Page 54 of Power Play

Then he was back on the bench, and they gave him a shift, and he played out the rest of it like nothing had happened, and the Sidewinders won three to one.

Paige’s phone lit in her hand with four minutes left on the clock.

“Maren,” she said. “He’s fine. Cut inside the mouth, spectacular eye tomorrow, nothing else in it. She made him do every test twice.” She read the rest and her mouth went sideways. “She says he was extremely unpleasant about it.”

I put both hands over my face and kept them there until I could breathe through my nose again.

“You went white,” Paige said. “I’m not going to pretend I didn’t see it. I’m also not going to do one single thing with it.”

Maren came up for me before the horn. I said no twice. She didn’t appear to hear either one. She walked me through a door with a badge reader on it, said a few words to the man standing inside it, and took me down a concrete hallway that smelled of rubber and cold. She parked me against a wall short of the locker room door. “Stand here, don’t apologize to anybody, you are with me.”

The horn went off overhead, and a minute later they came off the ice in a group. Men that size in skates on rubber matting made a low rolling thunder that carried through the cinder block at my back. The corridor filled with enormous men in wet gear moving past me at close range, helmets off, steam rising off their heads.

Then Eli turned the corner.

He had his helmet and both gloves in one hand. His hair was flat and dark with sweat, there was a split at the left side of his mouth with a strip of tape across it, and that side of his face from the cheekbone up had started turning the color it would be for a week. I wanted my hands on his face so badly that I pinned them behind me against the wall.

He gave Maren a nod on his way past. Then he saw me.

He stopped. He didn’t slow and then stop. He stopped, in the middle of a corridor, with twenty men stacking up behind him.

His eyes came off my face and went down the front of me, and he read it in order. He took in the crest, then the forty-four on the sleeve, then the fit, which was mine. Then he found the creases, two of them, still standing up across the front where it had been folded on a shelf.

It was new. He got to new and he stopped there. His mouth came open a little and didn’t close. He didn’t blink once. He stood there in his gear and looked at his own name on my body.

He signed my checks. He did the subtraction in his own corridor in soaked gear, in front of me. Nobody had told him. He’d skated right past me in warmups and put his eyes on an empty chair, and now he’d turned a corner and there it was.

He didn’t say one word.

Behind him Cole Westbrook said, “Okay, we are all seeing this, correct? I would like it on the record that we are all seeing it.”

Kasperi Mäkinen stepped around Eli’s shoulder and looked at Eli rather than at me.

“You have gone red,” he said. “Under the eye and over it. The bruise is only under.”

Every man in the corridor heard him, and it landed on every face I could see.

Eli was still looking at me.

“Kasperi,” Ryan said from farther up the corridor, with enormous patience.

“What? I am correct. It is two colors. I am describing them.”

“I’m aware,” Eli said.

His voice came out wrong. It was low, and half a step slower than he usually talked, and I was wet in a corridor full of his teammates before he finished the sentence. I pressed my shoulder blades into the cinder block.

He looked at me for one more second.

“Go home,” he said.

He didn’t say it as a dismissal. He said it carefully, because from three feet away he looked one second from putting his hands on me in front of his team.

“I drove myself,” I said.

“I know you did.”

“Then I’ll see you at the house.”