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It wasn’t that James was hoping his chemistry with Chase would fall apart in the structure of regular season. That would be actively hoping against the success of his team, so obviously he wasn’t hoping that.
And even if he was hoping that —
Winning feels good.
“How’s that for a fucking goal?” Chase yells right into his face, and James, breathless, can’t do anything but laugh. That wasn’t just highlight reel, that was a best of the season countdown clip. If you can find beauty in hockey — and James can, James does — that was a masterpiece.
“Fucking filthy!” Georgie says, crashing into both of them, and James follows Chase to the bench, bumps his fist against the outstretched gloves, and sits down still grinning, still breathless.
*
It’s even more beautiful when he watches it later, the ESPN highlight and the TSN one, because they both have different angles of it. The Senators goalie looks stunned, after, and James’ smile is so wide he can see it even before the camera zooms in to capture the celly.
James downloads the clip, saves it to the folder as 20231009vOTTP205441A. First of the season, but not the last. Not even close. Usually after he’s filed them away he doesn’t look at them, but this time he does, then goes to download the TSN version, same name, followed by v2. He clears his browser history after. The guys would never stop teasing him if they knew he watched his highlights, let alone filed them away, sorted by date and time. He bets they do it too — watching, not filing — but that seems to be one of the things you can make fun of someone for even if you do it yourself. Innocent until caught red handed.
James wonders what the red is supposed to represent. Blood, he supposes. Innocent until caught with blood on your hands. It makes sense.
*
“Excited about me, Jamie?” Chase asks before their next practice. James thinks it’s out of the blue at first, something meant to get a rise out of him — Chase seems to have made that his mission in life — but then he remembers being interviewed postgame, being asked about Chase and saying something about how he was excited to see what they’d accomplish together. ‘Excited to see’ isn’t the same as 'excited about', but why should James expect Chase to care what was actually said, when he could twist it, as crooked as the smile on his face. Though maybe smile isn’t the right word. Not a sneer, not quite, but close.
James takes a breath, remembers Finn’s advice, and ignores him, focuses on something else. He wonders where ‘out of the blue’ came from. Probably blue for the sky. Out of thin air, another metaphor. Dropping from the sky is pretty much the definition of unexpected. It could be water, though. Out of the sea. It could be neither, could just be the color. So many metaphors to do with color, and not all of them make sense.
He resists the urge to look it up, resists the urge to tell Chase, yet again, that his name is James, not Jamie. He turns his back to the room, and he starts to get ready.
Ice in his veins.
He’s always liked that one.
*
“Want to talk about it?” Georgie asks.
“What?” James asks, looking up from his orange juice.
“Whatever has you looking like that,” Georgie says. ‘That’ presumably not blearily adjusting to the morning. ‘That’ probably having more to do with Chase cutting in front of others to jostle him in the hotel buffet line, and saying ‘isn’t juice all sugar, Jamie?’.
“Oh,” James says, then finally takes a sip of his juice. “No.”
The more James ignores Chase the worse he seems to get. Most of it’s elementary, in more ways than one, and James has no difficulty tuning out tactics that were stale to him by second grade. It’s the doggedness that’s difficult to deal with, the way Chase doesn’t do it when anyone else is listening, so if James complains it seems like he’s overracting.
He’s talked about Chase with Finn enough by now, and it always comes back to the same thing. Team’s team, and they’re teammates now. Give people a chance: they may surprise you. If you focus on the worst, of course that’s all you’re going to see. And, over and over: that’s the situation, so get fucking used to it. Though of course Finn would never put it that way.
Finn’s a good person. One of those rare people who are exactly as kind as they appear. He never looks for anything in return for his kindness, except, perhaps, for someone to not try to talk him out of helping them, or assume that he’s looking for a reward or recompense. It took years of playing with him, but now James lets him help, and he tries to be bothered by the fact that Finn does a lot for him and that doesn’t really go both ways, because Finn doesn’t need anything James can offer. Except on the ice, but that’s not really the same thing.
Unlike Finn, Georgie isn’t naive. Finn would argue that, say it wasn’t naiveté but ‘not assuming the worst of people’ or ‘keeping an open mind’. But whatever Finn would call it, Georgie doesn’t have that. Maybe it’s maturity — he’s older, married, has a kid, another on the way, but James is pretty sure Finn could be all of those things and he’d still be exactly the same way. Possibly even more so.
“What do you think of Chase?” James asks, after they wade through the shallows — the strange weather lately, the upcoming trip to Florida, how Georgie’s wife is, his daughter.
Georgie’s mouth curls up at the corner. “As a player or a person?”
