Page 12 of Home Ice Advantage

Eric snorted. “I’ll say. Don’t tell me you’re fucking nervous.”

“I’m notnervous,” Sullivan said, and rolled his eyes. “I don’t get nervous.”

“I’m notnervous,” Eric repeated, in the exact same intonation, just a little mocking.

“I’m just—what is your problem?”

“I don’t have a problem, it’s just that you’re pretty damn full of yourself, huh?”

“What are you trying to say?”

Petey opened one eye. “I need to put you boys in a get-along shirt?”

“No,” Sullivan said, and he took a deep breath. “I was just trying to...have a conversation. Not get my head bitten off again.”

Petey turned a baleful eye on Eric, who frowned. “Don’t look at me like that, Peter McCaskill.”

Petey closed his eyes again, a distant smile on his lips. “Peter McCaskill, eh? Careful, I’m gonna think my mother showed up to sit on the bench as well. Since she’s the only one who ever calls me that.”

Sullivan had evidently decided that he wasn’t going to get what he wanted out of either Eric or Petey and started gathering his papers and his iPad. “Your mother could probably have helped improve the team’s record last year,” Sullivan said primly, as he headed for the door.

Petey’s eyes flew open. He turned his entire body toward Eric, like he was making sure he wouldn’t miss a single second of Eric’s head slowly expanding and exploding with fury. Petey had a much higher-pitched laugh than you’d expect from such a big man, wheezy and delighted. When he finally caught his breath again, he managed, “The old dog’s got some bite in him after all,” and promptly started howling again.

Eric took a deep breath, and then another. He wondered what kind of a fine he’d get if he pushed his head coach off of the bench and onto the ice in the middle of the game. For a brief second, he regretted the fact that now that he wasn’t playing anymore, he couldn’t just throw down. Couldn’t just sink his teeth into a problem. Petey was laughing at him, which was how he knew that if he showed exactly how much Sullivan infuriated him, it would only get worse from here. He took another breath.

“You better get it together, Petey,” Eric muttered, standing and stalking out of the room to the sound of Petey’s whoops behind him.

Ryan’s head was a mess, and it wasn’t because he was nervous, whatever Aronson would have liked to imply. The problem was that he had a billion pieces of information knocking around in there on the best of days, and it was even worse now that he was preparing to go out on the bench for his first professional coaching game. He took a second to close his eyes, shove the extraneous bullshit into the background and try to focus on the things that really mattered.

Namely: the roster was mostly rookies and prospects, the few stragglers he hadn’t sent back to their juniors teams because he wanted to see what they could do against men, so he wasn’t expecting much. Secondarily, he needed to see if he could keep up with the pace of major league line changes and matchups. It was a home game, so he had last change, and the ability to control them more easily than he would have otherwise. But that didn’t mean shit if he wasn’t at the absolute top of his game.

As they went down the hall toward the bench, Williams swung by to check in with him. He wasn’t particularly tall, but in his skates and Ryan in his shoes, he loomed above anyway. Williams was a handsome kid, almost the polar opposite of Cook. Cook was as white as a white kid who’d grown up in small-town Manitoba could be, and Williams hailed from New York, with a Filipina mother and a Black father.

Where Cook was blond, Williams had dark, thick hair; where Cook’s complexion was pale and splotchy red, Williams’s skin was a deep brown. And where Cook was a tiny spark plug, Williams was solid and steady, deceptively strong. He had a sense of humor hidden underneath his serious face but was already shouldering more responsibility than a twenty-two-year-old should have had to, and it showed.

“All ready, Coach?” Williams asked.

“Sure,” Ryan said, and laughed. “Might as well get thrown into the deep end.”

Williams looked sideways at him again, like he was trying to gauge whether or not Ryan was actually freaking out. It was a very funny gesture, like a kid who’d only had a couple of shortened seasons would be able to do anything about it. Apparently, whatever he saw eased his mind. “Well, I’ll try to make it as easy as possible for you.”

“That’sreallynot your responsibility,” Ryan said, but he couldn’t keep the corner of his mouth from tipping up in a smile. Say whatever you wanted to about the Beacons’ overall level of talent after last season’s trade deadline massacre and sudden retirements—and the stats writers who published roster summaries and playoff odds certainly did—but it was a good group of guys.

In response, Williams held out his gloved hand to fist-bump. Ryan obliged, and Williams dropped his hand lower for the extended version. It immediately hit him, the memory of developing secret handshakes with his teammates over the years, reenacting them over and over in hallways exactly like this all over the continent. He hadn’t expected to have that as a coach. They bumped low, raised it and knocked elbows, that indescribable sense of knowing where the other guy was going even if you’d never done it before.

Williams smiled. “You still got it, huh, Coach?”

“That’s what they tell me,” Ryan said, and headed out to the bench.

After all of that, the lead-up to the first game was almost anticlimactic. Ryan found that coaching, no matter where you were doing it, was like riding a bike. You didn’t just forget because you had suddenly upgraded from a $100 beater to a $10,000 full-suspension mountain bike. Once he got into the swing of things it was easy: he called the line changes, he consulted with Aronson and McCaskill about tactical adjustments and he tried not to overthink things too much.

They were playing the New Jersey Scouts: the team hadn’t made the leap last year that their fans had hoped, but they had qualified for the playoffs and even though they’d gotten knocked out in the first round, they’d taken it to seven games. They were icing the majority of what would be the opening-day roster, probably because they had signed a bunch of free agents over the offseason to complement their homegrown talent who were beginning to come into their own.

It was strange, too, looking over at the bench and seeing Danny Garcia behind it. Ryan remembered playing against the former enforcer in the later years of his own career. Specifically, being knocked on his ass repeatedly by him. He didn’t have time to worry about Garcia, though, because the game was starting.

The talent gap was evident.

Williams struck first, scoring on a clean win off of the face-off, but the Beacons were simply outgunned. They made a valiant effort, but they went down 2-1 fairly early and never quite recovered.

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