Page 100 of Knottingley Ever After
Long beat.
He looks at me. He does not move. He does not, of course, come over.
Of course.
“Break,” I announce, to the empty arena. “Five minutes. I require hydration and a reason to live.”
I skate to the home bench without waiting for permission.
The home bench at four in the morning smells of cooled rubber, the slow dissipating ghost of last night’s salt and adrenaline, and the very faint chemical pine of the cleaner Jimmy ran along the boards at midnight. My pads, dropped against the gate of the bench, smell of leather and yesterday’s overtime and a perfume I do not, on first whiff, recognize as mine because my own scent has gotten denser over the past forty-eight hours in a way I have, against Rémi’s gentle morning prompts, declined to interrogate.
I lift my water bottle. I squirt a cold arc of it directly through the cage of my mask onto my forehead and let it run down. I exhale.
Then I pull my gloves off, drop them on the bench, and reach for my phone.
Three texts. All from the same source.
Where is my Pinky. I am owed cuddle time.
Pinky.
Hello. I am being ignored. This will be reported to the proper authorities.
My mouth does the traitor thing at the corner. I roll my eyes for the benefit of nobody watching, and type back.
We have never once cuddled, Santori. Your lies will not work on me.
My bed is always open for you, Pinky. Always.
Funny.
Where are you?
Coach said I need to work on my A game or whatever, so I am on the ice. Dying. Slowly. Picturesquely. Send help.
The typing bubble appears. Disappears. Comes back. Vanishes again. Comes back.
Did you eat.
What is this you speak of, sir.
I know it is going to piss him off. That is, frankly, the point. Matteo Santori has, in the past two weeks, made it the cornerstone of his identity to monitor my caloric intake, my hydration, my sleep cycle, and the general operational status of the small biological machine I am driving around. He has noticed, with the precision of a man auditing a tax return, that I have a tendency to survive on iced tea, protein shakes, and the spite of any man who has ever underestimated me, which is not, per the medical literature, a balanced diet.
I am going to start punishing you for not prioritizing yourself, Pinky.
Haha. Throw me over your lap and slap me, Daddy.
I send it before my pride can recall the message. I stare at the screen. I watch the typing bubble appear. I watch it disappear. I watch it reappear. I watch it disappear again, this time for a longer beat than the last one, in the precise way the typing bubble vanishes when the person on the other end of it hasdecided that whatever they were about to type is going to require a quieter room and a sit-down.
Oh. Oh, that landed.
I snicker into the open cage of my mask, more pleased with myself than I have been at four in the morning in approximately ever, and I put the phone face-down on the bench, and I turn to grab my gloves.
I walk straight into Coach Declan.
The man is, somehow, off the ice and over the gate of the bench and standing directly within my personal radius without having made one audible sound, which is, I am going to assume, a thing he has been able to do since I was fifteen and that I will need to ask Rémi to investigate at a later date.
I blink up at him.
