Page 25 of Her Rival

I lay down with my work clothes still on and stared at the ceiling, and somewhere in the back of my head the question I'd refused for nine years to ask myself finally surfaced and put its hands on my collar.

What if he is not a man you can fix by writing him beautifully.

What if he is just a man.

And what if the article was always going to be the smaller of the two problems.

I closed my eyes and I did not sleep.

Tuesday was five days away.

10

JETT

Friday practice was the worst practice I'd had in two years.

Not in the technical sense. Technically I was fine. Shot was on, legs were on, I won every faceoff Coach put me in. Scored three on Moose in scrimmage and made one of them on a backhand that surprised even me. The tape, when I watched it later, would look like a perfectly ordinary practice from a player having a perfectly ordinary morning.

The problem was I was performing all of it. Every chirp at Langley, every shoulder-bump with Tank, every joke I lobbed at Moose, a thing I was watching myself do from about two feet behind my own head. I'd never had to do that on the ice before. The ice was the one place I never had to. The ice was where I could turn the bit off, because the bit was already in my body. The chirping was hard-wired to the skating. Once the skating was happening, the rest of it just came.

It didn't come on Friday. I had to make it come.

By the third drill Rhett had skated past me twice without saying anything, which from Rhett was about as loud as a man could speak. The second time he came past he tapped his stick against the back of my pads, light, on his way to the bench, and didn't look at me when I looked over.

I knew what the tap meant. The tap meant I'm here. The tap meant I see what you're doing. The tap meant come over Friday night if you need it.

I'd already been told Friday night. The tap was just confirmation.

I scored my third on Moose and he chirped me about it in fake Russian and I chirped him back in the same fake Russian and the team lost it, and I laughed at the right moments, and Coach pulled me at the end of the drill and clapped me on the shoulder and said good morning out there, Sturgill, and I gave him the thumbs-up I always gave him and headed for the bench.

I sat down on the long padded ledge and drank from my water bottle and tried to figure out why my hands were shaking when nothing about this morning should have made them.

It was her. Obviously it was her. It was the whole previous afternoon doing its slow unspooling in the back of my head. The video room and the goal on the screen and her not-looking and then looking. The smell of the soap and the smell of her. The second she'd held my eyes and I'd let her. The careful foot of space I'd kept between her body and mine as she passed her chair. And the way Hartley had come out of my mouth at the door like a word I'd never said before, despite the fact that I'd said it twice already that hour.

I'd thought about all of it for most of the night. Given up on sleep around three and gone out on the deck and stood looking at the valley and tried to think about the championship goal, the next week's schedule, anything not her, and within forty seconds I'd find I was thinking about her again. And I'd start over. And within forty seconds I'd be thinking about her again.

This was, I was learning the hard way, what intrusive thoughts felt like. It was a new experience for me. I did not care for it.

I'd been very disciplined for nine years about not having intrusive thoughts about Ashley Hartley. I'd filed her. Compartmentalized her. Spent the kind of money on therapists, briefly, in my mid-twenties, that nobody on this team would've believed if they'd known. Money that had taught me a set of techniques I'd used reliably and well to keep the kid in the suit and the woman in the green dress and all of it on the other side of a door I'd welded shut.

I'd opened that door on Monday for thirty seconds, in a conference room, with Brynn watching.

I'd opened it for two hours in a video review room on Thursday.

I was sitting on the bench Friday morning unable to close it back up, Rhett out on the ice doing skating drills with the patience I associated with monks, Coach watching me from across the rink with the narrow assessing eyes he used when he was making notes, and I knew I had about a forty-eight-hour window before somebody who wasn't Rhett figured out I wasn't fine.

The phone in my locker would have called. I knew it. It had been calling every other day this week. The 931 area code, the voicemails I was now letting stack up without listening. I'd hit the eleventh one Wednesday night and finally gone in and deleted the lot without playing any, which felt good for about twelve seconds and then nothing.

That was the other thing the video room had done. Reminded me my mother was a thing I'd also welded a door over. And the welding only worked when nothing else in my life was tugging at the edges of my composure. With Ashley Hartley on the other side of three feet of table yesterday, the door to my mother had rattled too. The way a thing rattles when an earthquake is happening in a different room.

This was, I was learning, what compartments did when you opened one of them. They didn't open in isolation. They opened in pairs.

I drank the rest of my water, stood up, went back out on the ice, and did the next drill.

After practice I sat in my car in the players' lot a long time before turning the key.

I checked the phone. Two voicemails. Both 931. I deleted both without listening. Sat with the phone in my hand. Stared out the windshield at the back wall of Caldwell Arena, which from the players' lot looked just like the back wall of any other industrial building, and I thought about going to The Hideout instead of going home.