There’s game film on my phone, and notes in my notebook, and I realize, sitting here, that Luca is normally the one who opens the meeting. He’ll talk about the team, what he knows, what happened the last time he was on the ice with them.
And now, he just sits in his chair, staring blankly into the distance. Quiet.
Any other man might be losing his shit right now with the knowledge of reporters outside his house and outside this arena, pushing up on the boundaries of his life trying to see inside.
But Luca McKenzie is, of course, still. Calm. Everything that’s tumultuous inside him hidden under the surface.
“Are you…good?” I manage, sitting up a little, eyes darting past him.
My dad was never comfortable sitting in bad feelings. When a relationship ended, it was time for the next big, better thing. If there was a problem, we fixed it with action. Creative thinking. There was never any time for moping, and now, when I see a version of it on Luca’s face, it makes impatience ripple inside me.
“Yeah,” he says, clearing his throat and flipping over to another page in his binder. “Great.”
Then, nothing. This room, which is normally so full of life when we’re here together, is painfully silent now, with nothing but the sound of our breathing to fill the space.
It makes me want to crawl out of my skin.
Shutting my notebook a little too hard, I say, “I thought you said you weren’t in love with her.”
He looks up, blinking at me, as if genuinely surprised that I’ve navigated the conversation back to his divorce after such a non-engagement in our strategy.
“I’m not,” he says, brow wrinkling.
“So, stop.”
“Stop—what?”
“All—” I wave my hand around, gesturing vaguely to where he’s sitting “—this. The moping, or whatever this is.”
“I’m not moping.”
“Well, you’re definitely not doing your job, and it’s freaking me out.”
He stares at me for a second, then a little bubble of incredulous laughter comes out of him. “It’sfreaking you out?”
“Yeah, do you want to do something about it? What is bothering you? Because I know a couple of tricks we can do to fuck with the paparazzi. We could drive by and blow glitter on them—though we’ll have to spend a pretty penny on glitter. The edible stuff—it’s the most difficult to get off.”
“No, I don’t want to assault the press,” he says, shaking his head. “And I’m not going to ask why you know that.”
“Glitter is a good non-weapon,” I argue, sitting back in my chair and crossing my arms. “So, what’s the problem?”
“The problem is that my personal life is on display for the world!”
He doesn’t raise his voice, exactly, but he definitely puts more emphasis on it than he has since I first saw him inside the door today.
“Okay, so—how do we fix it?”
“I’ll just have to wait for it to go away.”
“And throw the season in the meantime?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Our voices start to rise, and I know there’s something wrong with me—how I crave the adrenaline of this, how I start to get out of my seat, eyes fixed on him.
He’s a big man, probably strong enough to throw me, but I’m the one with the upper hand here. Because I know something about him that he doesn’t seem to understand.
“Luca, if you justwaitfor this to go away, the team’s going to suffer. Lose more games. That will occur not just from the loss of your performance, but from the loss of their leader. Your attitude affects a lot more on the team than you think.”
