Page 145 of Knottingley Ever After
“He has not,” Vance adds, mildly, “registered anyone. The one thing the man has, in fact, struggled with for the better part of his career is the small inconvenience of communication. Which is, I admit, a touch amusing in a coach. His Omega used to do that for him. She pushed his buttons. She refused to take no for an answer. She fought when every available door in the room was closing on her.”
He pauses.
He looks, very specifically, at me.
“Similar to you, Miss O’Shea.”
Oh.
“Declan needs,” Vance continues, soft, “someone like that in his life. Or he spirals, structurally, into the small protective silent misery I have, frankly, watched him manage for half a decade. I can see, on a close reading of this corridor, why he went ghost on you for five years. At least the recent tape, Miss O’Shea, suggests you are not, in fact, the one-hit wonder some of the small senior commentariat assumed. You will, on the small probability ledger of my own desk, be the next big thing in this sport. I am, however, in the small interest of being honest, obligated to tell you that not everything that glitters is gold. The small private architecture of the senior leagues is the small private architecture of the senior leagues. I would prefer, on the record, to help you and the half of your roster currently engaged in the long process of becoming worth glittering, achieve the outcome you have earned.”
He turns. He walks, unhurried, back down the corridor.
“Everyone,” he says, over his shoulder, “deserves their happily ever after. You have my number.”
The elevator at the end of the corridor dings.
The doors slide open.
Coach Declan O’Rourke, in a dark practice jacket with the small North Star embroidered patch at the chest, in the small unhurried stance of a man making the routine corridor run between his hotel room and the ground-floor lobby, steps out.
He stops.
He looks at us. His eyes do the small first read — his goalie and his captain, holding hands, in a hotel corridor, two hours before a major outbound game, an ice cream in the goalie’s hand and a small piece of card stock in the captain’s. The cedarwood-and-black-coffee scent of him layers itself into the small contained air of the corridor, the winter-whiskey-and-leather under it doing the precise instantaneous small thing my body has, every time, been filing as the small safest scent in the building.
His eyes flick down the hallway, past us, to the small disappearing back of Marcus Vance.
The captain, beside me, moves.
Jude tucks the small heavy business card, with the smooth unhurried sleight of a man who has, in seven hockey seasons of captaincy, learned to move his hands without being seen to move his hands, into the inside pocket of his own jacket.
“Good evening, Coach,” Jude says, level. “We were just heading up.”
He tugs me, gentle, into the open elevator.
Coach Declan’s gaze finds mine. Holds. The grey-green of his eyes, in the warm overhead corridor light, does the small unhurried captain-coach read of a man who has just clocked at least two of the three available data points in this corridor and is, in real time, doing the small private accounting.
Poker face. Iris. Hold the line.
I lift my cone. I lick, with elaborate goalie-Omega seriousness, the small drip of salted caramel that has, in the past nine minutes, run halfway down the side of the waffle.
Coach Declan’s mouth, against every visible captain instinct of his own, twitches.
“Salted caramel,” he observes, evenly, “is the way you like it, O’Shea.”
“It is, Coach.”
“Good.”
The elevator doors slide closed between us.
The lift starts up.
I look at Jude.
Jude looks at me.
The small careful captain-and-goalie eye contact, in the small mirrored stainless-steel interior of a hotel elevator on a Saturday afternoon in a city I have, until twenty hours ago, never set foot in, says everything that needs to be said before either of us has, in fact, said any of it.
