Just Nathan, looking at me on the ice, and whatever was on his face had gotten past everything he'd built to keep it from getting past, and the Hawks crowd was roaring around us and he either didn't notice or didn't care.
I could see Dylan too, somewhere to the left, standing, not sitting, and his face was doing the thing again, the thing I didn't have a word for, the thing that was older than everything between us.
I put my hand on the ice.
Pushed up.
The world tilted—hard, definitive, the kind of tilt that wasn't a suggestion. My arm went out from under me, and I was back down. The ice was cold against my helmet, and the lights were still too bright. Nathan's face was the last thing I'd clocked before the tilt, and it was still there when I closed my eyes.
I stayed down.
25
Ididn't fully remember getting back to the bench.
One moment I was on the ice with the world tilted, and I saw Nathan's face. Then I was at the bench and the boards were in front of me. Dylan was already there, which was not surprising, Dylan was always already there.
"Complete idiot," he said.
"Yeah," I said.
"Absolute—"
"I know."
"Decker is a fourth-line pest who says things to get a reaction and you gave him exactly—"
"Dylan." My voice came out slightly wrong. Not weak, I didn't do weak, but different, the words marginally harder to find than usual, which I was not going to examine right now.
Dylan stopped.
"How's your head?" he asked. Quieter.
"My head?"
His face did something funny.
Coach said something from the other end of the bench. I caught about half of it. The half I caught was about the powerplay and positioning and nothing about me specifically, which meant Coach was letting Nathan handle the me part, which meant Coach had already made a decision about how this was going to go.
Nathan was at my shoulder.
I didn't know when he'd gotten there. He was just there, the way he was always there. His hand came to my arm and he said something brief and professional to Dylan, and Dylan's jaw did another thing, and then I was in the tunnel and the crowd noise was muffled through the boards and the game was still going on the other side.
The tunnel was quieter.
Nathan had his tablet. He ran the assessment with the clinical efficiency of fifteen years of practice.
The questions. The eyes. The balance check that I almost failed—I caught it, compensated, and Nathan saw me compensate and made a note without saying anything about it, which was worse than if he'd said something.
Coach was at the tunnel entrance. Arms crossed. Watching Nathan's face the way you watched someone who was about to tell you something you didn't want to hear.
"What's the score?" Nathan asked.
"Tied," I said.
He made another note. I could see from the way he kept returning to the same place on the tablet that the numbers weren't good. Not catastrophic—I knew what catastrophic assessments looked like, I'd been through enough of them—but not good. Borderline on two measures, clearly wrong on a third, and he came back to the third one twice.
"Nathan," I said.
