Page 24 of The Reckless Rookie

Except.

Except I don’t, actually. The ref’s already got his arm up; the guy’s going to the box; we get the power play. The only thing my fists change is that I go to the box instead, and I hand the league the instigator that voids my whole deal, and I put a farm and a woman and my own rebuilt life on the ice to answer a cheap shot that already answered itself. He wanted me to swing. That was the whole play. The hit wasn’t the game he was trying to turn. I was.

I have to.

I want to.

They’re not the same, and for the first time I catch the difference while there’s still time to do something about it, and God, it costs. It costs more than any hit I’ve ever taken. I let go of his jersey. I pull the glove back on. I skate backward toward my bench with my whole body howling that I’ve done something cowardly, that I’ve let a man cheap-shot me in my own building and skated away from it, that everything I am is built to answer this and I didn’t.

The building doesn’t cheer a man for the fight he doesn’t have. The noise curdles into something confused and disappointed, and I skate through it, and it feels like failing in front of the entire world.

I did the right thing. It feels exactly like being a coward. Nobody warns you they’re identical from the inside.

Ryan finds me on the bench.

He doesn’t say good job. Ryan would never insult me with good job. He sits down next to me close enough that our shoulders touch, and he watches the power play we got because I didn’t fight, and after a while he says, quiet, not looking at me:

“Nobody stopped you that time.”

“Yeah,” I say. My voice isn’t right. “Turns out it’s worse.”

“It is,” Ryan says. “For a while.” He taps my pad with his stick and goes over the boards for his shift, and that’s the most anyone’s going to say to me about the biggest thing I’ve ever not done.

We win. I don’t have my best game and we win anyway, and in the room after, Colt tells me I skate like a man who fell off a horse and Mack asks if the horse is okay, and I let them have it because it’s easier than the truth.

Chapter thirteen

Finn

There’s music coming out of the house on a cold Tuesday, and it’s what finally does me in.

Three weeks since the barn. Three weeks of the most disciplined I’ve ever been in my life, which is a sentence I never thought I’d say about anything that wasn’t hockey. She kissed me and then she stepped back and put a hand flat on my chest and read me the cost of it in that level voice, and I heard her, and I’ve spent every day since being exactly the man she asked me to be. Clean. Professional. South line’s holding. Good. Dying, the whole time.

The music’s not loud. Just a station leaking through the screen door, some old song with a guitar that sounds like it stayed up all night, a singer working in Spanish over the top of it. I’m on the porch step where I’ve got no business being at ten o’clock, nursing a coffee I don’t want, when I look through the window and she’s moving.

Not dancing. Just swaying, drying a plate, hip against the counter, and her feet are doing something under her she hasn’t given them permission to do. And I know how to read a body now, she taught me that, the whole ranch taught me that, and this one says she can dance. The way you can tell a guy can fight before he throws a punch. It’s in how she carries the weight. Easy. Certain. Something she’s good at and never uses on anybody.

What gets me isn’t that she can. It’s that it’s private. There’s a version of this woman with music in her that the ranch never sees, that Sebastian never got, that nobody gets, and it’s running loose in her kitchen at ten at night because she thinks no one’s watching.

“You dance,” I say from the door.

She doesn’t jump. She has never jumped. “I did. Before this place took every hour I had.”

“Show me.”

She turns and gives me the look she gives a green horse leaning on a fence to see if it’ll give. “You don’t dance.”

“I move for a living.”

“That is not the same thing, and you have never been more obvious that you know it isn’t.” But she sets the plate down. And something crosses her face, the same something that walked out to a porch in the sun and chose the dangerous thing on purpose, and she says, “Come here. Before I think better of it.”

I go.

She sets my right hand on her back, low, takes my left in hers, and the second she’s that close the whole plan I didn’t know I had, get through this, be smooth, don’t blow it, goes straight out of me, because she smells like the day and warm skin and she’s looking up at me steady, and I have never wanted to be good at anything the way I want to be good at this right now.

“Okay,” she says. “The only rule. You don’t lead.”

“I’m the…”