His grey-green eyes flick to my bag.
“O’Shea.”
Damn.
“Coach.”
“Sit down.”
“I was, in fact, planning to —”
“Sit. Down. O’Shea.”
Yes, Coach. Filed.
I sit back down on the bench, the precise small five-feet-from-the-door bench, in the small dignified pout of an Omega who has, on the small inner accounting of the past sixteen minutes, just had her exit strategy professionally vetoed by a senior tier of authority.
Coach Declan walks into the room.
The fifteen Alphas in front of him sit up a quarter-inch. The small unhurried thing that always happens, in any room where Coach Declan O’Rourke walks in, in fact, happens, which is that the small private ambient atmosphere of the room is, in two strides of his, reorganized.
“Okay,” Coach Declan says, mildly, planting himself in the small dead-center of the locker room and looking, slow and even, at every single body in front of him in turn. “Let us, in the orderly way we always do this, dissect.”
He starts at sector one.
He works through the line, body by body. Brennan: the small dropped-shoulder defensive lapse at the eleven-minute mark of the first that opened the back-door pass that became their second goal. Voss: the small undisciplined penalty at the four-minute mark of the second that put us on a two-minute kill and gifted them the power-play marker. The full sector-one line, on the small unblinking surgical hand of a man who has, in his head, the small forensic frame-by-frame of every shift of the game tape, by name, by infraction.
They sit. They take it. The small thick-necked Alpha resignation of a sector that has, for the past seven minutes, been preparing in advance for this specific tongue-lashing.
Then he turns to me.
Brace, O’Shea. The seventh wrap-around is, professionally, a goalie’s failure. Take it. Document it. File it. Walk it up the post-side glove drill at four in the morning tomorrow. Do not, in this room, on this bench, in front of this assembled body, allow yourself to flinch.
“Out of every Alpha in this room,” Coach Declan says, with the small unhurried captain-coach cadence of a man laying a clean public sentence in the small ambient air of the locker room, “Miss O’Shea had the best individual performance of any body on this roster tonight.”
Wait.
Wait, what.
My head snaps up.
The sector-one half of the line, simultaneously, snaps up.
“Excuse me?” Brennan says, halfway through the small re-wrap of his right wrist tape, the small wounded honest disbelief of a man receiving the precise opposite of the post-game lecture he had budgeted for. “Coach. With respect. She let in seven.”
“Mm,” Coach Declan agrees, mildly. “On approximately fifty-three shots on net, which is, by the small archived metric of the public NCAA database, the most a goalie in our league has faced in a single regulation-plus-overtime period of play in eight calendar years. The save percentage is, on the small dry arithmetic of the situation, in fact considerably better than league baseline.”
He pulls a small black remote out of the inside pocket of his coaching jacket. He turns. He aims it at the wall-mounted television above the bench at the back of the room.
The screen, mid-shutdown loop on the small post-game scoreboard, brightens.
The first replay clip pulls up at two-x speed.
“Observe,” Coach Declan says, evenly. “One-thirty-seven into the first.”
On the screen, the senior-tier number-eleven of the opposing roster cuts in from the right wing and releases a wrist-shot from the high slot at the precise mid-eighty-mile-an-hour velocity for which his country-wide reputation has, since his sophomore year, been documented in the small senior commentariat archives. I, on the screen, drop the left hip, square the post-side glove a quarter-beat before the wrist-shot is even released, and rob him clean.
“Glove,” Coach Declan narrates. “On a shot the league commentary tracker callsstatistically unstoppableat this distance. Next clip.”
