Page 31 of Payback On The Ice

At five-twenty-five the pucks are on the blue line. Water bottles on the net. I'm on the bench with my helmet in my lap when he comes down the tunnel.

He stops when he sees me. Just for a second. Then he keeps walking.

There's a cut on his lip too. A little scab, right in the middle. I did that.

"Morning," he says.

"Yes."

He doesn't look at me. He scrapes his ice. He taps his posts. He drops into his stance and goes still, and his face is the face from my first day. Ice. Nothing. Like yesterday didn't happen. Like I'm a shot.

I skate out to the blue line. I set the puck down.

And I wind up and fire it into the corner.

It slams off the boards behind the net and caroms around the back and dies by the far post. It doesn't come within ten feet of him.

He comes up out of his stance. He looks at the puck. He looks at me.

"That's not a shot," he says.

"It's a miss," I say. "Isn't it? Miss is a miss."

I take the second puck and shoot it into the other corner.

Then the third one into the glass, so high it goes off the top of the glass and out of the rink, into the stands. It rattles down the bleachers in the dark.

He's standing straight up now, mask still down. I can't see his face. I don't need to.

"Theo."

He says it low. My name again. My whole body goes warm.

"Two left," I say.

I put the fourth one into the boards right next to the bench. The fifth I don't even shoot. I just flip it, softly, so it slides across the ice and stops against his skate.

"Zero for five," I say.

He pushes his mask up onto the top of his head. His face is white. His eyes are not.

"What are you doing."

"I'm missing." I skate in. I stop at the top of his crease, nice and polite, no snow. "I owe you. Zero for five. So go ahead. Tell me what I owe you."

"Get off my ice."

"No."

"Get off⁠—"

"No, because if I get off your ice, you'll go back to pretending you didn't stick your tongue down my throat behind your own net." My voice is shaking. I hate it. "So give me an order. Go on. You're good at it. It's the only time you'll even look at me."

He looks at me now.

He looks at me for a long, long time. His chest is going up and down under his chest protector. His hands are opening and closing, glove and blocker.

"Equipment room," he says.