Page 19 of Home Ice Advantage

“Youdidn’t specify,” Ryan said, lifting his chin. “Columbus is a perfectly nice town with an underrated food scene.”

“Gentlemen...” Petey said, slinging his arms around both of their shoulders, “we have a two-hour flight ahead of us and I get migraines on flights. Can we all agree to chill the fuck out? Eh? Eh?”

“Yeah, sure,” Aronson said, flicking his fingers against Petey’s wrist until Petey released him.

On the plane, the boys spread out in their preferred places. Ryan took note of the way that groups broke up: Cook and Williams sat together like always, but they’d roped Davey the goalie into their little group and were already pulling out the deck of cards. Some of the veteran d-men congregated around Afanasyev, toward the middle of the plane; they were all taking out their masks and earplugs for what looked to be a group nap.

And the coaches ended up in the front, in a group of four seats separated by a table in the middle. Petey immediately took one side, lifted the chair divider, and flopped down on his back.

“You’re going to have to buckle yourself in,” Aronson told him.

Petey said, “Bite me.”

“My biting days are behind me,” Aronson protested, and narrowed his eyes when Ryan laughed.

Somewhat against his will, Ryan settled into a seat next to Aronson, and pulled out his iPad and notes to start reviewing shit ahead of the game. The Battery were another one of those perennial bottom-feeder teams, no matter what big splashes they made in free agency. It was tough to keep players, but maybe not so much now that they’d shuffled the coaching staff around. They were already riddled by injury, with a few stars starting the season on LTIR.

Next to him, Aronson pulled out one of the yellow legal pads he was always carrying around and set it down on the table. Ryan could see out of the corner of his eye the sketchy diagrams and chicken scratch scrawl that passed for Aronson’s handwriting—most of it was in French. He couldn’t take too close a look, though, because by that time, the flight attendant had come out to the aisle to give them the usual talk about staying seated when the lights were on and buckling their seat belts securely. Some of the older guys were already snoring.

Ryan’s ears popped as the plane gained altitude, and he rubbed the side of his head absently. On screen, he watched his defenseman and the fourth line completely losing defensive zone coverage and allowing a goal against in an almost comical series of miscommunications.

Under Leclerc, they had had a complicated system of zone coverage. Petey and Ryan had worked out that they would be better served taking it man-to-man, but that also required practice and training to make sure that the players knew how to make the judgment calls necessary to actually pull it off. That would be a teachable moment before the Battery game. It was encouraging that some of the players had already come to him to ask for extra video review time: whatever you had to say about the talent level, you couldn’t fault the effort.

Strangely, Ryan couldn’t relax and concentrate on his work the way he had always been able to do. He’d flown on planes like this for the majority of his life, and he couldn’t ever remember being so weirdly aware of the guy sitting next to him. Usually it was the unspoken rules of the road: you made sure your arms and legs weren’t overlapping, the same way you didn’t look where you shouldn’t in the locker room. It wasn’t even like Aronson’s arm was drifting.

Ryan was just very aware of where it was resting in relation to his own arm. He shivered, although the plane wasn’t cold.

He frowned at the armrest and Aronson’s elbow. Aronson had rolled his sleeves up again, and Ryan could see his forearms, the thick, dark curly hair that went right up to the edge of his wrist. He wondered what it felt like, if it was soft or scratchy or—

Aronson caught him looking, eyebrows lowering. “What are you looking at?”

“Do you still think in French?”

“What do you—” Aronson started, surprised, then stopped. “It was what I grew up speaking at home. But I’ve been away long enough that it’s mostly English.” His eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“You write all of your notes in French, so I was just curious.”

“It’s so nosy assholes like you can’t spy on ’em.”

“Aronson, we’re literally coworkers.”

“So?”

“So, we’re supposed to be on the same page.”

Aronson leveled one of those blank brown gazes at him, eyebrows drawn down over the rims of his glasses. “Are we?”

From his vantage point on the opposite side of the table, hidden beneath the edge, Petey said, “Don’t take it personally, Sully. Roney’s just like this.”

“Like what?” Aronson demanded, the pen balanced in his hand like a dagger.

They couldn’t see Petey’s face, but the smile in his voice was almost audible. “Nuh-uh, I’m not giving youthatfight. Come on. Migraine, yeah? Chill. Out.”

Ryan realized it was sound advice. He also realized it was easier said than done. He slipped his earbuds in, connected them to the iPad, and turned the volume up. It was easier to listen to the sounds of skates on ice than it was to pay attention to the very bony elbow, still encroaching on his personal space, or the nearness of Aronson’s lanky frame, radiating like a space heater.

Thankfully, the flight wasn’t long, and by the time they had disembarked, the equipment staff had unloaded all of the bags and the team had made its way through the airport, Ryan felt a little more like himself.

He walked at the end of the line, watching the way the players were interacting with each other, filing things away for future reference. Who was at the center of it all, who was a problem, who was getting jokingly bullied by the older players. While he was watching, he caught a glimpse of Aronson, ducking down to pick up a pebble from the stretch of concrete outside of the arrivals terminal before slipping it into his pocket.

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