Page 112 of The Fall
He zeroes right in on my cast. “Kendrick, what the fuck? You break your arm and you forget to mention it to fucking medical?”
There’s a half-second blister of silence where everyone looks from me to the cast and back to Coach.
“Nah, Coach, it’s cool, it’s cool.” Hayes rides to my rescue. “Our man Kicks here was a true hero, sir. You should put him up for an award. ESPN Man of the Week.”
Coach arches one eyebrow. “Explain. Fast.”
“It was for Lily,” I say. “She broke her arm. She needed emotional support.”
Coach’s eyebrows climb and climb, and he stares me down like he’s seen a lot, but never this. I’m being judged, sized up against years of rooms and hijinks and insanity. Behind me, everyone is snickering and hiding their faces in their towels and base layers.
“Y’know what, I don’t even want to know.” Clearly, there’s no corralling us this morning. “Everyone on the ice in ten minutes! And get that fucking cast off, Kicks.”
The door slams shut behind him, and the room erupts again. A chant begins, my name, over and over.Kicks, Kicks, Kicks.
Hayes claps me on the shoulder. “C’mon, man. Let’s de-pink you.”
When we get to the medical suite, Hayes pops up onto the table beside me. “This whole ‘best teammate ever’ persona might be your new brand.”
The trainer walks in, and Hayes regales his captive audience with a grand retelling of my pink cast’s origin. With each retelling, the story becomes more dramatic, my heroics even more knightly. The whirring of the cast saw rattles up my arm as the blade splits apart the layers of plaster. Step by step, the pressure loosens, and with it, a small part of me.
When the trainer steps back, I pull the two halves free and stare at them. These stickers—the one-eyed monkey, the dinosaurs—were a little girl’s battle armor. “I’m keeping this.”
“Aww, miss it already?”
“I gotta keep it for our Nerf wars. I need to figure out how to get it back on.”
Hayes loops his elbow around my neck and rubs his knuckles into my head. “Man, hockey is the best. Where else do you get crazy-ass teammates like this?”
The locker room is empty when we get back, all the rest of the guys out on the ice already. The place is a disaster zone of clothes and leftover gear, water bottles and protein bars, sandals and charging cords, and ball caps all left behind. Hayes saunters to his stall to finish dressing, no hurry to him at all, when a voice behind me says, “I’ve got an idea.”
I turn and Blair is standing there, a fistful of Velcro in his hand. “I pulled these from the equipment room.”
My brain stalls, unable to connect the man in front of me with the bundle of black straps he’s holding. He must have heardme talking to Hayes. He went and found a solution without a word.
“For the cast?”
“Yeah.” He steps closer, and the space between us shrinks to nothing. “Can I?”
I nod, not trusting my voice, and hold out the two halves of pink plaster. He takes both and flips each over like he’s handling a fragile artifact. I don’t dare move, don’t say a word.
“Hold this.” He passes me one half while he works on the other.
He moves carefully, aligning the edges, matching seam to seam. He’s so careful, like he’s setting a fracture himself. I study the line between his brows, the softening there as he concentrates. He fits the adhesive backing of the Velcro strips along the saw marks; my gaze is fixed on his hands, on the delicate brush of his thumb.
He works, and I memorize the curve of his jaw, the way his lashes cast shadows on his cheeks when he looks down. This close, his scent of coconut and sunshine reach me, cutting through the perpetual funk of the locker room.
When he’s done, I can Velcro the cast back around my arm whenever I want. “Now you can lose to her again.” Blair’s lips quirk up at the corner, and he hands the cast back to me.
“Thanks.” My voice is too quiet for how fast my heart is beating. A current passes between us, hot and silent as the space between stars.
Reality shatters back into place, too loud and too fast in the form of Hayes. “Yo. We’re late. Coach is gonna fucking eat us alive.”
Shit. We scramble. We throw on our gear and waddle down the tunnel as fast as we can, hit the ice in a blur.
“Punctual as ever.” Coach doesn’t even look at us. “Take laps. Skate until I get tired of looking at you.”
We skate, lap after lap and lap.
