Page 26 of Single Pucking Orc

“I’m out,” he said.

The room didn’t go quiet, exactly, but something shifted. Korvash looked down at him from the bench.

“You’re out?”

“I’m out.”

“He’s out—” Fen started, spinning around with his phone already up, ready to narrate it for the newsletter⁠—

“Leave him alone,” Tarmek said, and that did it. Because the captain almost never intervened in the chirping. He usually just let it run. So when he said those three flat words, the locker room went silent for half a second, absorbing the fact that Rognar Stonebreaker was going home. Stonebreaker, who always went out, was going home. And no one was going to make it a joke. Fen put his phone down.

He kept unwinding the tape from his wrist and pretended he hadn’t noticed any of it.

Tarmek crossed the room a minute later with his hair wet and his gear bag over his shoulder. He paused as he passed Rognar’s stall.

“Good game.”

“It was a terrible game.” He looked up at him. “I lost the puck standing still. I heard a baby that wasn’t mine and lost the puck like a rookie.”

Tarmek considered this. His phone buzzed in his hand, probably Edie, but he studied Rognar a moment longer before looking at it.

“Yes,” he said. “Good game.”

Then he went to find his girl.

Grimshaw caught him at the door with a takeout container Rognar hadn’t seen him acquire. “Wings,” he said. “You didn’t eat.” Then he pressed a small blue tin, worn at the edges, into his hand. Cow udder balm, produced from the depths of a professional hockey player’s bag like the most natural thing in the world.

“Diaper rash,” Grimshaw said. “Told you. Keep it.”

“You carry this to the rink in your bag?”

“I carry a lot of things in my bag.” Grimshaw shrugged into his coat. “You’ll learn what to carry.”

Bex met him at the truck with her coat already on and her bag over her shoulder, the app open on her phone. “Down at eight-forty. Full bottle before that, kept it all down, no fuss. Changed her at nine, that redness is basically gone. I told you it was nothing. She’s been out cold.” She looked him over. “You look like you got hit by a bus.”

“Won the game.”

“Great. You still look like the victim.” She was already moving past him, down the drive. “Same time Thursday.” She got three steps and turned. “She’s a good baby, Rognar. You did all right getting her, whatever happened. She’s a good baby.”

And then she was gone, her taillights swinging out of the drive. He sat there a second in the truck with the engine cooling. Five miles from the arena, and home before eleven. He’d have laughed at himself a week ago.

He had the second monitor handset in his hand when he got out. The little screen glowed grey-green showing Charlie in her crib with one arm flung out and her chest going up and down. He was so busy looking at it that he didn’t see Nora until she spoke.

“You’re home early.”

She was sitting on her front step in a big soft cardigan with a mug in her hands, her glasses pushed up into her hair. The light from her hallway spilled past her and turned her into a warm, glowing figure at the edge of the dark. The terrible game fell off him at once.

“I’m home on time,” he said. “I’d like that noted in your records.”

“Noted.” She sipped whatever was in the mug. “I saw on the team account that the rest of the team went out. There’s a video of that guy with a mohawk eating a mozzarella stick in one bite.”

“The Broken Stick. Yeah.” He shut the truck door quietly, a habit that was four days old and already bone-deep. “The others went out.”

“You didn’t.”

“The others don’t have a person.” He held up the monitor without quite meaning to, showing her the little grey-green screen with his daughter breathing on it. “I have a person.”

She looked at the screen. Then she looked at him, and the recalibration he’d seen earlier that week appeared again, the look of a category quietly changing.