Page 14 of The Grumpy Defenseman
“Tell him I’ll have them by the end of the day,” I said.
Sandra nodded and disappeared. I filed the interaction and moved on, because media day did not pause for organizational politics.
By hour two, I had processed eighteen players and the entire coaching staff. My back ached from holding angles. My eyes were starting to burn from the strobes. But the work was good. Consistent. The kind of portfolio that justified every dollar of my contract.
Then Sandra’s voice came from the hallway.
“McKinney,you’re up.”
And there it was. The main event. The final boss. The man, the myth, the stone face.
Breathe, Sam. You’ve photographed heads of state. You can handle one grumpy defenseman.
Evan walked in, and the room’s temperature dropped two degrees. Not literally, though, with him, you could never be sure. He moved to the mark on the floor with the efficiency of a man fulfilling an obligation he had agreed to under duress. Expression sealed. Eyes fixed on a point approximately three feet above my head, as if making direct eye contact with the camera might cause it to combust.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Yes.”
One word. A brick wall with a broken doorbell.
“Turn your shoulders slightly left.”
He did.
“Chin up half an inch.”
He did.
“Look at me.”
He did not.
I waited. The strobe hummed. The tether screen glowed. Somewhere behind me, Sandra was checking her watch, and farther down the hall, Sully was giving someone clipped instructions in the tone coaches used when efficiency mattered more than feelings. Media day always smelled like ozone and compressed patience.
I did not care.
Time was mine in this room. The subject looked where I pointed. And if the subject was going to fight me on it, the subject was going to lose.
His eyes found mine.
For one-quarter of a second, barely long enough to register as a conscious choice, something passed across his face. Not softness. Recognition. The acknowledgment that I had seen him with the boy and the stick, seen the person he kept locked behind all that carefully maintained stone, and he knew it.
He could not un-know it.
My shutterclicked.
I did not need to check the screen. I felt it. The way you feel a perfect exposure before you see it: a rightness in the timing. The image was there. Real. Alive.
“Got it,” I said. “You’re done.”
He stepped off the mark without a word and started toward the door. Then, so briefly, I might have imagined it, he glanced back. Not at the setup. At me.
One look. Quick and unguarded, like a door opening and closing in the same breath.
Then he was gone, and the room seemed lighter in his absence.
I finished the last four players on autopilot. Good work, but my best frame was already in the camera. The one I had taken when Evan McKinney looked at me like I was a question he had not finished answering.
