Chapter 15: What He Didn't Say

We won the next game too.

Back home, the city noticed. There was a piece in the sports section, a short one, four paragraphs, about the Vipers' new offensive chemistry, the "unlikely pairing" of their captain and their volatile new acquisition. The writer called us complementary. He used the phrase "symbiotic danger," which I read three times on my phone in the elevator up to my apartment and then put away.

The team felt different after the road trip. Harder to explain. Something had settled, the way a locker room settles when it believes in itself — a quality of ease, of shared confidence, that hadn't been there before. They included me now without the qualifier. No more sidelong glances at Jax first to see if it was permitted. I was a Viper. The wins had made it official.

Reyes caught up to me after practice on a Tuesday, bouncing on his skates the way he did when he was working up to something.

"Hey," he said. "Can I ask you something?"

"Depends on what it is."

"That backhand redirect you did in the second period. Detroit. I've been trying to work out the body mechanics of it. The way you opened your hips before the puck even got to you." He demonstrated badly, his stick going the wrong way. "How far in advance are you reading the play?"

I looked at him. He was genuinely asking. Not trying to impress me, not posturing. Just a twenty-two-year-old who wanted to be better and had decided I was worth asking.

I showed him. We stayed on the ice for an extra forty minutes, which we weren't supposed to do, and I broke down the read — where your eyes need to be, what you're actually tracking, how to train yourself to feel the geometry of the play rather than just see it. He was quick. He made the adjustment on the third try.

"That's it," I said.

He grinned, and the grin was so uncomplicated and genuine that something in me ached for it. I had not been twenty-two in a long time, even when I was twenty-two.

"Jax said you'd teach me that," Reyes said, pulling off his helmet.

I went still on my skates. "What?"

"Yeah, like a week ago. I asked him about the read and he said—" Reyes shrugged, casual, already moving toward the tunnel. "He said to ask you. That you were better at explaining it than him."

He skated off the ice, already chattering at someone else, not seeing the effect of what he'd said.

I stood at the blue line for a moment. The ice was empty. My breath came in slow white plumes.

Jax had sent him to me. A week ago. Before the road trip, before Detroit, before the hotel room and the muscle rub and the shoulder that had hurt exactly where predicted. He had already been — not managing me. Something else. Deploying me, maybe. Giving me something real to offer the team.

I thought about what he'd said on the bus about Reyes watching me. The way he'd said you should do it like it was obvious, like there was no question I was capable of it.

I stepped off the ice and I stood in the tunnel for a moment with my stick in my hands and I tried to locate my anger, because anger was the thing I was supposed to feel. The clean, useful anger that kept everything in its correct position.

I found it. But it was getting harder to hold.

—————————————-

Reyes touched my arm after the Thursday practice.

It was nothing. A brief contact, forearm to forearm, leaning in to say something over the noise of the locker room, something stupid about a video game, I think, or a bet he'd made with the defensemen. I barely registered it. I was toweling off my hair and half-listening and thinking about the power play adjustments Jax had outlined that morning.

What I registered was the silence that followed.

Not a full silence. The locker room was still loud. But there was a particular quality to the air that I'd learned to read the way you learn to read ice — certain textures mean certain things, and the texture of this silence had a source.

I looked up without meaning to. Found him immediately, the way I always found him in a room now. Reflex. Problem.

Jax was at his locker, back to us, apparently absorbed in something in his bag. He was not absorbed in his bag. The set of his shoulders was the specific set that meant he was paying absolute attention to something he was pretending to ignore.

I stepped back from Reyes without thinking. Half an inch. Nothing visible. But I did it.

I hated that I did it.

Reyes finished whatever he was saying, laughed at his own punchline, and wandered off to torture someone else. I kept my eyes forward and my face neutral and I did not look at Jax again for the rest of the session.

Two days later, I came in for the morning skate and found my locker had been moved.

It had been next to Reyes, in the middle section of the room, surrounded by the younger players who were louder and less territorial. Now it was at the end of the row.

Next to Jax's.

I stood in front of it for a moment. My nameplate, freshly affixed. My gear hung exactly as I'd arranged it, moved without disturbance. Someone, an equipment manager, following orders, had done this carefully. Respectfully, even.

I sat down on the bench and began pulling on my gear. Jax came in four minutes later. He went to his locker without looking at me, began his own pre-skate routine with the systematic efficiency I now recognized as a kind of ritual, each action in a specific order.

"My locker moved," I said, keeping my voice neutral.

"Equipment staff reconfigures periodically," he said. "Efficiency thing. Lines tend to cluster better when the players are proximate."

It was such a smooth, complete lie that I almost admired it.

"Jax."

He looked at me, finally. His eyes were doing the thing where they told me nothing. "You're on my line. It makes sense for you to be adjacent."

"That's what this is."

"That's what this is."

I held his gaze for a moment. He held mine back with absolute, infuriating steadiness. There was nothing I could point to. Nothing I could call out that wouldn't sound paranoid or presumptuous. He had been perfectly, surgically deniable.

"Fine," I said.

He nodded once and turned back to his gear.

I sat with my shoulder against his and laced up my skates and tried to decide if being owned by someone counted as being protected by them, or if those were just two different words for the same imprisonment.

I didn't reach a verdict. I went out and skated. But I thought about it for a long time.