Page 25 of Home Ice Advantage

Being on a rebuilding team meant that there wasn’t the same kind of pressure you’d have on a contender, but that didn’t mean that Ryan wasn’t constantly aware of the internal pressure he’d placed on himself. The pressure to make sure that the guys were learning, that he was steering the team in the right direction, that night by night, he could see tangible improvements. Overall, he’d been happy with the start to the season. All of the guys he’d wanted to see take steps forward had done it. They were sitting at or around .500 on any given night. The losses weren’t blowouts. The team was engaged in practices.

They had even won that night against the Black Bears, which would have normally been something to savor. Colorado was where he’d like to see the team in five years, a Cup contender with no glaring holes in the roster, playing fast, physical hockey, constantly a threat in all three zones.

Ryan should have been happy about it.

Ryanwashappy about it.

Unfortunately the happiness regarding the result of the game was drowned out by the argument he’d had on the bench with Aronson and the fact that no matter what he’d tried to do to show the man that his way of coaching was actually getting results—even the results themselves, staring them both in the face—Aronson simply refused to stop...well, Aronson was unable to stop being a fuckingdickabout everything.

Ryan had managed to get through the presser without visibly reflecting that he was annoyed in any way. He had always prided himself on his ability to shrug things off: he’d had to do it a lot over his career. Starting out as a short undrafted nobody had meant he’d taken a lot of shit his first few seasons, on the ice and off it. He’d let it roll off his back and focused on proving them all wrong.

This was—this was different.

Aronson was irrationally, infuriatingly determined to piss in Ryan’s cereal. No matter what he did, Aronson disagreed. Disagreed loudly and often in front of the guys. Ryan had tried over the last month or so to talk to him about it, but every time Aronson had pushed his glasses farther up his nose and peered down at Ryan like a bird of prey staring at roadkill, and glared until Ryan eventually gave up.

Today, though. Today Ryan was pissed off enough that he wasn’t going to let Aronson glare his way out of it. There was being a dick and there was blatantly ignoring Ryan’s preferred systems and telling the guys to do something completely different in the heat of the moment. There was challenging him on the bench in front of the whole team. It wasn’t like Ryan was unreasonable or unwilling to listen to his assistant coaches, but this had been beyond insubordination, this had been fucking insulting.

He made it back to the office before Aronson did, and he furiously set about diagramming what he had wanted the forwards to do on the breakout, versus what Aronson had told them to do. It was one thing to see it in the heat of the moment on the ice but somehow worse to have it all laid out there in black and white and red.

He was still scribbling angrily when the door opened. Ryan didn’t bother turning around; this late after a game, it was only ever going to be Aronson.

“What are you doing?” Aronson asked. He sounded amused, his faint accent a little stronger the way it always was when he was making fun.

“Drawing you a diagram,” Ryan snapped, “because you apparently didn’t understand what I was talking about on the bench.”

“I understood perfectly. I just thought that considering the aggressive way their D were pinching all night, an adjustment was in order.”

“Then you discuss that withmefirst, you don’t—”

“Oh?” Aronson said, and laughed.

Ryan whirled around to confront him. It must have looked comical to an outsider: Aronson well over six feet tall and gangly as hell, a lopsided smirk on his face; Ryan at least half a foot shorter, stocky and red-faced with fury. He almost never lost his temper, but even he had his limits, and weeks of this bullshit had caught up with him.

“Because I seem to remember you talking a pretty high-and-mighty game about collaboration when you first got here, and this is kinda dictatorial,Napoleon—”

“What the fuck is wrong with you, Aronson?” Ryan demanded. His hands felt white-knuckled, clenched in fists at his sides. “Why the hell do you hate trying to work with me so much? I’ve never been anything except accommodating, I’ve never been anything except nice—”

“You’ve never been anything except a fucking Hall of Fame superstar who waltzed in here and took my fuckingjob, Sullivan. You’re nothing except a guy who gets everything fuckinghanded to himwhen I’ve worked for years to earn this.”

Ryan felt like the top of his head was going to explode in a cloud of smoke and lava, like an erupting volcano. As they argued he could see Aronson’s face getting redder and redder too, the taciturn smirk that pissed Ryan off so much vanishing into something more dangerous.

Aronson’s full mouth was pressed into a thin line, twitching with fury. The dark brown eyes were narrowed, fixed on Ryan with the kind of attention that really did remind him of nothing so much as a falcon, the kind of mad energy that a bird on jesses had. His whole body leaned into Ryan’s personal space, like he could intimidate him into backing down with sheer size alone.

Well. That was his first mistake. Ryan hadn’t spent almost eighteen years playing in the league against guys who were taller and heavier to be easily intimidated. He glared right back, even if he had to look up to do it. Ryan couldn’t have stopped himself if he’d tried. “Everythinghanded to him? Do you have any idea how hard I fucking worked to make it into the league in the first place? You of all people should understand—”

“We arenothingalike—”

“Yeah, it’s not my fault you never got the hardware and that you never wonshit.”

As the words came out of his mouth, he was aware that it was a step too far. A low blow considering that the Cup was the one thing everyone wanted, and so few people were able to win. Sometimes it was the difference between a Hall of Fame career and eventually being a has-been everyone talked about in hushed terms, like, what would it have been if he could have just won a Cup? It was even worse because Aronson had almost gotten there with Calgary, back in 2009, and Ryan’s team had swept them right out of it.

He shouldn’t have said it, but it was too late to back down now.

Aronson stared down at him, his whole body vibrating like if he opened his mouth something absolutely vile was going to come out of it, like if he moved even one inch, he was going to do something violent he’d regret later. Ryan remembered the year Aronson had broken 200 penalty minutes and almost laughed; of course Ryan would be unlucky enough to end up having to share the bench with the kind of guy who had had multiple biting scandalsandget along with him so badly to the point that they were about to come to blows in their office.

He could feel the sting in the air, almost like electricity crackled between them, like if he said the wrong thing the spark would send the whole room up in flames.

“Aronson—” Ryan started, intending to try to diffuse the situation after all, but the words were trapped on his tongue when Aronson moved forward suddenly, faster than Ryan would have thought possible. The entire weight of his body shoved Ryan back against the whiteboard, and when Ryan opened his mouth to yelp in surprise, Aronson’s lips came down hard on his and Ryan’s entire brain shorted out.

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