I had been playing hurt for so long I had forgotten this was what the other thing felt like.
The Wardens were up by one in the second period and I was running hot, the particular kind of hot where your body stops asking questions and just goes, where everything sharpens down to the next play, the next angle, and the crowd is doing what it does and the ice is doing me personal favors, and before the puck dropped to start the second period I had done the thing I always did now.
I looked for him.
Section 112 was to the left of center ice, slightly elevated, the kind of view a person chose when they wanted to see the whole surface rather than just their team's end. I knew this because Nathan had told me, precisely, when he'd bought the seat, along with a brief analysis of sightlines and viewing angles that I had absolutely not listened to and had found completely charming.
He was there.
Dark jacket, no lanyard, no tablet, no coat draped over the back of the chair in preparation for a quick exit. Just Nathan Cross, in a seat he'd chosen for the sightlines, looking at the ice with the focused attention he brought to everything.
He wasn't looking at the ice.
He was looking at me.
I found him and he was already looking and for a second it was just that—the two of us, across the distance of an arena, while fifteen thousand people did their pre-puck thing around us.
Then the ref dropped the puck.
I went.
The Morr Roarcame down from the upper bowl in the third period.
I'd scored. Of course I'd scored—I'd been seeing the ice the way I saw it when everything was right, the opportunities arriving like gifts, and I'd taken a shot from a place I had absolutely no business taking it from and it had gone in, the way those shots went in when you were running hot and the ice was doing you favors, and the building had lost its mind.
Section 214 started it. The guy in the red jacket, same as always, and it came down in a wave the way it always did, fifteen thousand people doing their best lion impression, and I had my arms up and I was already turning to point at whoever had fed me when I did the thing I always did now.
I looked for him.
He was in the same seat. Of course he was. Nathan Cross did not move from a position he'd chosen without reason. And he was watching me, same as before, and the Morr Roar was rolling through the building and the crowd was insane around him.
He did not do the Morr Roar.
He was not that person. He would never be that person and I did not want him to be that person. Nathan Cross in section 112 in his own clothes with no lanyard was already something I hadn't known I needed and now couldn't imagine the absence of.
But something happened in his expression when the roar hit.
I was far away. Ice-to-stands far. The kind of distance where you couldn't read a face with any reliability, where you went on general impression and silhouette and the quality of a person's stillness.
Nathan was not still.
Not visibly—he wasn't moving, wasn't doing anything the crowd was doing—but something in the quality of his presence had changed, some shift in the way he was holding himself, and whatever it was, it was significant enough that I could see it from the ice, which meant it was significant.
I put my arms down.
I skated to the bench.
Knox was there, saying something at volume about the shot selection, which he did every time I scored from a ridiculous angle because Knox believed in the correct approach to things and found my approach personally offensive on principle.Jenkins was losing his mind. Dylan was at the other end of the bench doing the jaw thing, the one that wasn't quite a smile.
I didn't hear any of it.
I was thinking about section 112.
We won.
The locker room was what it always was: loud, gear everywhere, Chappell crying, Jenkins doing the thing. I was at the center of it the way I was always at the center of it, giving the room what it needed, absorbing the contact and sending the energy back at a markup.
Except it was different now.
