I have asked the question with my whole chest at four-oh-two in the morning, in full gear, on a sheet of ice that has been Zambonied so recently that the surface still has the faint humming sheen of cold water that has not entirely decided to be a solid yet, while staring — glaring, technically, my mother would call this glaring — across the empty rink at the man who has been the plague of my existence since I was thirteen years old.
If he had not vanished from my life on a Wednesday five years ago, would I be standing here at four in the morning. Would my entire athletic trajectory have routed itself through this exact pre-dawn ice at this exact college on this exact continent. Hard to say.
What I am willing to confirm: I would, by any sane scheduling logic, still be in a bed somewhere. Asleep. Like every other functional adult human in the postcode.
Coach Declan stands at center ice with his arms folded over his black jacket, his breath plumed in the cold, his green eyes giving me the precise level professional look he has been issuingme at the front of every practice for the past two weeks. He is dressed exactly the way he was dressed nineteen hours ago, when I robbed Saint Aldwin’s star forward on the glove side in overtime and he gave me an eight-word sentence in a hallway. He smells, even across thirty feet of cold, the way he always smells. Cedar. Black coffee. The bracing cold-on-wool of an Irishman who has been awake longer than the woman in front of him.
“Your performance last night was good, O’Shea.”
Oh.
Oh, now we are willing to say it. In a private rink. At four in the morning. With no witnesses. That is convenient timing, Declan.
“But there is a number of things,” he continues, ignoring whatever my face is doing, “that we need to clean up before the road game on Friday. Hip mechanics. Recovery angle on the post-side. A couple of habits I have been watching you carry that we are going to break, with kindness, this morning.”
“Could this,” I demand, gesturing with my stick at the empty arena, “not have happened during actual practice hours, like a normal coaching session. Or are we doing this at four in the morning because we do not, in fact, want to be associated in a professional manner with the trending Omega goalie currently spawning new hashtags on the platform of public discourse.”
He gives me a look.
It is a level look. A professional look. The exact same look that has, in the past two weeks, communicated to me approximately fourteen things he is not willing to say out loud, and I am, at this hour, frankly not in the mood to parse it.
“Let us get to the point.” I huff. “I have a date.”
His eyebrow arches.
It is a small thing. The fractional climb of a single eyebrow over an otherwise unmoved Irish face. But I clock it, and I clockhim clock me clocking it, and the small spiteful private chamber of my chest that has been carrying the corridor-nod for nineteen hours lights up like a vending machine.
Intrigued. Or bothered. Or both. I do not care which one. Either is a victory.
“A date with whom.”
“None of your concern, sir.” I hum it. Genuinely hum. I pull my face cage down with the satisfying small clack of plastic against plastic, drop into my stance, and tap the toes of my pads with my stick. “Let us get this shit over with.”
He does not press it.
That is one of the things I have always known about Coach Declan O’Rourke, and one of the reasons the absence of him for five years was, on balance, harder than the presence of him would have been. He does not press. He does not chase. He does not ask twice. He files the information into whatever quiet inner ledger he has been maintaining on me since I was thirteen years old, and he gets on with the work.
He gets on with the work.
Forty minutes of butterfly-recovery drills. Twenty minutes of post-integration footwork. A long block of low-shot tracking with the puck-spitter, the small mechanical contraption that throws pucks at me on rotation and that I, in my private opinion, want to take out behind the dumpsters and shoot. He calls his corrections from the blue line in the same even pitched voice he has been calling them in since I was fifteen.
“Hip, O’Shea.”
I drop.
“Hip.”
I drop better.
“Hip, O’Shea.”
I lift my mask off my forehead and skate two strides toward center, because if he says the wordhipto me in that tone onemore time before I have had coffee I am going to come out of the crease and physically aggress him.
“Coach.”
“Mm.”
“If you are going to keep being a nagging broken record of an ass about my left hip, you can come fix it. Personally. With your hands. Like a professional coach who is invested in the corrected outcome of his goalie’s mechanics. As opposed to, say, standing on the blue line at four in the morning and barking the same syllable at a person who you taught the syllable to.”
