Page 152 of Knottingley Ever After
Clip two. A senior-tier defenseman pinches in. He releases the point shot. He gets a small redirect off the heel of his own forward at the top of the crease. I square. I read the deflection. I close the five-hole a small clean millisecond before the puck hits the post.
“Post,” Coach Declan says, in the small flat unimpressed tone of a man who would, in fact, prefer the goalie to have caught the puck cleanly but is, on the small inner accounting, going to take what was given. “Next.”
Clip three. Clip four. Clip five.
He walks the entire room, save by save, through fifteen specific stops that nobody at the post-game wrap on the bus was, in the small unhurried accounting of human nature, going to give me credit for.
“In the absence,” Coach Declan says, evenly, lowering the remote, “of the goalie performance you have just observed on this screen, the final score on tonight’s game was, on the small back-end statistical projection I ran during the bus ride, in fact fifteen to five. We would have lost in regulation by approximately ten goals. Thanks to the goalie performance you have just observed on this screen, we exited regulation tied at five-five, against a senior-tier roster that has played for thenational title four years running and includes four players who are, on the publicly accessible Bauer scouting reports, going to be in the Stanley Cup draft pool inside the next eighteen months.”
“So,” Brennan says, slow now, the small wounded recalibration of a man who has just received a piece of professional information he did not have ten seconds ago. “We lost. By two.”
“We lost,” Coach Declan agrees, “by two. In overtime. After exhausting them and being structurally exhausted, in turn, by them, in fact, exhausting our goalie. The two-goal margin in overtime is, on the small dry math, the goal-differential that the rest of the roster, gentlemen, failed to provide for her. Captain Kavanagh, winger Santori, and defenseman Bellerose, between them, in fact had to bridge a measurable section of the work that was structurally assigned to the rest of you for the duration of regulation. You can, on the replay, observe the gap. I will, in the interest of pacing, not narrate the gap clip by clip. The gap is, on the public record of this television, visible.”
Sector one stiffens.
“Okay,” Hargrove says, slowly, his back ramrod straight on his bench, the small careful tone of an Alpha about to commit, in front of a senior-tier coach, to a position he is, in fact, professionally too afraid to commit to but is too embarrassed not to. “You are, with respect, playing favorites, Coach.”
“Oh.” Coach Declan’s eyebrow does the small dry millimeter. “Am I.”
“Yes.”
“Why.”
Hargrove’s mouth opens. He clamps it back shut. The small wounded silence of a man who has, in fact, started a sentence without budgeting the second half of it.
Voss does it for him.
Voss, on the bench beside Hargrove, lifts his head. The small dry bored bored-bored sneer of a man who has, in the small private register of his own brain, been waiting all season to deploy the sentence in question and has, in this exact moment, decided that the post-OT-loss locker room is, in fact, the room to deploy it.
“Oh, come on,” Voss says. “Everyone knows it. You dated a goalie. You have a small soft spot for female Omegas in the field. We have all read the same archive. Frankly, Coach, it is touching.”
Petrov, two bodies down from Voss, mutters — not under his breath, exactly, but in the small unmistakable carry of a man who, on the small inner accounting of his own dark sense of humor, genuinely thinks the thing he is about to say is, in fact, funny:
“Yeah. And look how that one turned out. She died.”
The locker room stops breathing.
Not figuratively. The fifteen-Alpha-and-one-Omega room of biological respiratory systems stops, in unison, breathing for the small precise count of two seconds.
I, on the bench, with my exit-strategy duffel still in my hand, turn my head, very slowly, toward Coach Declan O’Rourke.
He is going to say something.
He is going to. Say. Something.
Coach Declan says nothing.
His face has gone the precise unreadable register of a man whose entire body has, on the small inner accounting of the past four seconds, gone through approximately fourteen distinct grief states without permitting any of them visible expression. His shoulders, against the small surgical professional control he has maintained in this locker room for the past nine minutes, are doing the small unmistakable thing of holding very, very still.
I look at him. He looks at me. The small grey-green of his eyes meets the small storm-grey of mine across the locker room.
Coach.
Coach, you are not going to say anything.
Why are you not going to say anything.
“Coach,” I say, slow, very even, my voice the precise low pitch of a goalie reading the shoulder of a shooter coming in on the high slot. “You ain’t. Going. To say anything.”
