Page 72 of Knottingley Ever After
Silence.
“Instead of running your mouths in my office about a goalie on a sector you do not coach,” I add, evenly, “I suggest youput your energy where it can earn you something, and that is into proving me wrong on the ice. Get your half of the team to score on her. Plenty. Publicly. Reliably. Then you will have an argument I cannot refute. Until then, you are simply chirping in the staffroom.”
Marek puts the mug down on the corner of my desk.
“Careful, Declan.” Whitlock’s voice has gone almost gentle, which is the precise register of his that I have learned to dislike most. “You can talk down to us as much as you like, and the trophies on that wall will buy you the room. But the rest of the building knows you. You are packless. You are Omegaless. The KPLO conduct revisions hit next season. You can be the youngest coach in the country with the most banners and the cleanest history, and if you do not have a name on a registry by next August, you will not be allowed near a playoff bench. So talk. Run your mouth. Save the conference. But the rules apply to you too. And they are coming.”
I do not answer. There is, in fact, no answer.
“Am I interrupting?”
The voice comes from my doorway, easy and unhurried, and all three of us turn at once.
Kavanagh is standing in the threshold with the loose unbothered posture of a man who is going to act as though he has not heard what he has, in fact, just heard. His hair is wet from the showers. His scent reaches me a beat after my eyes do — amber bourbon, the resinous warmth of him, layered now with the faint clean note of whatever drugstore body wash sector-two stocks for the visitors’ bathroom. He is in a clean grey hoodie and jeans, with a folded piece of paper tucked between his fingers, and his eyes hold mine for a precise and entirely deliberate beat that tells me without saying so that he caught at least the last sentence.
How long has he been standing there.
Long enough.
“Kavanagh.” I rise. “Come in. Glad you could swing by. We needed the quick meeting before the weekend on training rotations and roster jersey sizes.”
Whitlock and Marek do not move at first. Then they do, both at once, with the small choreographed shuffle of two men deciding the door was, after all, a better idea than the desk.
Jude tracks them out with a single neutral dip of the chin.
“I have everyone’s size,” he says, holding up the folded paper. “And Matteo just texted me to say Pinky is a small in the women’s jersey cut. He clarified twice. He was concerned.”
I frown.
“Pinky.”
Jude looks at me for a long, even beat, and the corner of his mouth does almost nothing, which on Jude reads loud.
“O’Shea.”
Right.
Right. Pink hair. The mess of it pulled into the high bun she lives in when she is preparing to demolish whatever has been put in front of her. I have, in the last eighteen hours, watched her wear that exact bun in a corridor outside the admin office and in a dark kitchen at five-oh-five in the morning and in a goalie crease for six straight hours of drills, and the nickname tracks. The nickname tracks too well.
“Got it.” I lower myself back into the chair. “Sit. Let’s get the practical out of the way so you can join your teammates before they finish whatever ill-advised post-practice plan they are already running through Hargrove. And, for the record: I do not want to hear a single report of a frat party this weekend. Not one.”
“Understood, Coach.”
He sits. He side-eyes the doorway one more time, confirming.
The latch clicks.
Jude turns his head and looks at me with the level, full attention he usually reserves for an opposing-team film session.
“You do not have an Omega.”
Not a question. A statement, with the captain’s polite invitation to confirm or contradict.
“Not your problem, Captain.”
“Will it be.”
The question lands in the small panelled quiet of my office with a weight that is, briefly, not appropriate to the seniority of the man asking it, and yet the seniority is exactly the point. The roles, for one strange half-second, are not where they should be. I am supposed to be in the driver’s seat of any conversation I host inside this room, and Jude Kavanagh, who has been in that chair five minutes, has just calmly seized the wheel.
