Page 66 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

Four to one.

I sit at the end of the bench for the rest of the second period and all of the third. Towel over my head. Mask on the shelf. I watch a twenty-three-year-old stop nineteen shots in a row. I’m relieved for him, and I hate that I’m relieved. Both are true.

After a four-one loss, the room is quiet and busy, and everyone is being extremely normal at me.

I sit in my stall with my chest protector still on, my head against the wood. I haven’t started taking the rest of my gear off when the boards creak. Beau sits down on the box beside me.

He doesn’t say anything.

He sits down in a towel, elbows on his knees, and looks at the floor. He stays there.

Two minutes. Five. The room empties around us in stages: the young guys first, then the trainers, then the equipment staff pulling the bins through. Somebody kills the stereo. The showers run and stop. Beau’s own gear is still in a heap in his stall.

At about twelve minutes, he picks a roll of tape off the floor, turns it over once in his hands, and then puts it back.

I would rather he shouted at me. I would rather anybody in this organization shouted at me. I’ve been waiting since the eleventh of March for one person to put it to me straight. Instead, a thirty-four-year-old man with four kids at home and a flight at seven in the morning is sitting on a wet box in a towel at eleven at night because he’s decided the useful thing is simply to stay with me.

He doesn’t ask me a question. Beau Tremblay has asked me direct questions for six years and taken whatever answers he got. He isn’t asking tonight. I understand why, and that’s unbearable.

Twice, I nearly say it.

Twice, I get as far as opening my mouth. Both times, the first sentence forms and I can already hear where it ends: this man loses a playoff spot, a captaincy, and a friend in the same breath. I shut my mouth.

At twenty minutes, he stands up.

“You know where I am,” he says.

That’s it. He goes and has his shower.

I get one pad off.

Emil comes over before I get the other one. He stands there with his phone in his pocket, his hands doing nothing.

“Hey. I just wanted to say sorry.”

“For what?”

“For going in.” He says it fast, the way he says everything, but he’s looking straight at me. “It’s horrible, right? It’s horrible when it’s a guy you like. I don’t want it that way. I want it because I took it off you, not because you had a bad night. I know that’s weird to say out loud, but I’ve been standing over there for ten minutes not saying it. That’s worse.”

There’s nothing at all to say to that.

“You stopped nineteen,” I say.

“Twenty-one, but who’s counting.” He knocks his knuckles once on the top of my stall and goes.

Priya is in the hallway outside the equipment room at half past ten.

She has her coat on, her bag on her shoulder.

“Two minutes.”

“Okay.”

“The league’s compliance office has asked the club for footage,” she says. “Full-period broadcast and both in-house angles for the first period of six games this season. It came in on Wednesday, and I’m telling everybody involved myself rather than letting it come out in the video room.”

The hallway has a wet floor sign on it and a fluorescent tube out at the far end.

“Which six?”