Page 139 of Slashed Bonds

Niko’s door, its two inches. She was on her side, facing the wall, with the dog against her spine and one hand under her cheek, and her breathing was the long, slow kind, the kind that means the body’s finally been allowed to stop guarding.

Her face was the color of the sheet. I stood there for eleven seconds. I counted.

And fuck, I’m excited.

Dangerously. That’s the word I’d use if anyone asked, and nobody will, because nobody asks me things at two in the morning. I don’t do nerves. Not before games, not before fights, not before the parking lot in Kingsmere. Nerves are a thing that happens to men who haven’t decided yet.

But this is different.

Seven hours from now we walk into Ashford’s building, in front of whoever Maddie’s eleven seconds has summoned, and the public gets to look at us for the first time in four years. Not at clips. At us. At whether the villains are worth the ticket.

I don’t know how it goes down. That’s the excitement. I haven’t not known the outcome of something in a long time.

I close my eyes and lean back against the brick.

And I let myself remember the thrill.

Before the drugs. Before the high, before the need to have something in my system to get through a Tuesday, before the aftermath that follows the high like a bill. Before all that, there was a boy of fifteen on a sheet in a rink with a leak over section C, and the boy would line up a forward coming down the wall, and he’d feel the whole game go quiet.

Not silent. Quiet. The crowd dropped away. The bench dropped away. There was a man with a puck and a lane he wanted, and there was me, and there was the exact spot on the ice where the two of us would meet, and I’d be standing on it a half second before he arrived.

The sound a body makes when it goes into the boards at speed. The way the glass shivers. The way the forward looks up from the ice afterward with his whole understanding of the game rearranged.

That was the drug. The first one. Everything after was a substitute.

The last time I felt it clean was two seasons ago. Ashford’s building. Their forward, the one with the father on a board, coming down my wall with his head down and the puck on his forehand and a step on Okonkwo.

I didn’t move toward him. I never do. I moved to the spot.

Three strides to the boards at the hash marks, stick flat, hips square, and I was standing there when he arrived, and he arrived with everything he had, because he’d been told his whole life that speed solves things.

Speed doesn’t solve a wall.

He went into me and the boards at the same time, and the glass behind us shivered in its frame, and when he hit the ice his head went back a quarter inch too far and I knew, I knew before the trainer got there, that he’d be in a brace and I’d be in a letter.

Clean. The tape shows it clean. Shoulder to shoulder, feet on the ice, no elbow, no leaving my skates. The committee watched the tape and suspended me anyway, because a man on a board had a son on a stretcher and needed somebody’s name on a page.

I don’t regret the hit. I regret that it’s the last one I felt all the way through, before the quiet in my head started needing help to arrive.

And tomorrow, I’m going to stand in front of that same man’s seat for sixty minutes.

Maybe the quiet comes back. Maybe that’s why I’m excited.

Cash’s page four says Halvard wants the outside and I take the wall away first. Page five says Mori’s on the left wing ahead of my pair and I put the puck up the boards to her the instant it turns over, because she’ll already be moving, because she reads the turnover before the man who caused it does.

Nine for nine on Sunday. I believe the page.

What the page doesn’t say is what I’ll do if someone on Ashford puts a hand on her the way Teller did. There’s no page for that. Cash didn’t write one because Cash knows there’s nothing to write.

I lift my hand and look at it in the dark.

Ink to the knuckles. Ink up the forearm, over the elbow, across the shoulder and down the back and around the ribs. I’m wondering whether I need another one, which is a funny thing to wonder, since I don’t have much skin left that isn’t spoken for.

None of us do. Cash is covered from the collar down. Niko’s got more ink than freckles, and he’s got a lot of freckles.

But if we went to Vicious Ink, Dox would find a spot. He always finds a spot. He’s found spots on me I didn’t know I had.

And I’m wondering whether Mori would want one. With us.