Chapter 61 FIRST GAME BACK

Chapter 61 FIRST GAME BACK

POV: Reese Calloway

He texted the night before, short and factual the way all his texts were: Home game Saturday. You should come.

I texted back yes before I finished reading it and then sat at my kitchen table and thought about what I'd just agreed to, which was walking into the Blackstone Arena on a Saturday night with twenty thousand people and television cameras and the specific noise of a professional hockey crowd that I had no existing framework for managing.

I went anyway.

The press access seat was four rows up from the glass on the near side, close enough to the ice that I could hear the skates and the boards and the officials calling things in the breaks between play. I arrived forty minutes before the game and the arena was already running at half capacity with the particular building noise of a large space filling up from the edges inward.

I had my camera.

Not because I was there to work. Because I was never anywhere without it and putting it in the bag and leaving the bag at home would have been a deliberate decision requiring a reason I didn't have.

The warm-up started and the Vanguards came out in a stream from the tunnel and spread across the ice and I watched them from my seat and tried to find Cole in the movement.

He was on the far end, working through a drill with three other players, moving through it with the efficiency of someone whose body knew this sequence and didn't need to think about it.

Then he came around on the near side and his eyes found the press section and found me in it.

He didn't wave. Didn't break the drill or change his expression or give the moment anything that would make it visible to anyone else in the building.

His next lap was different.

Tighter line, faster push, cleaner through the turn. I raised the camera before I decided to and pressed the shutter and didn't look at the result because the next sequence was already happening and I was already following it.

The game was fast in a way I hadn't expected even after six weeks of working adjacent to hockey.

Watching footage on a monitor and sitting four rows from the glass were completely different experiences and I spent the first period tracking the movement and understanding maybe sixty percent of what I was looking at. Better than zero, which was where I'd started. I found myself actually watching rather than framing, following the play because I wanted to know what happened next rather than because I was building a sequence.

In the second period Cole got the puck at the near blue line.

Three seconds. He moved through the space between two defenders with the specific efficiency of someone who had calculated three steps ahead and was already executing the fourth, and then the puck was in the net and the arena went loud all at once, the specific total noise of twenty thousand people responding to the same thing at the same moment.

I looked at the bench.

Tommy was on his feet.

He was up before anyone else on the bench moved, both hands on the boards, and when Cole turned back up the ice Tommy was the first thing he looked at and Tommy was grinning in the uncomplicated way of someone who was genuinely happy about something without any reservation around the happiness.

I sat back in my seat and let the noise run over me.

The lobby afterward was full of people moving in every direction, families and press and team staff, the post-game chaos of a building emptying itself in sections.

June appeared beside me from nowhere, which was a June specialty.

"You came to an actual game," she said.

"Yes," I said.

She looked at me with the particular June expression of someone filing a piece of information they found significant. "You hate hockey."

"I'm working on it," I said.

She pressed her mouth together to keep whatever she was going to say from coming out and looked at the lobby instead.

We stood beside each other in the crowd and waited.

The team came out through the side door in ones and twos, some still in gear, some already changed, moving through the lobby toward the waiting area where family and credentialed guests had gathered. I watched the door and June stood beside me and neither of us said anything.

Cole came through the door still in partial gear.

He found me before he cleared the doorway.

Not scanning the crowd, not searching. He came through the door and his eyes went directly to where I was standing the way they'd gone directly to my position in the stands during warm-ups, without the searching that meant he didn't already know.

He crossed the lobby. Skates off but still in the rest of it, jersey and pads and the specific disheveled reality of someone who had just played sixty minutes of professional hockey and hadn't addressed any of it yet. Completely unbothered by the state of himself or the people around him watching him cross the lobby.

He stopped in front of me.

"What did you think," he said.

I lifted the camera and found the warm-up photograph on the small screen and turned it toward him.

Cole took the camera from my hand and looked at the image. His face in the warm-up, tight line on the turn, the ice and the boards and the specific quality of movement that belonged to someone in full possession of the thing they were built to do.

He looked at it for a long time.