“Either,” James says. “Both.”
“They’re not the same thing, Cap,” Georgie says.
“I know,” James says. And he does, objectively, he’s known people he would consider nice up until they’re on the ice, and he’s known very sportsmanlike players who aren’t particularly good people. He knows. Except —
“There are lines,” Georgie says, and James doesn’t know if he’s agreeing, or giving James his opinion on Chase, or just guessing what James is thinking, anticipating what it is he’s going to say.
“There are,” James says, because whatever the reason, it’s still the truth.
*
James gets his first goal of the season off a textbook drop pass from Chase. It’s not as beautiful as Chase’s goal was, but James doesn’t care, not when it ties the game.
When Chase comes in for the goal celebration his visor knocks hard into James’, a flash of pain and a red mark on his forehead that persists through his postgame interview. It’s not that James thinks he did it on purpose, he just wouldn’t be particularly surprised if he had. Maybe that’s ridiculous. Maybe he’s being ridiculous. He spends a few minutes trying and failing to cover the mark on his forehead with his hair. By the time he’s finished, the mark itself has mostly faded, but his hair won’t lie flat any longer. He thinks that’s probably a metaphor for something. A lot of things feel like that lately.
“Looking good, James,” Chase says when James makes his way out, and James doesn’t know if he’s referring to the red mark or his messed up hair. Either way it’s meant ironically, and either way, he’s commenting on his own handiwork.
“Thanks,” James says and takes some satisfaction in the way it wipes the smirk right off of Chase’s face for a moment, but then it returns, even wider than before, and James isn’t proud of the way that, in the elevator to the parking garage, he has to take a few deep breaths and unclench his hands.
*
Games tick past in the regular season, and Chase doesn’t do anything stupid.
Well, that’s not true, on or off the ice. Off the ice he remains too loud, obnoxious. He keeps trying to bait James, gets all the louder when James refuses to humor him. On the ice he rides a very fine line that James rarely approaches, and never on purpose. He gets more penalties than James would like, but they’re mostly stick infractions, which are always called tightly at the beginning of the season, the refs letting players know where the line in the sand has been drawn. A few cheap shots, but nothing like the sort he has a reputation for by now.
James has been watching carefully, warily, and he doesn’t stop watching, but after half a dozen games and nothing worse than some hooks and trips, he lets himself think that maybe Chase has changed, started to grow up a little, at least as a player.
Childish, they say when those sorts of things happen. James has never played in a league where those things were allowed, and certainly not when he was younger. When he was a child they couldn’t even check one another, let alone get away with what Chase has gotten away with. But he knows what they mean when they say childish. They mean driven by impulse, emotion. They mean unaware of consequences, or, if aware, uncaring, at least in the moment.
So it could be that Chase is growing up, maturing, has more control of his behavior, though James never really got the feeling that Chase was out of control when he was doing what he was doing, merely that he didn’t care about the rules, and worse, didn’t care whether he hurt someone else.
It could also be that Chase hasn’t changed at all, but he understands that he’s working within another system now, and the Whalers coaching staff doesn’t encourage that behavior. James knows so much of how players perform is based on who’s coaching them, and that doesn’t just apply to whether they reach their full potential or not. Systems are systems, and your job is to buy into what you’re told to do, because no system can be successful if those meant to execute it are derelict in their duties.
The Bruins are a big team, thrive on physicality. Chase crossed the line, but in Boston the line he was asked to straddle is well over the line now that he’s on the Whalers. The Whalers aren’t an overly physical team, rely on their speed, skill. Physicality, yes, but more of the type you need for board battles, forechecking. They can protect themselves, but they don’t go out looking for trouble. If trouble finds them, it finds them, but not because they were asking for it. He’s proud of that.
James is climbing back onto the bench at the end of his shift, back to the play, when he can hear the roar of the crowd, the particular one that means something physical has happened. It’s lower, if you pay attention, and James doesn’t know if it means it’s coming more from the men in the crowd than women and children, low due to the difference in the tenor of the voices, or if it’s just innate to that sound entirely, the rough instinctive satisfaction of violence.
By the time he’s sat down there’s a whistle, an official with their hand up for a penalty, and the crowd’s silent. James knows that silence too, the sickly, uneasy kind, would know even without looking what whoever went down hasn’t gotten up. They like the violence of it right until they’re reminded of the consequences. They like the violence without the violence. Sanitized for consumption.
The Jumbotron shows the replay while the refs huddle to decide the call, and this time the sound from the crowd is a collective wince, sucked through the teeth. It’s a textbook boarding call, could even get charging — multiple strides, unsuspecting player with their back to the play, right on the numbers.
