Page 13 of The Grumpy Defenseman
Me: Soon.
Lena: That’s what you said last week. I’m starting to think you don’t love us anymore.
Me: I’ll bring coffee.
Lena: Forgiven.
I pocketed the phone and got in the truck. The engine turned over. The world narrowed back down to the things I could control: training schedule, contract negotiations, the next decadeof my life.
I pulled out of the lot and did not look back at the building.
But I could still hear her laugh. Warm, carrying across a gymnasium like it had been designed to find the one person who was not ready to hear it.
Samantha
Media day was my Olympics.
Not in scale. Not even close. But in the high-pressure, there-is-no-second-take intensity that made my hands go steady, and the rest of the world dissolved into background hum. Some people meditated. Some people ran. I stood behind a camera in a room full of people who needed me to be brilliant, and I was.
I had set up the lighting rig in under three minutes: two strobes, one reflector, and thesoft gold gel I carried for exactly this situation. The backdrop was standard-issue team branding, but I had shifted it six inches to the left so the logo sat in the upper third instead of dead center, transforming the composition from corporate headshot into something with visual weight.
Details. My entire career was built on details no one asked for but everyone noticed.
I moved on.
“Cole,” Sandra said, materializing at my elbow with the relieved expression of a woman who had been drowning and just spotted a lifeboat. “Thank God. We’re twenty minutes behind.”
“Not anymore.”
She blinked. “You haven’t even…”
“Send them in.”
And then I worked.
Not frantic. The opposite. I moved players through the setup with the kind of efficiency that only came from having done this a hundred times in a hundred cities andknowing, with bone-deep certainty, that the difference between a usable image and a great one was about four seconds of patience and one perfectly timed sentence.
Brick came first. Of course he did.
“Make me look good, Cole.”
“You do that yourself.”
He grinned. I caught it. The light hit his cheekbones at exactly the angle I had designed the rig to produce, and the image on my tether screen looked like it belonged on a billboard. One take.
Next.
Tommy Kowalski came through loose and easy until I handed him a stick, and his posture sharpened, like the body could joke, but the hands still belonged to a pro. Jake Morrison tried to give me a smirk instead of a usable expression. I asked who he had been chirping in the hallway and caught the real one before he could put the mask back on. Cross defaulted to swagger. Hendricks gave me exactly one neutral look, then, after Brick barked something from offcamera, the corner of his mouth twitched hard enough to count as personality.
Two defensive partners started jawing at each other between takes, shoulder-checking and muttering under their breath, and I let it run. The best images on media day were never the posed ones. They were the half-second where irritation and affection showed up in the same frame.
Media day told you who a team was almost as fast as a losing streak did. The Stampede room ran on veteran gravity and the kind of locker-room affection that would never call itself affection. Mack steadied the edges. The younger guys took their cues from the veterans and pretended they were not doing it.
Silas Vane drifted through around the halfway mark, observing with the quiet intensity I was beginning to file under unsettling but predictable. He watched me direct a group of forwards into a three-quarter angle and murmured something to Sandra that I could not catch.
Sandra approached me during a transition. “Vane says the selections from the community event are strong. He wants to see your edit before it goes upstairs.”
That was new. Silas inserting himself into the approval chain. Not alarming, but notable.
