Page 115 of The Fall
I mirror him, or try to.
Blair’s stick taps the ice once.
His eyes aren’t on the puck when it drops; they’re on me. He wins the draw; the puck is his before I can react.
He resets. The puck drops again.
I miss.
I miss again.
“You’re holding too much in your arms. Let your hips do it.”
“I’m not?—”
“You are.”
He adjusts his stick and nudges mine with a correction. “It’s timing, not reflex. Let your momentum carry it.”
The puck drops.
Fucking hell.
I almost have it, almost.
He knocks my stick free of the puck with a twitch of his wrist, too fluid to be fair. I curse.
“You’re close,” he says. “Shift your inside knee in.”
He skates around behind me and adjusts my grip. “This,” he says, his voice low. He repositions my foot with his own skate, ankle to ankle beside me. “And here.” The heat of him bleeds through my gear. His chest hovers an inch from my back, so close that I feel the shift of his breathing. “Feel that?” His voice is low, right at my ear. “That’s where your balance should sit.”
“Your shoulder.” His other hand pushes on my shoulder blade. “Drop it.”
I force the muscle to release, to soften under his touch. He pulls back, but not far. He’s still close enough that if I shifted my balance wrong, if I leaned back even an inch?—
Then he’s back in front of me, setting up across the dot. Our eyes lock.
The puck drops.
I win it clean, snapping it back between my skates before he can react. My body remembers the position he put me in, holds it as if it’s muscle memory I didn’t have five seconds ago.
“Again.”
We reset. His skate brushes mine as we settle into position. The puck drops, and I win it again, cleaner this time.
Our eyes meet. The smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth betrays him. “There. You feel the difference?”
I nod, not trusting my voice.
“Good.” He holds my stare. “Fourth line centers don’t draw for possession. They draw to kill chances. Is the fourth line all you want to be?”
“No.”
“Good. So go again.”
The meeting drags ass, and Coach’s markersqueak-squeaksacross the whiteboard.
We’re going over some detail about new forechecking schemes. Strategies are marked, erased, marked again. Strategies, rotations, adjustments.
