Ryan clipped my shoulder.“Buckman Grill in an hour?Burgers on me.We’re shutting the place down.”
“Later,” I said, shoving my gear into my bag.“Need air.”
“Suit yourself, legend.”He headed out, still chirping at a rookie.
I walked out the side door, away from the fans, away from the noise.
Campus looked dipped in liquid silver, a very light snow reflected off arena lights.Fans spilled toward bars, dorms, anywhere warm.A young woman in a beanie yelled, “Carter, you beauty!”before dissolving into a giggling fit with her friends.Sure, we weren’t allowed to have alcohol back in the locker room, but that didn’t stop the concession stands from serving the crowd.I lifted a hand, kept walking.Halfway to Stony Creek, the adrenaline crash arrived—hands shaking, vision grainy at the edges.I exhaled through a four-count the way a previous sport psychologist had taught me.In two, three, four, and out two, three, four.I ran through a couple of cycles, bent over with my hands on my knees.
“Is that dude about to throw up?”I heard someone ask.I lifted a hand with a thumb in the air, showing I was fine.With my back to the unknown person, no one knew who I was.
Austen had been there.I grinned at the thought.I recounted my breaths until the quiver eased.
When I got back to the room, I found Austen sitting cross-legged on his bed, laptop balanced on his thighs, earbuds in.He looked up, paused whatever glowed on the screen, and pulled the buds free.
“I felt more invested.Normally, when I watch sports, I don’t care who wins or loses.And people yelling at the players or referees like their single loud voice is going to change anything is beyond me.And even more absurd when I observe people yelling at a television screen.”
He looked at me, and I gestured for him to continue as I sat down, kicking off my sneakers.Austen’s eyes tracked them immediately as they tumbled onto the rug.I caught the look.Without a word, I leaned down, grabbed the shoes, and lined them up neatly under the bed frame.
“It’s statistically insignificant,” he continued, leaning back in his chair.“Inputting energy into a system that cannot receive the signal.But tonight… the variable had a name.It wasn’t just ‘the goalie.’It was the person who sleeps with me.It changes the equation when you know the person inside the mask isn’t just a data point.”
Sleeps with me?I wanted to crack a joke, but I held back.“So, you yelled?”I asked, amused.
“I… observed with high intensity,” he corrected.
I shrugged out of my coat.“Crowd was louder than the pipes tonight.”
“I noticed.”He set his mug down.“Nice glove on the back-door play.”
I froze, one arm halfway out of my sleeve.I stared at him.“You know what a back-door play is?”
“I do now.”Austen adjusted his glasses, looking slightly defensive.“I didn’t know the terminology at the time.I just saw the geometry of it—the cross-ice pass, the calculated open space.I had to consult a secondary source to acquire the correct nomenclature.”
He tapped a key and swiveled his desk chair, turning the laptop screen toward me.
The glow from the monitor lit up his face.It was a YouTube window, paused on a post-game media scrum.Ryan stood in the center, grinning, a cluster of microphones in his face.
“Your defenseman seems to enjoy talking to the press,” Austen said.“He broke down the sequence in the second period.He called it ‘robbery.’”
My cheeks went hot—ridiculous after surviving Caribou’s top line.“You saw that?”
“North-end view caught the whole angle.”
Silence stretched, not awkward, just full.I smelled peppermint from his mug, the lingering sweat from my underlayer, and the faint, clean detergent scent from his blanket.
I cleared my throat.“So.Did the chaos behave?”
Austen took a slow sip from his mug.“It was… loud.At first.Too many variables.”
“But?”
He picked up his mug and took a sip.He licked his top lip when he pulled it away.Wonder what that tastes like?Down boy!I said to my hormones as I felt them rising.Post-game always made me a little on edge, sexually.Austen’s probably not even gay.He seems more… asexual, if anything.
“But then I stopped watching the people and started watching the math.”Hearing his voice brought me back to the present.He set the mug down, his hand tracing a line in the air.“Force vectors.Every player is just a mass moving at a specific velocity.The puck is a projectile on a decaying trajectory.Once I started calculating the angles of incidence—where the lines were going to intersect—instead of listening to the screaming, it settled down.”
He looked at me, eyes scanning me like I was still a diagram.“You have excellent spatial intuition, by the way.You put yourself at the convergence point of every vector.It was… satisfying to watch.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said, suppressing a smile.
