My stomach turns.
Another follows:Travel itinerary attached.
Another:Media availability tomorrow at 9:00 a.m.
My thumb hovers over the screen like I could delete the future if I press hard enough.
I set the phone down on the bed and stare at the wall. This isn’t just a trade. It’s the universe taking the private fracture we’ve been pretending we can manage and forcing it into the open. It’s distance becoming destiny. It’s a map redrawn without my consent.
And I don’t even know how to begin telling Rafe what Minnesota will do to us. I don’t even know if he’ll let me try.
21
Minnesota is cold as fuck.
It bites through the seams of your clothes, through the thin places you didn’t know existed, and it stays there long after you’ve stepped back inside. It doesn’t matter that the training facility is warm or that the locker room smells like eucalyptus and detergent and the familiar tang of sweat. The cold follows you in anyway. It clings to the backs of your hands, to your lungs, to the memory of stepping out of the car and feeling your body flinch like it’s bracing for impact.
Practice today is brutal in the way winter practices always are now that this is my life. It’s pretty relentless and effectively strips away ego until all that’s left is discipline and whether you can keep your legs under you when they start to shake.
We run defensive rotations until my calves burn. We run them again. We run them again after that because Coach doesn’t care that it’s February and our bodies are already carrying a season’s worth of bruises. He cares that our closeouts are half a step late on the weak side and that half a step is the difference between a stop and a highlight reel.
By the time he finally blows the whistle, my shirt is plastered to my spine and my lungs feel like they’ve been scraped raw. Ibend at the waist for a second, hands braced on my knees, sweat dripping off my nose onto the hardwood. Somebody groans behind me. Somebody else swears. The sound bounces off the high ceilings like an echo of suffering.
“Jesus,” a voice says near my shoulder. “Did we piss him off somehow?”
I straighten slowly, rolling my shoulders, and glance to my left. It’s DeShawn—a young guard with endless energy even when he’s dying. He’s the kind of guy who talks through drills like his mouth is powered by a separate battery. He’s toweling his face off, eyes wide with exaggerated misery.
“You’re looking at me like I’m supposed to know,” I say, forcing my breath to settle into something more controlled.
DeShawn points at me with the towel. “You’ve been pro, what, three years? You’ve seen some things. You gotta know.”
“Yeah,” another voice cuts in, dry and amused. “Tell us what the West Coast does when it gets hard. Do you all just… manifest a win?”
That’s Jonah, a wing who plays like he’s been carved out of focus. He’s not loud. He doesn’t waste words. When he does speak, it’s usually something that lands clean and makes people laugh in spite of themselves.
I huff a tired laugh as we start walking toward the locker room. “In LA, we complain a lot and then someone makes a smoothie.”
DeShawn gasps, hand to his chest. “A smoothie? That’s how you survive war?”
Jonah’s mouth tips up. “I knew it. Soft.”
“I’m from Southern California,” I remind them, pushing open the locker room door. Heat and noise hit me immediately. “I’m allowed to be soft.”
“Not here,” DeShawn declares, like he’s offended on behalf of the entire state of Minnesota. “Here we eat… I don’t know. Frozen meat out of the snow or whatever.”
From somewhere deeper in the room, a low voice calls out, “If you keep talking, I’m going to make you run suicides again.”
That’s Andre, our veteran big man, and he says it without looking up from his locker. He’s built like a wall and carries himself like one too. He’s steady, grounded, and has the kind of presence that quiets a room without needing to raise his voice. He’s been oddly good to me since I arrived, in that calm, watchful way older players sometimes have when they decide you’re worth keeping.
DeShawn raises both hands in surrender. “My bad. I respect my elders.”
Andre snorts. “You don’t respect anything.”
“Not true,” DeShawn says, dropping onto the bench and yanking off his shoes. “I respect the fact that Oliver Marshall drinks iced coffee when it’s twelve degrees outside.”
“It’s not twelve,” Jonah says, stripping off his shirt. “It’s nine.”
DeShawn turns to me again, eyes accusing. “Nine degrees, man. Nine. That’s not weather. That’s a threat.”
