

I want, more than I have wanted anything in a while, to go down — to drop to a knee and let my body do the thing it’s screaming to do — and I don’t, because nine hundred people are watching and two rows behind the bench is a woman who notices everything, and going down means a trainer, and a trainer means questions, and questions mean the thing I’ve kept for six months stops being mine. So I straighten up. I find the ref. I get the penalty called — two minutes, roughing, twenty-two skating off to a chorus of boos — and I skate to the bench under my own power with my face arranged into nothing, and the only sound I make is breathing.

Cash leans in. “Beau.”

“Power play. Get out there.”

“Your shoulder⁠—”

“Get out there, Cash.”

He goes. We score on the man advantage — Wyatt, off a feed from Theo, top corner — and that’s the dagger, four-one, and the building roars and the clock runs out and we’ve beaten UMass in our own barn in the first conference game that counted, and it’s a good night, it’s a genuinely good night, and I’m standing at center ice with my team piling in and my shoulder quietly screaming and I let myself, one time, look up into the seats.

She’s standing. Clapping. Not hiding it this time.

In the room after, O’Grady gives us the version of a good speech that he allows himself, which is three sentences and a nod, and the room’s loud and happy and somebody’s got music going, and I peel my gear off slow on the side away from the room, careful with the left arm, and get my shirt on before anyone can clock the shoulder, which is already going colors it shouldn’t.

Wyatt finds me by the showers. Doesn’t say anything about the arm. Just hands me a water and says, low, “That was a cheap hit.”

“It was.”

“You good?”

“I’m good.”

He looks at me a second — Wyatt’s version of pushing, which is just looking — and then lets it go, because he’s Wyatt, and because the room’s celebrating and you don’t take that from people. “She’s waiting,” he says instead. “Outside. Saw her and Margo in the lot.”

“Yeah?”

“Mm.” A small smile, the one he’s been doing all week, the one that means he’s worked something out and isn’t going to say it. “Go on, Cap.”

She’s in the lot with Margo and the cold, and she doesn’t do the thing girlfriends do at the bus — doesn’t run up, doesn’t drape. She waits until I get to her and then looks at me with the dry, level thing and says, “You got hit late.”

“I got hit late.”

“It looked like it landed wrong.”

“It landed fine.”

She looks at me a beat longer than the answer earns — the noticing look, the one that’s catalogued the clipboard and the shoulder and the half-second I came up slow in the first — and I watch her decide, again, not to push it. She just files it, the way I file her, and I think about how we’ve built a whole relationship, fake and otherwise, out of two people deciding not to ask each other the question.

“Good game,” she says.

“Yeah?”

“You were —” she pauses, and lands it dry “— adequate.”