“That’s what I love most about my brother,” she says. “He’s not loud about caring. He just shows up until you realize he’s been there the whole time.”
There’s something uniquely unpleasant about hearing a simple truth when you are not remotely equipped to deal with it. Especially when it comes attached to the brother of the woman saying it. Especially when that brother has already ended up under my skin.
I’m a journalist with full access to this team. I am sitting across from the goalie’s sister—still going, somehow, saying more than I meant to.
“Another coffee?” Aurora says.
“Please,” I say.
Team dinner that night.
Long table. Full chaos. Brody at one end holding court, Sebastian and Caleb doing something inadvisable with the bread rolls, Liam at the other end, quiet as usual and still somehow pulling the table toward him. Katarina sits next to him like she’s seen all of this before and stopped fighting it years ago.
I’m at the far end. Recorder, notebook, professional distance. I’m doing my job. I am completely on the correct side of the line.
The bread basket starts at Brody’s end and makes its way down the table, hand to hand. I’m watching Caleb say something to Sebastian that makes Sebastian inhale half his water when the basket lands in front of me.
I look up to say thank you.
He’s already looked away. Back to whatever Aiden was saying. Easy. Natural. Like passing bread to the journalist at the end of the table meant absolutely nothing. I hold the bread.
I have feelings about the bread. I am not getting into that right now. What I will say, purely as an observer of human behavior, is that he made a point of not making it a thing. Which somehow makes it more of a thing.
I eat the bread.
I’m fine.
That is, in fact, a lie, but it is a good one and I’m sticking with it.
The first road trip comes faster than I’m ready for.
Charter plane at six a.m., which should be illegal, and Brody, who is somehow already loud at six a.m., which should also be illegal.
The hotel is aggressively air-conditioned in the specific way of hotels that have given up on nuance and committed fully to cold.
I did not pack for this. I packed for Florida, because I live in Florida, and Florida does not do this.
Brody lends me his Cyclones hoodie without making it weird, because underneath all the noise he is, unfortunately, a very good person.
It hits mid-thigh. It is the warmest thing I have ever worn.
I am not thinking about the fact that it says CYCLONES across my chest.
I’m not.
That would imply I am having a reaction to wearing team gear in a team hotel while thinking entirely too much about the team’s goalie, and I reject that on principle.
Right now all I can think about is the fact that I need sugar. The vending machine is at the end of the hall. I’m going to get some, come back, and go to sleep like a professional.
I pull the hoodie on and head out.
The hallway’s narrow and quiet.
Most of the team’s asleep or close to it. Ice baths run late on travel days—Coach’s rule—and the guys who’ve done theirs are back in their rooms by now. The hallway has that late-night hotel silence where everything gets swallowed by carpet.
I’m almost at the vending machine when I hear the elevator.
I turn the corner.