Patience wasn’t something I’d learned in locker rooms or on the ice, not really. Hockey had refined it, sharpened it into something useful, something controlled and deliberate, but the foundation had been there long before any coach tried to put structure around it. Long before anyone called it discipline or composure or leadership potential.
It started in smaller spaces. Tighter ones.
A kitchen table where silence meant more than words ever could. A house where the wrong response bought switch, overreactive consequences. I has learned quickly that reactingonly made things worse, that meeting noise with noise didn’t end it—it extended it. Instead I absorbed it. Let it pass through. Let it burn itself out without giving it anything to hold onto.
By the time I got to hockey, it already lived in me. Coaches called it control. Teammates called it focus. Fans called it cold. They weren’t wrong. It was easier to be still than it was to give someone a reason to keep going.
“Big man doesn’t want to talk,” he slurred on, louder now, his voice carrying just enough that people nearby started paying attention without making it obvious. “Figures.”
The smell hit next when he moved closer, cheap beer and something sour underneath it, his elbow bumping into mine as he dropped onto the stool beside me like space didn’t belong to anyone but him.
I shifted slightly to create distance. He followed it.
Asshole.
“Thought you guys were supposed to be tough,” he muttered, leaning in, his breath warm and unpleasant against the side of my face. “All that fighting.”
I exhaled slowly through my nose, keeping my posture loose, my shoulders relaxed, refusing to give him anything to use as cannon fodder.
The sizzle from the flat-top cut through the low hum of conversation, sharp and steady, the delectable smell rolling through the space as the cook worked just a few steps from the front door. I didn’t need to look to know he was pressing the patties down, timing it the way they always did here—quick, practiced, deliberate. A second later, Marlene moved down the narrow stretch behind the bar, sliding the paper basket in front of me with a quiet efficiency that didn’t interrupt the rhythm of the room.
It looked exactly the way it always did—simple, solid,unassuming until you knew better. The cheese sealed inside, molten and waiting, the kind of thing that demanded patience whether you had it or not.
I reached for it. Unwrapped the wax paper to let the burger cool.
“Unbelievable,” the guy muttered beside me, watching now, his voice rising again as he searched for a reaction he wasn’t getting. “Guy goes out there, takes people’s heads off, and then just… sits here.”
I took a bite. The heat hit immediately, sharp and contained, and I let it settle instead of reacting to it, letting the burn register and fade on its own.
“Hey.” His hand came down harder this time, the impact rattling the glassware. “I’m talking to you.”
I set the burger down, wiped my fingers once on the napkin, and turned just enough to meet his eyes.
“Hey, man,” I groaned, keeping my voice even. “I’m just a guy trying to eat a burger after a shitty day.”
It should have been enough.
Of course, it wasn’t.
He blinked at me, like the answer didn’t line up with whatever he’d already decided I was, and then he laughed, sharp and humorless. “A shitty day,” he repeated, the disbelief thick in his voice. “You don’t know what a shitty day is.”
I didn’t respond. Picked the burger back up. Took another bite.
He leaned closer, louder now, the alcohol stripping away whatever restraint he might have had left. “You skate around, hit whoever you want, get paid for it, and you think that’s a bad day?”
I chewed. Swallowed. Reached for a fry.
“Frosthawks finally trying to rebuild somethin’,” he wenton, his words dragging as he tried to keep up with his own thoughts. “And they bring in you.”
There it was. Judgment.
“No one wants ya here,” he added, his voice tightening with something that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with him. “You’re a problem. Everyone knows it.”
I stayed quiet.
The room shifted around us, attention tightening without fully locking in, people watching in the way they always did—indirectly, through reflections, through peripheral vision, through the understanding that something might happen.
“Say something,” he snapped.