Page 6 of The Grumpy Defenseman
“You ready?”
“No.”
Her mouth nearly twitched. “Honesty. That’s new.”
I stopped at the boards. The plexiglass between us was scratched and cloudy near the bottom from years of puck impacts. She stood on the other side with her arms loose at her sides and none of the tension I had seen in PR handlers and the endless procession of people who wanted something from me and could not hide it.
She did not want something from me. Not in the usual way.
That was the unsettling part.
“How long were you watching?” I asked.
“Long enough.”
“You didn’t shoot.”
“No.”
I waited for an explanation. She did not offer one. Just held the silence likeshe owned it.
“The session,” I said. “What do you need from me?”
“Skate,” she said. “Like you were skating before you knew I was here. Forget I’m in the building.”
“That’s not how this works.”
“It is today.”
She picked up her camera, adjusted something on the body without looking at it, and moved along the boards toward the far end. Giving me space. Not crowding. Not directing. Just positioning herself and waiting.
I should have objected. Should have insisted on the scripted version: stand here, hold this pose. That was the transaction. I gave them the images they wanted, and they left me alone.
Instead, I pushed off the boards and started skating.
Laps first. The rhythm I had carved into my nervous system since childhood: edges finding their grooves, the ice responding to every adjustment in weight and pressure. Iheard the shutter clicking somewhere in my periphery, faint and steady, but quieter than I expected. She was not firing in bursts the way most photographers did, spraying frames like they were looking for a needle in a haystack. She was waiting. Taking single shots. Patient.
I moved into puck work. Handling drills: figure eights around the face-off circles, crossovers with the puck on my forehand, then switching hands entirely. The kind of close-quarters work that built the muscle memory needed to protect the puck in traffic, when two-hundred-pound forwards were trying to strip it, and the only things between you and a turnover were steady hands and balance.
I forgot about her.
Not all at once. In pieces. First, the camera’s awareness faded. Then everything except the ice and the puck dissolved into the background hum of the refrigeration system, and I was alone the way I had been alone since I was four years old on a rink inClearfield while my father made the surface new again.
When I finally stopped, chest heaving and stick resting across my thighs, I found her at the boards again. Closer this time. She had moved without me noticing.
Her camera was down. She was looking at me with that same expression from before, the one I could not file into any category I understood.
“Your defensive positioning,” she said. “When you run the breakout drill. You build a wall with your body before you even touch the puck. Every angle covered. Every lane closed. It’s like watching someone construct a fortress in real time.”
I stared at her.
“The question is,” she continued, her voice dropping into something softer, “whether you’re keeping people out or keeping yourself in.”
The words hit the ice between us and did not bounce. They just sat there, absorbing cold, waiting for a response I did not have.
Behind me, the arena door banged open, and two familiar voices spilled into the silence like water into a crack.
“McKinney!” Brick’s voice ricocheted off the rafters. “The hell are you doing here at…” He spotted Samantha. The grin went nuclear. “Oh. Hello again.”
