Coach Briggs emerges from the bench area, skating toward me with the slow, deliberate stride of a man who has delivered bad news so many times that his body has developed a specific posture for it. Shoulders slightly rounded. Jaw set but not clenched. Eyes carrying that particular blend of sympathy and resignation that coaches perfect over decades of crushing young athletes' dreams.
He is a big man. Six foot five, barrel-chested, with a silver beard that makes him look like a retired Viking who traded his axe for a whistle. His scent precedes him across the ice: pine resin and black coffee and the faint metallic tang of old hockey equipment that never fully washes out.
Alpha, naturally. Every coach in competitive hockey is an Alpha. The league does not officially require it, but the unspoken rule is etched into the sport's DNA as deeply as the blue lines on the ice.
He stops three feet from me, plants both hands on the top of his stick, and exhales a cloud of cold air that hangs between us like a white flag.
"Holloway."
"Coach."
"You skated well today."
I wait for it.
The word that always follows a compliment directed at me. The conjunction that transforms praise into pity. The linguistic pivot that coaches have been performing since I first laced up skates, turningyou are talentedintoyou are talented, but…
He sighs, the sound carrying more weight than his two-hundred-and-forty-pound frame.
"Don't get the wrong idea."
I tilt my head, letting the silence stretch. Letting him fill it with whatever version of the truth he has rehearsed during his walk across the rink.
"You are extremely good, Sage. Better than most of the Alphas on my squad, if I am being blunt about it. Your defensive reads are professional-level. Your skating speed is elite. And that shot you just put in the net?" He gestures toward the goal behind me with his stick. "That was NHL caliber. No exaggeration."
The compliments land like punches to the chest. Each one a reminder of what I am capable of and what the world refuses to let me have.
"But," I say.
Not a question.
A statement. An inevitability.
"Because there is always a fuckingbut."
Coach Briggs winces at the profanity but does not correct me.
He knows.
They always know.
"No team is risking an Omega on their professional team."
The words land on the ice between us like a body check that connects with your blindside. The kind of hit you do not see coming even though you have been bracing for it your entire life.
Behind the plexiglass, the scouts are packing their clipboards into leather briefcases. One of them laughs at something his colleague says. The sound carries through the barrier, tinny and distant and completely indifferent to the fact that it just punctuated the destruction of my afternoon.
"The concerns are the same as always," Coach Briggs continues, his voice dropping into that careful register that men use when they are trying to soften a blow they know is going to leave bruises. "Pack dynamics on a full Alpha roster are already volatile. Adding an Omega into that mix introduces variables that scouts are not willing to gamble on. The scent complications alone make front offices nervous. And then there is the heat cycle situation."
"I take suppressants for that." My voice is flat. Mechanical. The response I have given a hundred times to a hundred different coaches in a hundred different rinks, each time hoping it will be enough and each time watching it bounce off the wall of systemic bullshit like a puck off thick plexiglass. "I take blockers for that shit. Have been on them for years. Mycycles are regulated, controlled, and medically supervised. I can provide documentation. I can submit to random testing. I can sign whatever waiver they need."
Coach Briggs rubs the back of his neck, the gesture so tired it makes his age show in ways his physicality usually conceals.
"It is not about the medical side, Sage. You and I both know that."
I clench my jaw so hard my teeth ache.
Because yes. I do know that.
