The buzzer sounded. The players cleared the ice, disappearing into their tunnels, and the lights dimmed for the anthem. I stood with everyone else, hand over my heart, not really seeing the flag on the jumbotron.
I shouldn't be here. I had a program to refine, a Grand Prix Final to prepare for, a career that didn't leave room for distractions.
The anthem ended. The crowd roared. The players came back onto the ice.
I stopped pretending I was here for any reason other than him.
Red was in the starting lineup. He took his position at center ice, crouched low, stick ready. The referee dropped the puck, and the game exploded into motion.
I'd seen hockey before, mostly highlights on television or clips during Olympic years. I understood the basic mechanics: get the puck, put it in the net, don't die in the process.
I hadn't understood what it looked like when someone was extraordinary at it.
Players moved in bursts and collisions, sticks cracking against the ice, boards rattling with every check. It was chaos, beautiful and brutal, and somewhere in the middle of it was Red.
He was smaller than everyone else on the ice. I'd known that intellectually. Seeing it was different. He looked like he should get crushed.
Instead, he made them look slow.
Thirty seconds in, he stole the puck from a defenseman twice his size. Not by overpowering him but by reading where the man was going to move before the man knew it himself, sliding his stick into exactly the right gap at exactly the right moment. The defenseman spun around looking for the puck, and Red was already gone.
"Oh," Natalia said quietly. "I see."
"Watch the game."
"I'm watching." Her voice was mild, which meant she was going to be insufferable about this later. "He's good."
Good was the wrong word.
Red read the ice like I read music. He anticipated where the puck would be before it got there, positioning himself in spaces that only existed for a fraction of a second. He wasn't the biggest or the fastest, but he was always in the right place, and when he had the puck, everything else fell away.
He stripped another forward. A minute later, he took a pass at full speed and deked around a defender so cleanly that the man fell trying to follow. Red kept moving, threading the puck to a teammate who had a clear shot.
The shot went wide. The play was perfect.
I leaned forward without meaning to.
This was the version of him I hadn't seen. Not the hungover mess on the locker room bench, or the man who'd raced me. This was Red in his element, the thing he'd built himself into. I recognized it because I'd built something too.
The heat in my chest had nothing to do with the crowd.
The first period ended scoreless. Red had been on the ice for most of it, and he'd taken two hits that made my teeth ache. Both times he'd bounced off the boards and kept skating. Both times he'd come back harder.
"He's tiny," Natalia observed. "Compared to the others."
"He's better than all of them."
She raised an eyebrow at my tone but didn't comment.
"He's reckless," she said instead, tilting her head at the jumbotron replay of Red threading between two defenders. "He plays like he's got something to prove."
Everyone had something to prove. Red just did it louder than most.
The second period started. I kept my eyes on number 44.
It took me until the third hit to understand what was happening.
The Falcons' number 44 was built like a refrigerator. The first time he caught Red, it looked incidental, just a collision near the boards that sent Red down hard on his left side. His bad side.
