It is never about the medical side. It is never about the suppressants or the waivers or the documentation. It is about the optics. The tradition. The deeply rooted belief that Omega bodies belong in certain spaces and hockey rinks are not one of them.
"Look at me," I say, gesturing at myself with the hand not gripping my stick. "I am clearly not a distraction. I look like I rolled out of a gym bag. My hair is shoved under a helmet ninety percent of my waking hours. I have the sex appeal of a cinder block in compression shorts." I spread my arms wider, inviting inspection. "Should I cut my hair shorter? Start cosplaying as a man? Would that make the scouts feel safer about letting an Omega on their precious ice?"
The sarcasm is scalding, and I do not bother to cool it.
Coach Briggs holds up a hand, palm out.
"I understand your frustration. Genuinely, I do. And none of what I am telling you reflects my personal assessment of your abilities. If I were assembling a roster purely on talent, you would be my first pick. No hesitation."
"But you are not assembling a roster."
"No," he admits. "I am not the one making these calls. I am just the messenger."
He pauses, and something flickers across his weathered face. Regret, maybe. Or the ghost of a conviction he abandoned years ago when the politics of professional sports ground it to dust.
"You are simply not the best fit for their team right now. The landscape is what it is." He taps his stick against the ice, a nervous rhythm. "Maybe next year? Give it another season. Let the conversation evolve. There are people pushing for integration at the league level, and momentum is building. These things take time."
Time.
Next year.
Maybe.
The vocabulary of polite dismissal. The language coaches use when they want you to leave quietly and stop making them feel guilty about a system they benefit from and have no intention of dismantling.
I nod.
Not because I agree. Not because I accept his timeline or his optimism or his belief that patience will magically dissolve decades of institutional exclusion.
I nod because fighting with Coach Briggs is not going to change the outcome, and the energy I would spend arguing is better directed toward the ice. Toward training. Toward the relentless, grinding, bone-deep work of becoming so undeniably good that they will eventually run out of excuses to say no.
"Thanks, Coach," I say, and the words taste like copper. Like biting down on the inside of your cheek hard enough to draw blood and swallowing the evidence.
He gives me a look that might be admiration. Might be pity. The two are so tangled together in the way people perceive me that I stopped trying to separate them years ago.
"Take care of yourself, Holloway. Stay sharp."
He skates back toward the bench, and I am left alone at center ice.
Just me, the empty net, and the silence of an arena that witnessed my best performance and still decided I was not worth documenting on a clipboard.
I stand there for longer than I should. Letting the cold seep through my pads and into my bones. Letting the fluorescent lights buzz overhead in their mechanical monotone. Letting the full weight of another rejection settle onto my shoulders alongside all the others, stacking up like sandbags against a flood that will never stop rising.
Fifteen years.
Fifteen years of lacing up skates before dawn. Of running drills until my shins split and my fingers went numb and my body gave out so completely that I had to crawl off the ice on my hands and knees. Of watching boys with half my skill and twice my privilege get scouted, signed, celebrated, while I got whispered about in hallways and laughed at behind clipboards.
And for what?
The laughter reaches me before I reach the tunnel.
I am skating toward the exit, my stick slung over my shoulder and my helmet hanging from my fingers, when the sound filters through the concrete corridor that connects the rink to the locker rooms. Male voices, loud and loose with the careless confidence of Alphas who have never questioned whether they deserve to take up space.
"Did you see her face when Briggs told her?"
"Fucking priceless. Like she actually thought they were going to draft her."
"Draft an Omega? In what universe? She would go into heat mid-game, and the entire roster would lose their minds."
