Brody is the first person I see.
He has seen the photo.
I know immediately — he’s doing the thing. Too warm, too fast, talking about the upcoming road trip schedule like the information is urgent, like he’s been saving it for this exact moment.
Brody is many things. Subtle isn’t one of them.
“How’s the ankle?” I ask.
Twenty minutes of ankle. I write all of it down. My hands need something to do.
Liam gives me four words for the piece I’m building on team momentum. Then he gives me a look. The look is harder to decode than the four words. I write both down. The look goes in the personal notebook.
Then I do actual work for a while.
Transcribe Brody’s ankle update. Clean up Liam’s quote. Tag two photos from warmups that my editor will want by lunch. I build out three paragraphs on team momentum and delete two of them because they sound like they were written by a woman who got photographed kissing her source in a parking lot and is attempting journalism through blunt-force denial.
I start again. This version is better. Cleaner. Way less insane.
Forty seconds later my brain throws Jax Mercer into the middle of a sentence about defensive recovery and I have to backspace half a paragraph.
I take a sip. It’s terrible. I keep drinking.
Caleb says something to Sebastian at the far end of the rink and both of them laugh. I write down the drill note I actually need. I answer one email. I rename three audio files.
That’s the shape of the morning: work for two minutes, think about him for ten seconds, get annoyed with myself, go back to work, repeat. Functional enough that nobody looking at me would know anything was wrong. Chaotic enough on the inside that I start writing the word crease in my notes and nearly put kiss instead.
I do not love that for me.
By the time my phone lights up again, I’ve gotten a decent paragraph out of myself, captioned six photos, and spent an unreasonable amount of energy not looking across the rink unless I have a work-related excuse.
Aurora texts at ten.Coffee this week?
That’s it.
I stare at my phone. She’s seen the photo. She has one hundred percent seen the photo. She’s the sister of the man in the photo and she’s texting me about coffee like it’s a normal Tuesday in a normal week where I didn’t kiss her brother in a parking lot and end up in approximately forty-seven sports media outlets before breakfast.
She’s texting about coffee anyway.
I open my journal. Write one line. Close it. Keep moving.
I photograph warmups. He’s in the crease running rotations and I keep the camera on him and tell myself it’s for the piece ongoalie preparation that I have been building for three weeks and this is partially true.
I can’t keep my eyes on the drill.
He catches me looking from across the ice. Doesn’t react. Goes back to his drill.
I capture shots of the boards for a while.
The day goes like that. Work. Him. Work. Him.
I get everything I need — Brody’s ankle update, Sebastian and Caleb doing something inadvisable that I photograph from three angles because I am thorough. I write my notes. I do my job.
My camera keeps ending up on him. I stop fighting it after a while.
Water break.
He skates to the boards. Stops in front of me. My recorder is in my hand. Notebook open. Professional distance fully operational. He looks at me for a moment. Not the reading-a-shooter look. Something quieter.
