I was just one of many. I had made my peace with that a long time ago.
"See you tomorrow, Hayes." He grinned and got in his car.
I didn't need to, but I watched him pull out of the parking lot.
I did it every single time.
I sat in my car for a long minute and ate Hayes's protein bar. I thought about Sacramento and the potential starter position.
2
Jamie
There were thirty-seven people in the room, and I could tell you every one of their comfort levels without looking twice.
The rookies were easy to spot—not because they looked young, but because they held their drinks with both hands and laughed a half-beat too late at every joke. It was orientation night. The Storm ran these during the first week of pre-season, a casual night at one of the downtown restaurants the team liked. I'd been organizing them for four years now—long enough that the hosting duties had shifted from assignment to assumption. Nobody asked if I was running it. I just ran it.
I liked running it. That's what people got wrong about me sometimes. Connecting with people wasn't a project. I made rooms comfortable because it made them better. I'd figured that out when I was twelve years old watching my older sister's birthday party fall apart because nobody thought to introduce the two friend groups to each other. I'd walked over, said, "Katie,this is Dev. She also does gymnastics," and the whole energy changed.
That was the first time I'd understood that some people could read the room and some people couldn't.
I could.
"Mikkola." I set a fresh beer on the table in front of the Finnish rookie who'd been nursing his first one for forty minutes. "Have you met Nico yet? Nico Varis, Finnish-American, forward. He went through Saginaw too. Different years, but he knows all the same people."
Mikkola's shoulders dropped a quarter inch. That was the whole job—a quarter inch of relaxation in a kid who'd been bracing against the unfamiliarity of a new city, a new team, and a new language of inside jokes he hadn't earned yet.
Nico appeared at my elbow like he'd been summoned—which, in a way, he had. I'd texted him twenty minutes ago. He started talking to Mikkola in Finnish, and I watched the kid's whole face change.
Connection established.
That was one less person eating alone at the facility cafeteria next week.
I worked my way around the room the way I always do. It's all pattern recognition—who's isolated, who's talking but not comfortable, who needs a bridge to a conversation they can't find the entrance to. It was like reading ice. You saw the open lane before it opened.
Theo found me by the bar and threw an arm around my shoulders. "You're doing the thing."
"What thing?"
"The Jamie thing. Where you orbit the entire room and somehow every single person feels like they had a real conversation with you."
"It's called being friendly, Theo."
"It's called being a wizard." He leaned into me with the comfort of having been a teammate long enough to be family. Theo's version of friendship was warm and all-in. He'd been like that since he walked into the Storm's locker room as a rookie and hadn't had the good sense to be afraid of Luca Moretti. "You eat yet?"
"I'll eat later."
"You always say that and then you eat protein bars in your car at midnight." He flagged the bartender. "Two of whatever he was having, and can we get a menu?"
"I'm fine, Theo."
"You're also eating." He slid the menu across the bar. "Pick something or I'm ordering for you. And you know I'll pick the weirdest thing on the menu."
I ordered a burger. It was easier than arguing with Theo Callahan when he'd decided to take care of you. Besides, he was right. I hadn't eaten since Abbott had stolen my other protein bar at noon.
Abbott.
He wasn't here tonight. Backup goalies didn't attend rookie night unless they wanted to, and Abbott rarely wanted to be at large social events. He attended the ones that mattered—team dinners, the Korean barbecue nights I organized, anything where the real bonding happened in smaller clusters. He skipped the ones where the primary function was filling a room with noise.
