Page 14 of The Grumpy Defenseman

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 off camera, 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.

“Tell him I’ll have them by the end of the day,” I said.

Sandra nodded and disappeared. I filed the interaction and moved on, because media day did not pause for organizational politics.

By hour two, I had processed eighteen players and the entire coaching staff. My back ached from holding angles. My eyes were starting to burn from the strobes. But the work was good. Consistent. The kind of portfolio that justified every dollar of my contract.

Then Sandra’s voice came from the hallway.

“McKinney, you’re up.”

And there it was. The main event. The final boss. The man, the myth, the stone face.

Breathe, Sam. You’ve photographed heads of state. You can handle one grumpy defenseman.

Evan walked in, and the room’s temperature dropped two degrees. Not literally, though, with him, you could never be sure. He moved to the mark on the floor with the efficiency of a man fulfilling an obligation he had agreed to under duress. Expression sealed. Eyes fixed on a point approximately three feet above my head, as if making direct eye contact with the camera might cause it to combust.

“Ready?” I asked.

“Yes.”

One word. A brick wall with a broken doorbell.

“Turn your shoulders slightly left.”

He did.

“Chin up half an inch.”

He did.

“Look at me.”

He did not.

I waited. The strobe hummed. The tether screen glowed. Somewhere behind me, Sandra was checking her watch, and farther down the hall, Sully was giving someone clipped instructions in the tone coaches used when efficiency mattered more than feelings. Media day always smelled like ozone and compressed patience.

I did not care.

Time was mine in this room. The subject looked where I pointed. And if the subject was going to fight me on it, the subject was going to lose.

His eyes found mine.

For one-quarter of a second, barely long enough to register as a conscious choice, something passed across his face. Not softness. Recognition. The acknowledgment that I had seen him with the boy and the stick, seen the person he kept locked behind all that carefully maintained stone, and he knew it.

He could not un-know it.