Page 100 of Goaltender Interference

“I’m not sayingI’ma therapist, I was just saying, if we can do anything for you, the way you’ve done shit for us over the last couple of seasons, we’re all happy to do it. I don’t know what thatis, but it’s on the table.”

“Thank you,” Matt said, weirdly touched. “I honestly don’t know what that could be, either. I guess the important thing is that Aiden isn’t in Montreal anymore. And I’m just...well, I’m just playing and dealing with my knee and that’s all I really have to say about it.”

Jack’s dark eyes met Matt’s, almost like he was daring him to get really crazy, be super vulnerable about it. “Okay. Well, you know we’ve got your back. For whatever that’s worth.”

“It’s worth a lot.”

Matt wished his knee wasn’t so fucked. He wished he could just get on the ice again. He would’ve felt a lot better about all of this if he could’ve just worked it off, pushed himself with the kind of physical activity that would wipe any of the sadness from his mind and heart, at least until later. He’d have that for the game, but Jack asking him these questions felt a little like peeling a scab that hadn’t healed.

“Well, I won’t bother you anymore, Cap. I’ll let you get ready for the game. But, I don’t know. Think about it.”

Matt thought about it, and about his apartment at home, the laundry piling up and the dishes he hadn’t had time to wash, and nodded. “I will.”

He did not think about Aiden. He didn’t.

It was bitter cold outside, but Aiden rolled the window down as he took the car to Midtown. He rarely had a reason to go there, and he tended to avoid driving in the crowded New York streets especially. But that’s where the framing shop was, and that was where he had to go. He certainly couldn’t lug the jersey back on the subway.

The proprietor looked up in surprise when Aiden came into the store. He couldn’t tell if that was because the voice mail about the pickup had been left in July and it was January now, or because Aiden was fairly unrecognizable these days if he didn’t pull his hair away from his face.

“Uh, sorry this took so long,” Aiden said, “I’m here to pick up my jersey.”

He stopped to look at it in the car. Like always, they had done a professional, quality piece of work. Despite the fact that he spent an hour sweating his ass off in it that last game, it looked smooth and pristine beneath the glass. It sat on the passenger seat, like it was watching him accusingly.

It wasn’t one of his favorite jerseys the Libs had ever worn, he had to admit. In Aiden’s mind the only true shade of Liberty green was the one he had worn his first few years. The periodic attempts at redesign always left him cold.

But that was all it was: his last jersey, framed.

He had thought it would feel different picking it up. Crushing. He didn’t feel any of that. Mostly he just wanted to get it home because he had a lot of other things he needed to do.

Aiden had been getting his hair cut by the same woman in Brooklyn since the year he moved to the city. He texted her in between dropping the jersey off in his memorabilia room and packing his bags to see if she could fit him in.

She texted back,for you? of course. can you be there in 20?

Aiden eyed his bags, which were already mostly packed. It hadn’t taken long: he had a house full of stuff, but none of it was really necessary right now. And it was even possible that most of his clothes were still in Montreal.

He wrote back,yes, and headed out to his car immediately. His flight wasn’t for another few hours, but when he wasn’t flying on a team plane, Aiden was the kind of person who showed up at the airport at least an hour early, just in case. He’d almost missed enough flights and buses in his career to know better. A quick visit to Alyssa probably wouldn’t kill him, though.

Her eyes widened a little when she saw him, but because she was a professional, she didn’t say,what the hell happened to you.Instead, she asked, “What would you like me to do?”

“I just want to look like myself again,” Aiden said, a weird lump in his throat. “It’s...been a while.”

The thing he always liked about Alyssa was that she didn’t make him talk when he wasn’t in the mood to, and her hands were firm and gentle. She worked in silence, and it was like he could feel the weight of the hair falling away as she did. He watched himself in the mirror, and he could see Aiden Campbell slowly emerging from beneath all of it.

“Do you want me to get rid of the beard, too?”

“If you could just trim it.”

When she finally finished, Aiden looked at himself again. Alyssa cut his hair similarly to the way he used to wear it. It was just a little lighter, the kind of dark brown-and-gray that was only noticeable in the right light, or in the clumps of it on the floor, somehow more visible there. He didn’t look the same as he did when he first took over as the starter from Ward, but that was to be expected.

He was thirty-seven; he wasn’t a boy anymore. His face had the laugh lines and frown lines he had earned over the last sixteen years. The freckles were still the same, maybe more of them, but his eyes were so tired. Really fucking tired. And he looked sad, even at rest.

“Are you okay?” Alyssa asked.

“I’m going to do my best to be,” Aiden said, surprised to find that this time, he fuckingmeantit.

The flight Aiden picked got him into Montreal while the Royal were at l’Arène, in the middle of a game against the Minnesota Northern Lights. It was cold but not as cold as Winnipeg, and so while he was technically underdressed, he could suffer through. He dropped his shit off at the hotel room he had reserved, just in case. He took a cab to Matt’s condo and sat down on the steps to wait. There wasn’t much to do, and it was actually cold enough that his phone was going to die if he took it out of his pocket, so he just sat on the stoop, zoned out and concentrated on his breathing.

Aiden didn’t even know what time it was when Matt approached the steps, but he did know he had lost feeling in his fingers.

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