Page 33 of Game Misconduct

“I was gonna start this morning. If you’re free.”

“I’ll have Sakari drop me off. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“I owe you, Bee. Anything.”

“Mon chum, you know I’d never cash in on it.”

True to her word, Bee met him at the Cons’ Skate Zone in Voorhees, and together they dressed and went out on the ice while Mäkelä sat in the stands, his legs thrown over the arm of a chair, headphones in as he zoned out, staring up at the ceiling and thinking whatever weird little goalie thoughts kept him occupied.

It was also strange, being there on a day when the rest of the team wasn’t. Because the rink administrators knew them, they didn’t have any trouble getting out on the ice before the public skate. But he knew he was going to end up working through it—or around it, given what he remembered of public skates from his childhood—and after it.

“So what brought this on?” Bee asked as they skated out for warm-ups.

“I, uh, I wanted to get better. And I’m not going to get better unless I practice. Unless I change the way I’m doing things.”

He was stunned when she hugged him so hard she almost boarded him, the force of her body pushing him down the ice. Bee was about four inches taller than he was, and they were right at the same weight.

“Michael!” she crowed, delighted.

“Bee, what the hell?”

“I’m so happy, I can’t believe you’re finally doing it!”

He pulled out of her embrace, already on the defensive. “What do you mean, finally?”

“I’ve always known you could do this, it’s just, it is good to see youdoit.”

“And you—you never said anything?” Mike couldn’t help the sick swoop of his stomach. It wasn’t just Danny? Bee had known?

“Michael,” she said, grabbing his shoulder pads. “I’ve always known you had talent and I’ve always hoped you’d use it. But your friendship is more important to me than that. I was afraid I’d lose that. Us. Is that selfish of me?”

“I don’t know what the fuck to say,” he said, because he didn’t.

“If I’d told you that I thought you weren’t playing the way you could, would you have listened to me? Instead of telling me to fuck off, instead of things being wrong after that? You’re very proud.”

He knew how he’d reacted to hearing it from Danny, and he honestly didn’t know how he would have reacted to hearing it from Bee. He’d known her longer and trusted her more, but he’d lived with bone-deep weariness and fury about what he wanted and what he was capable of, like, forever. Maybe their friendship wouldn’t have survived. She was looking at him, her brown eyes warm, her face open. She never would have been able to look at him like that their first season together, when she had a pole up her ass a mile long and felt that any emotion was a show of weakness and someone would take advantage.

And now she was looking at him with love. She loved him too.

If she could change, he could at least try to be kind of honest about how he would have treated her then.

“No. You’re probably fucking right,” Mike said, and looked down at his skates. “Jesus fucking Christ, I’ve been fucking up my life.”

“Stop being dramatic, Michael. You’re only twenty-five, you’ve still got time.”

Mike bit back the urge to say,you and Danny, you motherfuckers, but Bee didn’t know about Danny, and he couldn’t tell her. He’d been keeping these secrets for so long that even now that he had a guy he was talking to regularly, even with his best friend, it still felt too risky to open his damn mouth.

He didn’t like having all of these emotions all at once. It was a lot easier to feel angry, or maybe horny, but as they went out onto the ice, he felt shame and embarrassment and frustration that he couldn’t tell her what the tipping point for this had been, couldn’t tell her that he was doing it for himself but also for a guy on a rival team, couldn’t tell her where he’d been and who he’d been talking to at all hours of the night for the last two months.

One day at a time.

“All right,” he said, “so the first one simulates a breakaway—”

“Just tell me where I need to be,” she said, and gently headbutted him with her helmet.

He’d picked out two exercises for today. One was a basic agility drill, which he was planning to do when Bee took a break, and the other one was basically infinite variations on Bee trying to get close to the crease while he tried to stop her. As they were running through the motions, he realized how little he actually thought about what he was doing on the ice. He reacted a lot but he didn’t plan anything. The drill instructions had extras in them, liketry to think about your skates as being extra sticksandonly keep one hand on the stick when you poke checkand, like, Mike knew that these were things he should have been thinking about when he was playing. But mostly when he was out on the ice, he was using his body like a battering ram, or he was fighting.

It was kind of sobering and kind of humiliating.

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