Page 46 of Payback On The Ice

"Dane."

"What."

"You still didn't say sorry."

I look at the wall. At the four squares of white tape, right above the desk where the picture of me and Nico at the lake used to hang.

"I know," I say.

He doesn't say anything else. After a while his breathing goes long and even, and the hand towel goes warm, and I get up and wet it again and put it back, and sit back down on the floor in the dark. I do it again at three. And again at four-thirty, when I'd normally be stretching.

At five-fifteen I leave him a note on the desk, next to the lanyard I still haven't turned over.

No six today. Or tomorrow. Sleep.

13

THEO

Deb clears me on a Friday.

She presses on every rib on the left side, one at a time, the way she did three weeks ago, and I don't make a single noise. I don't even breathe funny. I just sit on her table and look at the ceiling and think about absolutely nothing.

"Huh," she says.

"Is that a good huh?"

"It's a huh." She snaps her gloves off. "You're cleared for contact Monday. Not before. If I see you in a battle drill this weekend, I will personally tape you to the bench."

"Yes, ma'am."

She squints at me over her glasses. "You're in a good mood."

"I'm always in a good mood."

"You were not in a good mood three weeks ago, honey." She writes something on her clipboard. "Somebody's been taking care of you."

I hop off the table. My face is hot. "Ice and ibuprofen. Like you said."

"Mm-hm," says Deb.

For three weeks there's no wager. The first week, I didn't even go to the rink in the morning. I slept, sitting up against two pillows in Nico's old bed, and woke up at noon with the light coming in sideways. The second week I went back, because I couldn't stand it, and he was there, in the crease, at five-thirty. He didn't put any pucks out. He made me skate. Edges. Crossovers. Backwards laps with my stick across my shoulders. He stood in the middle of the ice with his arms crossed and watched me do it, and when I started breathing too hard, he said, "Done," and that was the end.

The third week, he let me shoot. Just shoot. No breakaways. No wager. Wristers from the slot while he stood in the net and let half of them in on purpose. I know it was on purpose. He's not that bad.

"You're letting them in," I told him on Wednesday.

"Yes."

"Why?"

He didn't answer. He tapped his posts and dropped into his stance.

Out there, nothing changed. The bag, the bottles, the card table at the Lantern. Nobody talks to me. But nobody's put a stick on me since that Thursday either, not even Gunnar, who walks past me in the hall now like I'm a wet floor sign.

And every night, around eleven, there's a knock on my door.

He never stays long. He brings ice, until I don't need ice. He brings the pills until I don't need the pills. He stands in the doorway or sits on my floor, with his back against the mattress, and says almost nothing.