James has been on the receiving end of a hit just like it more than once. Has gone down before like Jansen's down now. He missed three weeks with a concussion. For days he couldn’t keep food down, had to put blankets over the windows because even blackout curtains let in too much light. He was constantly on the verge of tears. He may have been cleared for play after three weeks, but he didn’t feel right for months after that, still gets a little nauseated by movies and TV shows with too many jump cuts, which never happened before the hit.
Chase argues the entire way to the box. James isn’t sure what possible argument he could be employing. Certainly not a case of mistaken identity. And not begging for leniency, James imagines, since only two minutes go up on the board, which is as lenient a call the refs could make without ignoring the hit entirely.
Jansen makes his way off the ice on his own steam, to stick taps from both benches. It’s a good sign. At least, James hopes it is. He knows it can be hard to gauge.
James keeps his eyes on the play, even though there isn’t any play, the game on a TV timeout. The Rangers captain is arguing with the ref. Presumably he’s unhappy Chase only received a minor, and James can’t blame him. Finn’s standing beside Garza, not saying anything, just filling the leadership role. James should be doing it, but he’s sitting here instead.
James can’t see the other team’s bench, keeps his eyes straight ahead, but he’s at the edge of his own, and he can hear the commentator between the benches say ‘down the tunnel’.
Not a good sign, but also not an unexpected one. No one’s allowing Jansen to step back onto the ice until they’ve tested him for a concussion. That's the protocol now, thankfully. James thought he was fine, said he was fine, ‘just got my bell rung’, and they believed him, because why wouldn’t they? He wasn’t lying to them. He played three more shifts that night before he was beelining down his own tunnel, dry heaving in a bathroom stall. Could have been worse. He knows how much worse it could have been.
He’s angry, he knows he is, knows he needs to control it, needs to keep his head in the game, and that’s before the Rangers score on the powerplay, erasing the Whalers’ one goal lead. Chase should be skating out of the box shamefaced, mortified, Chase should look embarrassed and penitent at absolute minimum, but he doesn’t. He looks pissed. It makes James angrier.
“What was that?” James says, as Chase clambers over the boards to sit beside him, shoulder to shoulder for the length of the television timeout. James should be getting onto the ice, he knows his line is going to be tapped to try to swing the momentum, but this is something for the bench, not the ice. It sounds like an arbitrary distinction, and maybe it is one, but regardless, he stays where he is, and so does Chase.
“What was what?” Chase asks. Either he’s the most oblivious person alive, or he thinks now’s a good time to goad James. Which circles right back to the most oblivious person alive.
“That hit,” James says.
“A hit,” Chase says, glancing over at James. “I know you barely throw them but—“
James doesn’t need to throw them too often, because he has a good stick, can separate the man from the puck just as easily, be streaking forward before his opponent’s even realized he turned it over, let alone started the chase. He hits if he needs to. But he doesn’t throw hits like that.
“That wasn’t a hit,” James says. Chase is lucky they called it boarding instead of charging, which gets looked at more closely by hockey ops for supplemental discipline, even luckier that it was just a minor. He cost them the lead, but he could have cost them more than that. He could have cost them the game, and still might, their one goal lead disappearing in the wake of Chase’s lack of discipline — no, that sounds like something a mealy mouthed minimizer would say. In the wake of Chase’s dirty hit, in the wake of Chase injuring someone he didn’t need to. Not that you ever need to.
Jansen hasn’t returned to the ice, and James doesn’t want to think about what it may have cost him. It’s not the time right now. It’s not the time for this either, but he’s too angry to care. “It certainly wasn’t a legal hit.”
“No shit, that’s why I got a penalty,” Chase says, looking at James like he’s an idiot.
“You’re lucky it wasn’t a major,” James says. “There’s illegal and then there’s —“
“You my teammate or are you the fucking ref, Erickson?” Chase says. “Fuck’s sakes. You want to bawl me out save it for the fucking room, dude.”
That’s the right move, what he should have done. He knows that, doesn’t need Chase to tell him, doesn’t need to feel the eyes of teammates and coaching staff on him right now. They need to keep their eyes forward, make up for Chase’s mistake instead of fighting about it. They’re in public. The first few rows behind the bench could probably hear all of that. And James stands by everything he said, but he knows it’s not something they should be hearing.
“If you want to do goon shit, don’t do it on my fucking line,” James says, and jumps over the boards, Chase’s sputtering laugh following him, a disbelieving, contemptuous sound, pure mockery, before Chase himself follows him onto the ice.