I thought about Wes Chen's jawline and his scarred hands and the way his eyes looked when the murder face dropped and the real face showed through, raw and tired and carrying something heavy that he thought he had to carry alone.
I typed: He's devastating.
Sofia: Here we go again.
She was right. She was always right.
Here we go again.
-e
WES
Luca Moretti was everywhere.
This was, technically, his job. Equipment managers are supposed to be present, moving through the locker room and the bench and the practice facility like a current that keeps everything running. Sticks taped. Blades sharpened. Helmets adjusted. The invisible infrastructure of a hockey team maintained by people who never get their names on the scoreboard.
But there is a difference between being present and being inescapable, and Luca Moretti had crossed that line approximately forty-eight hours after the biscotti incident and had not looked back.
He was in the locker room when I arrived at 6:30, already sorting gear. He was on the bench during practice, handing out water bottles and replacement sticks with an efficiency that bordered on precognitive. He was in the weight room when I trained, restocking towels and checking equipment that didn't need checking. He was in the hallway, the parking lot, the training room, the film room. He was everywhere, and everywhere he was, he was talking.
Not to me specifically. To everyone. Luca Moretti talked the way the ocean produces waves, constantly and without apparent effort. He talked to the rookies about their stick preferences. He talked to the veterans about their kids. He talked to the trainers about protein intake and to the coaches about practice schedules and to the Zamboni driver about a documentary on penguins that he had apparently found life-changing.
He talked and he smiled and he moved through the facility with the particular confidence of a man who believed that every room he entered was better for his presence, and the infuriating thing was that he was right. The locker room was looser since he'd arrived. Players lingered longer. The energy was warmer. Luca had done what three years of team-building exercises and motivational speakers had failed to do. He had made the Reapers' facility feel like a place people wanted to be.
I did not want to be impressed by this. I was impressed by this.
Two weeks after the biscotti, he reorganized my equipment stall. I came in on a Monday morning and found my gear arranged with a logic that I had not requested but immediately recognized as superior. Gloves on the top shelf, easy reach. Helmet on the hook, visor pre-cleaned. Sticks in the rack, sorted by flex rating, each one labeled with a small piece of white tape showing the date it was last used.
"I didn't ask for this," I said.
Luca was two stalls over, working on a rookie's skates. He looked up with an expression of complete innocence that I did not believe for a second. "Ask for what?"
"The reorganization."
"Oh, that. I noticed your setup wasn't optimized. You were reaching across your body for your gloves, which puts strain on your shoulder, and your sticks were mixed up. The one you used last Tuesday has a hairline crack in the shaft. I pulled it."
"You noticed a hairline crack."
"It's my job to notice hairline cracks."
"In sticks."
"In everything."
He went back to the skates. I stood at my stall and looked at the arrangement and tried to find a reason to be annoyed by it, because being annoyed was easier than being grateful, and being grateful opened doors I wasn't ready to walk through.
I could not find a reason. The arrangement was objectively better. The man had improved my life by approximately twelve percent through the strategic placement of hockey equipment, and I hated him for it in a way that I was beginning to suspect was not hatred at all.
The skate thing happened on a Thursday.
Practice had ended. I was at my stall, unlacing my skates with the methodical slowness of a man whose hands ached and whose fingers didn't want to cooperate. The laces were tight and my knuckles were swollen from a fight two days earlier that I was pretending hadn't bothered me, and the fine motor control required to thread a lace through an eyelet was proving more difficult than it should have been.
Luca appeared. He did not ask permission. He simply knelt down in front of me and put his hands on my skate and started unlacing it himself.
"I can do it," I said.
"I know you can. Your hands are also the size of catcher's mitts and they're swollen and you've been fumbling with that lace for two minutes. Let me."