Briggs was in net, which meant none of us were safe from commentary.
“Wade,” he called as I circled behind the goal, “are we pretending your ribs are fine, or are we allowing honesty into the building today?”
I caught the puck off the boards and kept moving. “You’re talking a lot for a man who wears thirty pounds of padding and still flinches when Hannah yells.”
“Hannah has the voice of a woman who could discipline a tornado.” Briggs dropped into his stance, glove up, eyes bright behind the cage. “I respect natural disasters.”
Ryan skated past me backward with the smooth, annoying ease of a man who now got paid actual money to be hard to hit. He had joined morning skate because he was in town, because he was nosy, and because apparently semi-pro life hadn’t beaten the interfering older-brother streak out of him yet.
“You’re favoring the left side.”
“I’m skating.”
“You’re skating mad.”
“I’m always skating mad.”
“No, you usually skate like you’re trying to murder the concept of offense. Today, you’re skating like breathing has wronged you personally.”
Cade glided along the blue line, his stick loose in one hand, annoyingly composed for a man who had spent the last few months recovering from his own nightmare and still somehow looked like he’d been built in a lab for rich-boy threat assessment. “He’s also gripping his stick too hard.”
I cut my eyes toward him. “You coaching now?”
“No. Observing.”
“Do less.”
Rider coasted past the faceoff circle and sent a puck toward me with the blade of his stick. “He’s right.”
“Didn’t ask you either.”
“That has never stopped anyone here.”
Briggs tapped both posts with his stick. “I would like to observe that his mouth is still busted, his hand is wrapped like a mummy, and he looks like he slept in a storm drain.”
“I slept in my apartment.”
Ryan’s mouth twitched. “Same aesthetic.”
I fired the puck. Briggs blocked it with his pad and made a dramatic little wounded noise, then kicked the rebound toward the circle like he was offering me charity.
“Uncalled for. I’m here as emotional support.”
“You’re here because you have abandonment issues and a goalie complex.”
“That is a rich diagnosis from a man whose coping mechanisms include moving into a sadness cave and beating up a basketball player in the rain.”
The puck slid loose near the crease. I reached it first and snapped it high. Briggs caught it cleanly in his glove and held it there like an insult.
“See? This is why violence does not solve everything. Sometimes violence gets saved.”
Ryan laughed under his breath.
I didn’t.
The problem was, they were funny. The bigger problem was, I didn’t have enough room inside my body for funny. Every time one of them cracked a joke, my brain tried to take the exit, but Aura’s face was already standing in the doorway.
Aura in my apartment, holding her Sin Bin shirt against her chest while she asked me to forgive her. Aura telling me the lights stayed on. Aura telling me he said her name over and over so the whole school would know exactly whose body was being passed around. Aura saying she loved me like the words were a bleeding thing she had finally ripped out of herself and placed in my hands too late.
