Page 36 of Cross Check
"Go home," Theo said. "Talk to him. Use actual words, not whatever Finnish stoic bullshit you're doing where you suffer in silence and call it strength."
I went home, but I didn't talk to him. I went to the guest room and lay on the floor and stared at the ceiling.
17
KIERAN
I'd made a mistake, and the evidence was everywhere.
Nico's toothbrush was back in the other bathroom. His charger was back on the guest room nightstand. The hoodie that had lived on my desk chair for weeks was folded on the guest room bed. TheKalevalawas gone from my nightstand, and the empty space where it had been was an accusation I couldn't answer.
Three days of this. Three days of watching Nico retreat into the version of himself I'd met on day one, contained and silent, impeccably professional. He was sleeping on the floor again.
I'd done this. I'd saidbe careful at the facilityand he'd heardI'm ashamed of you,and I hadn't been fast enough to close the gap between what I meant and what he felt.
On the third day, practice went wrong.
Reeves called a full-contact scrimmage, first team versus second, game intensity. I settled into my crease with the familiarrituals—stretch, test the posts, calibrate. The whistle blew. Play started.
Nico was playing like a man with nothing to lose. Not reckless in a showy way—he wasn't throwing wild hits or taking stupid penalties. His recklessness was subtler and more dangerous. He was putting his body in places it didn't need to be, blocking shot lanes with his torso instead of his stick, finishing checks against guys who outweighed him by forty pounds. Staying in contact zones a beat too long, inviting the punishment instead of avoiding it.
I watched from sixty feet away and felt my hands tighten on my stick.
The play developed in the neutral zone. Nico carried the puck through the center lane. Bishop's territory. Bishop read the play, stepped up, planted his feet. Nico saw him and didn't change course. He lowered his shoulder and drove into Bishop's check.
The collision was enormous. Two bodies meeting at full speed, the sound of it carrying across the ice. Nico's stick flew from his hands. His helmet shifted. He hit the ice hard, his shoulder taking the impact, and slid into the boards with a force that made the glass rattle.
The whistle blew.
He didn't get up immediately. He lay on his side, one arm tucked against his chest, his face pressed to the ice. The trainer was already skating over. Guys were pulling up, forming the loose circle that happens when someone goes down hard.
I was moving before I'd decided to move. The crease, my crease, the space I'd occupied for seventeen years, the six-by-four sanctuary where nothing touched me and nothing got through, was behind me. I was skating toward the far boards, past the hash marks, past the face-off dots, past every boundary that separated my position from the rest of the ice.
Abbott caught my arm at the blue line. "Walsh. He's okay. The trainer's got him."
"Let go."
"Kieran." Abbott's grip tightened. His voice was low and urgent. "Don't. Not in front of the whole team."
I stopped. The rational part of my brain, my goalie brain, the one that calculated angles and controlled impulses, reasserted itself with the grinding reluctance of a machine being forced back into gear. Abbott was right. Skating across the ice to cradle an injured teammate was not something goalies did. Not unless they wanted every person in the building to know exactly why.
I went back to my crease. I watched the trainer help Nico to his feet. I watched him shake off the assistance and skate to the bench under his own power. I watched him sit down and press a towel to his face—the eyebrow cut had reopened—and stare at the ice with an expression that was more than just the pain.
My hands were shaking. They never shook. Not in overtime. Not on breakaways. Not in game sevens.
I found him in the training room after practice.
He was alone. Declan had finished with him and moved on to Bishop's eternal shoulder maintenance. Nico sat on the treatment table with a butterfly bandage above his eyebrow and an ice pack strapped to his shoulder. He looked up when I walked in. His face was a locked door, blank and controlled, the mask firmly in place.
I closed the door behind me.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"I'm here."
"You shouldn't be. If someone—"
"I don't care." I crossed the room and stood in front of him. The treatment table put us at the same height. His eyes, dark and guarded, the eyes of a man who'd been taught that vulnerabilitywas a weapon other people used against you, met mine. "I made a mistake."
