The pass missed me by three feet.
Whistle.
“Again,” Reid called.
I circled back. “If Lowell moves it faster, that’s open.”
Lowell looked offended. “I moved it fine.”
“You moved it like you were mailing it.”
Milo laughed. Roman, from the other end, muttered, “Here we go.”
Reid skated closer to the boards, not onto the ice, but near enough that his voice dropped out of team volume and landed directly on me.
“Enough.”
The word cut through everything.
Not loud. Not angry. Final.
My mouth closed.
For one clean second, there was no noise in my head.
No lights. No buzzing. No argument forming. No need to prove that I’d seen the play before anyone else. Just that word and the boundary behind it.
Enough.
Reid’s gaze held mine. “You can argue after you’ve done it correctly.”
Heat moved up my neck. Not humiliation. Something stranger. My gloves felt too tight around my hands.
I wanted to snap back. I wanted to make Milo laugh, to give Roman the line he was waiting for, to turn it into nothing.
I also wanted, badly, to do the rep right.
That scared me more than getting yelled at would have.
I nodded once and skated back into position.
The next rep was clean. I stayed underneath. Lowell made the first touch, I gave him the option, then I released into space when it was there instead of when I wanted it to be. Puck to Milo. Shot. Rebound buried.
Reid blew the whistle. “That’s the read. Run it again.”
My lungs worked like I’d sprinted.
Practice moved on. I moved with it. I was still me. I still chirped Milo when he whiffed a one-timer. I still forgot where I’d put my backup stick and found it two stalls over for no reason I could explain. I still had to ask Tessa to repeat a media reminder because her first version got eaten by three other conversations near the bench.
But something stayed quieter.
After showers, I hung back in the locker room under the excuse of re-taping a stick that did not need re-taping. Guys filtered out in waves. Milo singing badly. Sokolov complaining into his phone in Russian. Lowell asking Benny about skate steel withthe urgency of a man defusing a bomb. Roman paused near my stall.
“You good?”
I looked up. “Yeah.”
He didn’t believe me. He never did. “You got quiet after Reid clipped you.”
