Page 5 of Her Rival

I hit that wall right as Coach blew the whistle for one more set of suicides.

"You're killing us," Moose hollered from the blue line, bent double, gloves on his knees. Big Norwegian bastard, slowest recovery on the team, complained like it was a second job. "It's November, Coach. We won the championship in March. Let a man breathe."

"You want to breathe, retire," Coach said. "Line up."

We lined up.

That's the thing nobody tells you about winning. You'd think hoisting the thing over your head in front of nineteen thousand screaming people buys you a little grace. A little attaboy, take it easy, you earned it. It buys you nothing. It buys you a target the size of a dinner plate. Every team in the league gunning for the champs. A coach who decided over the summer that defending a title is harder than winning one, and we were all going to suffer for his theory.

I dug in and skated. Goal line to blue line, blue line back, goal to red, red back, all the way down and all the way home, lungs full of broken glass. Langley puked a little behind the net at the end of the third one and tried to play it cool, wiping his mouth on the back of his glove like we hadn't all seen it.

"Atta boy, rookie," I said, gliding past. "Get it out. More room for beer later."

"I'm two years in, you asshole."

"You'll always be the rookie to me, sweetheart."

He flipped me off. I blew him a kiss. Behind me, Rhett laughed, that low rare thing he did maybe twice a practice. Stone, the guys called him. Our captain, and the closest thing I had to a best friend, not that either of us would've said it out loud. Stone didn't hand out laughs. You earned those same as everything else off him.

Coach finally let us off the ice. We clattered down the tunnel like a herd of something prehistoric, all pads and stink and noise. I peeled out of my gear at my stall and sat a second in the steam and the racket of thirty grown men being idiots, and I let myself feel it. The good ache. The bone-deep done-ness of a body used all the way up.

People asked me sometimes, the rare times anybody asked a real question, why I still played this hard. I had the contract. I had the ring. I had, though almost nobody knew the actual shape of it, more money than a man could spend in nine lifetimes, sitting quiet in accounts I never touched.

I never knew how to answer that without sounding insane, so I never answered straight. But the truth sat right there in that locker room every day. I grew up in a house where joy was a thing you apologized for. Where a boy who laughed too loud got a look. Where the only acceptable noise was the noise they told you to make, in the key they picked, on the Sundays they told you to show. Then I found this. A barn full of noise nobody could take. A hundred and ninety pounds of reasons to yell, and not one of them a sin.

I'd have played this game for free. I just made real sure nobody found that out. It would've wrecked my negotiating position.

"Sturgill." Coach was in his office doorway, chin tipped at me. "Got a minute."

The locker room went oooooh like a bunch of fourth graders.

"Somebody's in trouble," Moose sang.

"Somebody's mom got called," said Tank.

"Eat a helmet, all of you," I said, cheerful, and grabbed a towel and went.

Coach's office hadn't changed since the day he showed up in Vegas a couple years back to take over a team that was a punchline at the time. Same bad fluorescent light. Same whiteboard full of his chicken-scratch X's and O's. Same framed photo on the desk that used to be just him and now had Brynn in it, the two of them squinting into the sun somewhere with mountains behind them. A second frame sat next to it that I tried not to look at too long, because it did something to my chest. Brynn and her mom, Victoria. Both of them holding the trophy.

Family. The man had built himself a family out here from scratch. I respected the hell out of it, and it made me itchy to be in the room with it. Both at once.

"Sit," Coach said.

"I'd rather stand. I smell."

"You always smell. Sit down, Jett."

I sat.

He leaned back against the front of the desk, crossed his arms, gave me the look he used when he was about to make me do something I didn't want to do and had already decided I was doing it anyway.

"Victoria's putting together a thing," he said. "A feature. Big one. Long magazine piece about the championship season. The whole story, how the team got built, all of it. National."

"Cool. Tell her congrats."

"You're the centerpiece."

"No."