Page 111 of Knottingley Ever After
Coach Declan’s whistle blows from the bench. It is sharper than the whistles he uses at the front of any normal practice session, which is, on his particular gradient, the auditory equivalent of a controlled detonation, and he calls the sector-oneline off the ice with the clipped tone of a man whose patience is, for the day, suspended.
“That last sequence,” he says, in the level professional voice of a man going on the record, “was not a clean rep, sector one. We are not running personal-vendetta drills inside my practice plan. If you want to take chippy plays at the back of your own goalie’s net, you can do it on someone else’s ice.”
I exhale through my nose. The sound is a hiss against the foam inside my mask.
Off.
Today is off. You have been off all morning. You have, on the inner ledger, lost the back-corner save you should have made at the seven-minute mark, the rebound control on the play after, and now this. That is not three flukes. That is a pattern.
And the pattern, frankly, is upstream of the ice. I have not slept properly in three nights. I closed my eyes at one-thirty in the morning last night, lay in my converted storage room staring at the small square of moon coming through the high transom window, and did not actually sleep at any registered point until Rémi’s alarm went off at six. The two nights prior had been the same. A small constant tinnitus humming under my breastbone. The kind of insomnia that does not, in any visible way, announce itself, until you take a puck to the cage on a stoppable shot.
“Oh, well,” one of them says, loud enough to carry over the gate of the bench, “clearly the catching streak is failing. The pink-haired wonder’s real colors are finally coming up.”
Two of his teammates laugh.
Not quietly. Not the small contained snickers that pretend to be inside jokes. The full open-throated laugh of a unit that has been waiting two weeks for an excuse to be unkind about me out loud and has, on this particular Tuesday afternoon, decided that one goal is the excuse.
Skate off it. Skate off it. Reset. The wall.
Then Matteo skates across the centre line.
Not fast. Not theatrically. The unhurried purposeful glide of a winger who has clocked the chirp and is going to address it the way a winger of his caliber addresses chirps, which is from a precise distance designed to make the next words available to every man on the ice.
“Guys.” Cheerful. “Cut the fucking bullshit. Stop bullying the goalie.”
“Oh.” Brennan, of course. Of fucking course. “You are going to defend her, Santori. That tracks. You two are sleeping together, right? Cute.”
Three more laughs. A small whistle from the back of the line. Someone, possibly Voss, sing-songs out, “Now he has to be the knight in shining armor,” the kind of register designed to land as a slap.
Oh, no. Oh, please, no. Santori, do not.
Matteo, in the way I am starting to suspect is the only way Matteo knows how to be in a room, brightens.
“Yeah.” Loud. Easy. The kind of voice he uses ordering coffee. “We fuck pretty often, actually. And, for the record, she gives the best fucking cuddles I have had in my entire adult life. Sound asleep on my chest like a kitten. Honestly, life-changing.”
Santori.
Santori, we have done none of those things.
Santori, do that again.
“Are you jealous,” Matteo continues, sliding to a stop in the precise middle of the ice now, “because you cannot score an actual Omega? Or are you jealous because she can in fact handle me and Jude and Rémi simultaneously, which is a tactical performance most of your line could not produce in a one-on-one. Honest question.”
Brennan’s mouth goes thin.
“Hey, listen.” Matteo lifts his stick, casual, like a teacher gesturing at a chalkboard. “If any one of you assholes wants to shunourOmega in this rink one more time, you come right at my face and you try it. Not hers. Mine. I have business hours.”
Our.
Our Omega.
He said it on the record. With three coaches listening. With Declan listening. With every body on this ice listening. The pronoun is now in the league’s ambient air, and the man with the trophy case at the bench just heard it.
Brennan laughs.
It is, as bad-decision laughs go, a textbook example. He coasts across the centre line. He stops two feet in front of Matteo’s face. He hooks his stick under his arm. He says, with the bright cheerful confidence of a man about to make the worst seventeen seconds of his afternoon, “Oh yeah? And what are you actually going to fuckingdo,Santori? Fight me on the ice?”
Matteo smiles.
