Page 195 of Wild Card 13

Everything moved.

The room breathed.

The game came rushing back in.

I stood there with my stick in my hand and my shoulder still burning where Alois had gripped it.

No one looked at me.

No one except Alois.

He sat back down in his stall and picked up his tape like nothing had happened, like he had not just reached into a bad decision before I could skate straight off a cliff.

Around me, the guys kept laughing, chirping Victor, pulling on gloves, slamming locker doors, reaching for helmets. Pregame swallowed everything because hockey always did. Give the room enough noise and it could digest almost any kind of danger.

I bent down slowly and picked up the roll of tape I must have dropped without noticing.

My fingers did not feel quite attached to my hand.

Alois said nothing.

The silence told me he knew exactly what he had stopped. And some part of me knew he had stopped it for her.

Coach barked again from the hallway, louder this time. “Let’s go, boys. Warmups.”

The room snapped into motion.

Helmets came off shelves. Gloves were tugged tighter. Sticks lifted from stalls. Skates hit rubber mats in heavy, uneven rhythm as guys started filing toward the door, all noise and shoulder checks and last-second chirps.

Marco passed Victor on his way out and tapped him lightly on the chest with the butt end of his stick. “Stay warm, amore. The press box is cold.”

“I hope you miss an empty net,” Victor muttered.

Marco looked wounded. “Cruel. Accurate, possibly, but cruel.”

Zee shoved his helmet on crooked and followed Jonah into the hallway still arguing about sodium. Liam moved past them both with the calm of a man who had played too many road games to waste energy before he had to. Milo disappeared behind him, smooth and quiet, already somewhere inside whatever version of himself showed up when the lights got bright.

Alois stayed seated.

I pretended to adjust my glove.

Alois pretended to care about the tape on his stick.

Neither of us was doing a very convincing job.

The last equipment assistant cleared the doorway with a crate of extra towels. The door swung half-shut behind him, leaving the locker room suddenly too quiet. Not silent. Never silent in an arena. The crowd still pressed through the walls. Music pulsed somewhere beyond concrete. Skates scraped in the hallway as the team lined up near the tunnel.

Alois stood first. He did not hurry. He picked up his helmet, tucked it under one arm, and looked at me.

I looked down at my stick. “You gonna tell me I’m an idiot?”

“No.” Alois’s face gave away absolutely nothing. “You know already.”

“Comforting.”

“It was not meant to be.”

I huffed once through my nose. The sound almost became a laugh, but there was still too much heat moving around beneath my skin. Too much leftover anger. Too much humiliation, too, now that I had enough distance from the moment to feel it.