Page 18 of Slashed Bonds

That last one gets me every time.

Twenty-three years old and that smell still works on me like a hand at the back of my neck.

Knox settles under the bench in the corner with his stick toy, where he’ll stay without being told, watching the door instead of the game because he’s never once cared who wins.

I lace up.

Left skate, right skate, three wraps and a knot, the same order since I was six. My hands know it so completely that I can watch the ice while they work, tracking the pickup guys taking warm-up laps and mapping their tells before the puck ever drops.

The tall one favors his left. The one in the gray jersey doesn’t check his shoulder before he turns. Kessler, the big Alpha with the shaved head, is the best skater out there and knows it, which is a weakness disguised as a strength.

Then I peel the cap off a makeup wipe and take the red off my mouth.

I don’t play in makeup.

Never have. The face I use to walk through the world stays in the bag with my phone and my keys, and what steps onto the ice is bare, scrubbed, and about eleven years old in the eyes.

People comment. I hate that they comment.

I step through the gate, and the cold comes up through my blades, into my ankles, up my shins.

And every thought in my head goes quiet.

That’s the thing I could never explain to a therapist without sounding unwell. Hockey is the only room where my brain stops narrating. The nightmares stop. The phantom ache at my nape stops. The list of everyone who owes me stops.

There’s the puck, and the eleven other bodies, and geometry.

That’s all there is.

Kessler skates past me on his way to center and inhales, deliberately, loud enough to be a statement.

“That’s a rejected one,” he says to his winger, delighted. “Smell that? Like somebody left a wedding cake in a snowbank.”

The winger laughs.

My scent turns before I can stop it, sweetness draining out, ozone and cold metal rising in its place. That’s my tell and I hate having one, so I file his face where I keep the others and glide to the dot.

Say it again after the second period.

The whistle goes.

I win the draw clean — hands low, blade flat, weight through my inside edge — and it’s back to Ruiz on the point before Kessler’s stick finishes its arc. He swears. Good. Angry centers cheat forward.

First shift, I don’t shoot. I don’t even try.

I observe them.

Gray jersey turns his head at the blue line. The tall one crosses over twice before he accelerates, which costs him a stride and a half. Kessler wants the puck on his forehand so badly that he’ll skate himself out of a lane to get it there.

Second shift, I take the puck off the wall and hold it under my feet, drawing two of them into me, and slip it between Kessler’s skates to Tremblay cutting through the slot.

He fans on it.

Noted. Building blocks.

The mill-league boys score twice in eight minutes, because four drunk Alphas playing downhill is a genuine problem, and the bench chirp starts almost immediately.

“Hey. Omega.”