Page 101 of Knottingley Ever After
“Excuse me, why are you off the ice. Why are you off the ice and in my personal space. Why are you off the ice and in my personal space at four-twenty-seven in the morning when I am attempting to hydrate, sir.”
He says nothing.
His green eyes drop briefly to the phone on the bench. Up to my face. Down to the phone. Back to my face. The professional Irish granite has gone, for one strange suspended half-second, the smallest fraction less professional than I have seen it in five years.
“So,” he says, very quietly. “You are actually being serious with yourpack.”
The way he says the wordpackis the way another man might sayex-husband.
I cross my arms. I attempt to cross my arms. The chest protector and the pads and the bulky stupid bib of my hockey gear make crossing my arms a functionally impossible gesture, but I manage a credible approximation, and I lean into it.
“Why is that any of your business, Coach.”
“O’Shea.”
“Do you want to join in, perhaps? Wait in line as the next bidder for a temporary packship slot? I can put you down on the waitlist. Henderson at admin loves a waitlist.”
Something behind his face moves.
It is not, by any visible measure, a large movement. It is the tic of a jaw muscle, the kind of thing you only catch on a person you have spent your adolescence cataloguing the micro-expressions of. But it moves, and I clock it, and I am, abruptly, no longer entertained.
“You are still angry.” Stated.
“No shit, Sherlock.” I tilt my head. “Should I open a TED talk, Coach? Should I rent a small auditorium?Captain Obvious 101: Things My Former Coach Has Finally Decided To Notice About Me After Five Years Of Sustained Avoidance.Hands-on workshop component. Bring a notebook.”
“Iris.” Quieter. “You should trust that I had reasons.”
And there it is.
The same five-word architecture. Reasons. The bare unbroken stone of a man who has decided, in the small inner courtroom of his own ethics, that the reasons exempt him from offering them.
Something in me, very quiet, decides we are done with civility.
I lift my mask up off my face entirely, hook it onto the strap above my head, and step in.
Two steps. Inside the small reasonable distance any two professional adults would maintain at the back of a hockey bench. The cedar-and-coffee-and-snow of him fills the small radius between us with the precise embarrassing density that has been mapping itself onto my nervous system since I was sixteen years old, and I refuse to acknowledge it, and I rise uponto the steel toes of my skates so that I have any chance of meeting his stupid green eyes at level.
He does not step back.
He does not, in fact, move at all.
“I,” I tell him, very low, very flat, into the four-inch radius of his stupid Irish face, “do not trust a man who decided to drop off the face of the earth and leave me behind on a Wednesday in October with no warning and no note, Coach.”
His jaw tics again.
“During these training hours,” I continue, my voice dropping further, the way it drops in the crease when I am calling a defensive switch I want only my pack to hear, “I will follow your orders. I will run your drills. I will accept your side-comments. I will tolerate your sudden, deeply professional interest in my health, my mechanics, my hip, and the cleanliness of my recovery angle.”
“Iris.”
“Outside of that,Coach,you do not get a say in anything. Not my packship. Not my dates. Not my caloric intake. Not the location of my phone on a bench. Not the boys whose contacts are saved in it. You do not insert yourself into the rest of my life on a whim, on a hallway run-in, on a glance at the screen of a device that does not belong to you. You do not get to step back into the picture, on your own schedule, because you have decided I am now interesting enough to be worth the trouble.”
I let it sit. A beat. Another beat.
“If you want a say,” I add, conversationally, my chin lifted, the storm-grey of my eyes locked onto his, “you are going to have to fucking grovel for it.”
There is silence.
Long. Cold. The kind of silence that has, in the past, ended fights.
