Page 13 of Pucking Inevitable: Bonus Scene

He also looks, as he always looks, like he is about thirty seconds from committing a felony against whoever is standing across from him.

Same energy, different context.

But still with the same shadows he loves surrounding him like a cloak.

I should clarify that I did not become a hockey person.

I want to be honest about this. I grew up watching my brother play and I understand the game and I can follow the flow of it with more intelligence than most people in this rink but I am not, at my core, a hockey person. I am a person who is deeply and specifically invested in one player on this ice, which is a different thing.

What I am, genuinely, is a person who has sat in these stands long enough to know the other kind of women who come to these games.

I spot them the way I always spot them. They started gathering in the row behind the penalty box about forty minutes before warm-ups, which is where I noticed them last time and the time before that. Four of them tonight. Nice seats. Not their first rodeo. They came with purpose, which I respect on a purely strategic level even while I find it deeply irritating.

They are, objectively, beautiful.

They are also watching Xaden with the focused attention of women who have done their research.

I know this because I was once a woman who sat in a rink and watched another player years ago with the focused attention of someone who had done her research, and I know what that looks like from the outside now, and I also know something they don't, which is how completely and utterly pointless it is.

Xaden doesn’t notice them.

This is not an exaggeration and it’s not something I tell myself to feel better. It is a fact I have observed and verified over multiple seasons in multiple arenas. I have watched women do things in his eye line that would have had most men's heads turning, and he’s looked through them the way you look through glass. Not because he is performing loyalty for my benefit, he does this in cities where I’m not present. I have it on good authority from both Cas and Carnage and once, memorably, from Harper who delivered the information with a tone that suggested she found it both irritating and she was reluctant to admit it.

He’s simply not interested.

He was never interested in the performance of things. He wants the specific thing or he wants nothing, and the specific thing is currently sitting in the third row, in a jersey with his name on the back, holding his daughter, so.

That said.

There is one of them, blonde, seats herself closest to the glass, turns her head at exactly the angle that maximizes the profile, who has clearly decided this is the game where she cracks the code. She has been watching him in warm-ups with the intensity of a thesis defense. Every time he comes near the boards she leans forward.

Em notices her before I do, which says something.

“Why does that lady keep looking at Daddy?” she asks.

“She likes hockey,” I say.

“She's not looking at the hockey,” Em says. “She's looking at my Daddy.”

Three years old.

“People like watching your daddy play,” I tell her. “He's the best player on the ice.”

Em considers this with the gravity of someone reviewing evidence.

“She should get her own daddy to watch,” she says, and turns back to the ice.

I press my lips together very firmly.

The first period is exactly what it always is, which is Xaden Devlin playing hockey the way he does everything else, with complete, focused, barely contained intensity that makes every other person on the ice look like they are operating at three-quarter speed.

I have watched him play a lot of games. I know the shape of it by now. I know the shift in his shoulders when he's located a gap that doesn't exist yet but will in approximately four seconds. I know the way he holds his stick differently when he's about to do something the other team's defence has not predicted. I know the sound the crowd makes when he has the puck and they have decided something is about to happen, which is a different sound from any other crowd sound, a specific frequency of held breath.

Em knows it too.

She’s on her feet for most of the first period, which is not unusual, she stands up every time Xaden has the puck and she doesn’t sit back down until he either scores or loses possession, and she narrates the whole thing in a running commentary that the people around us have come to accept as part of the game day experience.

“He's going, Mama. He's going—-oh, Daddy—-no, the man with the—go, Daddy, go⁠—”