Page 45 of The Reckless Rookie

We close it out 3–1.

In the room after, Sully stops at my stall. He doesn’t sit. He looks at me a second with the face he saves for the rare thing, and all he says is, “Took you long enough to hear me,” and caps it with the ghost of a nod, and moves on down the line.

He said it to me that first night. Put one behind his goalie. I heard the words then. I heard them tonight.

Months to get from hearing a thing to being able to do it. That’s the real distance.

The room’s half-empty and the adrenaline’s gone to that flat tired place when Roman says it.

“That was close tonight.”

He’s across the room, getting undressed, not making eye contact, so I know this is more than just a casual thing. Roman’s the loudmouth of the two, voicing what Ryan might tell you privately. Faster to a verdict than Ryan. He’s usually right more than you’d want him to be.

“It went in,” I say.

“Not the goal.” He straightens up and now he is looking at me, and the few guys still dressing go quiet the way a room does when it decides to let two people have it out. “Second period. You dropped your gloves and took five strides at twenty-two in a playoff game. I watched you do it. Whole building watched you do it.”

“And I stopped.”

“You stopped.” He says it flat, like it proves his point, not mine.

“This time. Two feet from an ejection that ends our season. We’re one bad Finn night from going home, and we’re all supposed to trust a ranch fixed you because you buried one nice goal.”

And the heat comes up. Somebody in my own room calling me a liability with my jersey still on, and the old wiring lights up the same as it always does, measures the distance, wants to answer it the only way I ever knew how.

I put it down. Right there, standing in front of a man who’s half looking for me to swing so he can be proved right in front of everybody. I put it down, because he’s not entirely wrong, and you can’t fight your way out of a thing that’s true.

“You’re not wrong,” I say.

That lands harder than a shove would’ve. He wasn’t braced for it.

“I almost cost us tonight. I know how close. I was closer to it than you were.” I pull my other pad off, keep my hands busy, keep my voice level, the way I’ve learned to on a county road at midnight. “So don’t trust me. Watch the tape all series. Count how many times I go and how many I don’t, and decide on the number. That’s the only fair way to do it.” Roman looks at me a second longer, recalibrating, because he came in loaded for the old Finn and got somebody he doesn’t have a file on yet.

“Ryan’s down because he trusts you,” he says. Quieter. Not backing off, aiming truer. “I don’t have that yet.”

“Then I’ll earn it. Same as I did his.”

Ryan’s the one who ends it, from his own stall, not loud. “He walked himself down off a clean fight for me tonight, Rome. Nobody stopped him. I’ve seen a lot of guys who couldn’t do that with a gun to their head.” He pulls his shirt over his head.

“Watch the tape. He’s right. The number’ll tell you.”

Roman doesn’t say anything to that. He grabs his bag and he goes, and it isn’t settled, and it isn’t supposed to be. He gave me a fair fight with words and I didn’t hand him the wrong one back, and that’s the whole win in the room tonight, bigger than the one on the board.

The room takes me most of the way back tonight. Roman’s the rest of the distance, and I don’t get that one for free, and I find I don’t want it for free. A room that makes you earn it one skeptic at a time is worth more than one that hands it over.

I point the truck north near midnight with a playoff win in my chest, a teammate’s doubt riding shotgun, and the best game of my life behind me, and I want to tell her.

That’s the thing that finds me on the black road, past the point where the city lets go and the dark takes over. Not the goal. The wanting to tell her. I played the game of my life tonight, I finally became the guy on the ice that she’s been turning me into on the ground, and the person I want to hand it to is an hour north in a dark house, and I don’t know if I get to.

Because something’s been off since the phone rang in her kitchen. I felt it in the kiss at the door. A careful I hadn’t felt from her since the barn, a hand back on a wheel I thought we’d both let go of. She stepped out of my arms to take a call from a man who spent three years not learning her name, and she came back and told me nothing, and I let her, because I don’t have the standing to ask and we both know it.

I’ve got the best night of my season and a splinter I can’t pull out, and they’re both true at the same time, and the road doesn’t care which one I feel first.

I drive toward her anyway.

I always drive toward her.

I don’t know, tonight, coming off the best I’ve ever been, whether she’s still driving toward me.