Page 97 of Knottingley Ever After
Then the rest of them get to us.
Matteo tackles me into the back of the net the way I knew he would the second the buzzer went, Rémi catches my arm to keep me upright before Matteo can take both of us all the way to theice, Petrov and Linder and Hargrove pile on around the pile, and the post-game scrum becomes the noisy laughing knot of bodies it always becomes when a team has actually executed the thing it was supposed to execute.
From inside the pile, somewhere near my left ear, Matteo says, breathless and grinning, “YOU MAGNIFICENT PINK BASTARD.”
Tactical disaster. Going to be a lot of these now.
I think I am going to live.
It takes me a full fifteen minutes to extract myself.
Handshake line with Saint Aldwin. The post-game salute to the home crowd, which the Omega section refuses to let us cut short. A brief on-ice interview I am not yet eligible to do, which Jude handles with the practiced ease of a captain who has done six of them. A coach-handshake at the bench, Coach Whitlock’s congratulations the precise temperature of a fridge that has not been plugged in, Coach Marek’s cooler than that.
And then, finally, the corridor.
My borrowed practice bag over my shoulder. The pads tipped down. The cage of the mask flipped up because I am too tired and too sweaty to keep it shut. I am halfway down the rubber-matted hall toward the girls’ locker room — the one tiny converted utility closet they have given me at the back of the visitors’ wing for the dignity of changing alone — when I see him.
Coach Declan is standing at the corner. Arms crossed. Black jacket. Black jeans. The professional face I have, for two weeks now, been the only person in the building able to read through.
My stride slows by a beat. The pre-emptive brace of a woman who has spent two weeks taking her cues from him strictly inside the visible architecture of practice, by mutual unspoken treaty.
He nods at me.
Once. Small. The fractional dip of his chin he has used since I was thirteen years old to tell me the work I had just done was sufficient.
“O’Shea.”
“Coach.”
“See you tomorrow morning. Six sharp. We have training scheduled.”
That is it.
That is the whole sentence. He has not, in the past nineteen minutes since I robbed Saint Aldwin’s star forward in overtime on the first night of the season, said one single word about the actual hockey I just played. No nod at the glove save. No reference to the eleven-stop streak. No professional acknowledgement, of any kind, that the goalie he personally signed off on importing across an ocean has, in her first official game, delivered on the entire ten-year project I now know lives behind his eyes.
You magnificent immovable bastard.
Twice, now. Two for two.
And the rest of me — the very tired, sweaty, post-game version of me that has been running on adrenaline and a single banana since pre-game warmups — does, on the inside, the small humiliating thing it has been doing since I was sixteen years old in his Yorkshire rink.
It wants more.
Not from anyone. From him. Specifically.
It wants thegood job, O’Sheathat lands in your chest like a brick of warmth. It wants the dry one-line postgame text he used to send my Nokia at midnight after a road game when I was a junior. Any single piece of evidence — a sentence, a flick of the eye, a hand on the back of my shoulder — that the man who taught me how to read an angle has registered that the angles tonight were, frankly, perfect.
He gives me none of it.
I hate, in equal proportions, that he has held it back and that I have noticed he has held it back.
“Six sharp,” I confirm, in the level voice of a woman who is, by surface measure, fine.
“Good.”
That is it. He turns. He walks down the corridor in his unhurried granite step, and the cedar-and-snow trace of him follows him, and I stand in the hall with my bag over my shoulder and a heart in my chest that has, very embarrassingly, just done the precise small fall it has been refusing to do for five years.
I push through the door of the girls’ locker room.
