Page 87 of Blind Spot
“You’ll be ready,” he said.
“I’ve got one job tonight.”
“You’ve got a few. Cross likes it when you back-check.”
“One real job.”
“When you score,” he said, “you go to center ice. I’ll meet you there. I’ll leap over the boards if I need to. Meet me. Can you do that?”
“Yeah,” I said, into his collarbone.
***
I tried to be normal in the locker room, and that lasted about ninety seconds.
Nobody warns you about the week after coming out. They don’t tell you it’s mostly just another week. By two days later, we’d slid down everybody’s feed.
Four days out, a beat writer asked me about a power play instead of my boyfriend, and I knew we were old news.
”—because people think Rook’s quiet,“ I told Trier while he was lacing a skate. “That’s the costume. At home, the man delivers speeches. He composed a pre-eulogy for the basil in October. He said the world was shedding tears because it wouldn’t survive. When it lived, he apologized to it. He’s the most talkative man in North America, and he’s hidden it from all of you for a decade—“
“Varga, you’ve been with him for five years.”
I ignored the attempt at correction. ”—and the coffee thing, the coffee thing kills me. He has a drip machine that cost as much as a snowmobile.”
Trier tossed a roll of tape at my chest. “You’re boring now,” he said fondly. “It’s like a Hallmark movie. I liked you better when you two fought about the thermostat.”
“You’re just jealous that your cat doesn’t cuddle as well as Rook does.”
“My cat is extremely affectionate.”
“Your cat tolerates you for food. My man builds me a runway to my dreams and makes chowder from scratch. There’s a difference, Trier.”
Two stalls down, Rafe had his head bent over his laces, and the corner of his mouth was doing the silent-laugh. Across the room, Heath grinned into his elbow pad.
Cross, taping his stick, said without looking up, “If you score tonight, I will personally clear the ice for you. Now sit down.”
I sat. He knew.
I had one job.
I didn’t score in the first period. Didn’t score in the second either, but Rafe did. My failure was eating me alive.
“It’s coming,” Rook said to me, just before the third period.
“What is?”
“Yours.” He didn’t look at me. He looked at the ice. “You’re pressing too hard. You’re trying to score every time you get the puck. Let the right one come.” He went over the wall for the face-off. We were down 3-2.
We tied the score halfway through the period. Rafe won a race to a dead puck in the corner. He cleared it to the front of their net. I got a stick on it, and it bounced off Heath’s skate into their goal. He’d planted himself where nobody could move him, as always.
We only had two minutes left. The two teams traded the puck up and down the sheet like neither one could afford to be the team that blinked.
Rook retrieved a puck in our corner and sent it back down the ice. I was almost a full minute into my shift. My lungs were begging for a rest, but Markel didn’t pull me off. He knew what was supposed to happen, too.
Their d-man tried to flip the puck out of their zone, and Cross knocked it down with his stick. That kept it near their goal, and the entire building sounded as if it were holding its breath.
Cross took one step to drag a winger toward him, and the instant the lane bent, he sent the puck down to me on the half-wall, flat and hard, tape to tape.
