Page 136 of Offside

Griffin made every save. He was too good not to. But the warmth was gone. The easy communication of two men who’d been reading each other since September, and for years in our twenties, the shorthand that meant I could throw a look across the ice and Griffin would already be moving. That was gone, replaced by something functional and cold, and the whole first line felt it. Theo recalibrated his positioning three times in twenty minutes. Cole was playing too tight, too careful, trying to compensate for a foundation that kept shifting underneath him.

Twenty minutes in, Calloway blew his whistle.

Not the short tweet that meant stop and regroup. The long, sustained blast that meant everyone to center ice. Right fucking now.

We gathered. I read the temperature of the group. The collective awareness of what was coming, the way thirty bodies arranged themselves slightly differently when a reckoning was incoming.

Calloway stood at the blue line. Arms crossed. Clipboard at his side. He had a way of reading a room that made every person in it feel purposefully included, and he used it now, his gaze moving across the group and stopping nowhere for too long but making contact with everyone.

“I’m going to say this once,” he said. His voice was conversational, which was somehow worse than if he’d raised it and just chewed us all out for sucking today. “Whatever is happening in this locker room, or outside this arena, I don’t know what it is and I’m not asking. That’s your business.” He paused. “But the moment it shows up on my ice, it becomes my business. And right now it is very much on my ice.” Another pause. “We are this close to a playoff berth. This fucking close!” He pinched his thumb and forefinger together with almost no space between them. “In this franchise’s first season. Do you understand what that means? Do you understand what that would mean for this city, for this organization, for every one of you?” He let that sit. “I don’t care if someone said something they can’t take back. I don’t care what happened off the ice. In here, you are professionals, and professionals do not bring their personal situations onto the ice and cost their teammates what we have worked this entire season to earn.” His gaze settled on me for a moment. Then Griffin. Then the group again. “We clear?”

The ice was quiet.

I felt the weight of thirty pairs of eyes moving between me and Griffin. I could feel the shape of what everyone in this group already suspected, whether they’d said it out loud or not.

“Clear,” I said.

A long beat. The kind that had a whole conversation in it. The acknowledgment that Calloway was right, that I knew it, that Griffin knew I knew it, that the gap between knowing something and fixing it was exactly the problem.

“Clear,” Griffin said.

Calloway nodded once. “Again. From the top.”

We ran it again. Better, technically. The machinery grinding instead of seizing. But I spent the rest of practice aware of Griffin the way I was aware of a bruise. Not looking directly at it but knowing exactly where it was.

When Calloway finally called it, I skated to the boards and stepped off the ice and started down the corridor toward the locker room.

I stood in the corridor for a moment, watching Griffin.

Then I kept walking.

Calloway’s office door was open. I knocked on the frame anyway.

“Close it,” Calloway said, without looking up from the clipboard.

I closed it behind me and sat in the chair across the desk without being asked. Calloway finished whatever he was reading, set the clipboard down, and watched me with the attention he gave things he’d already assessed and was waiting to confirm.

“What do you need,” Calloway said. It didn’t seem like a question.

I studied the desk for a moment. The printed schedule. The coffee cup. The same real cup Calloway had been carrying since the first day of training camp, never a paper one.

“Hypothetically,” I said.

Calloway’s expression didn’t change.

“If a player had a relationship with someone on staff. Not a subordinate. Someone in a different department entirely.” I kept my voice level. “What happens to her… To that person. Professionally.”

Calloway let it sit for a moment. The facility hummed around us. The distant sound of skates on the far rink, someone running a drill.

“There’s no rule against players dating staff here,” Calloway said. “Hypothetically… She was hired for her experience and work ethic. That doesn’t change because of who she’s seeing.” He said it the same simple way he did most things he felt didn’t require elaboration. “Nobody I respect is going to see it any other way.”

“And if someone does?”

“Then that’s my problem. Not yours and not hers.”

I nodded. I’d gotten what I came for and started to stand.

“Lindqvist.”