Bring the Good Snacks

You don't text back.

You think about it for the whole day. You think about it through morning skate, where Mason takes faceoffs and doesn't glance at the bench where you're filming. You think about it through lunch, through a meeting with Cassius about "data hygiene" that makes you want to set your own hair on fire, through a two-hour session tagging penalty kills until your eyes feel sandpapered.

You don't text back, but at 11:24 p.m. you're in the Cave with a bag of salt and vinegar chips on the desk.

It's for you. You like salt and vinegar. It's a coincidence.

At 11:31 the steel door opens, and Mason Dufresne walks in like he owns the building. Gray hoodie, hood up, hair damp, two coffees in a cardboard tray. He sees the chips and stops dead.

"You brought the good snacks."

"I brought my snacks."

"Salt and vinegar is the good snacks. That's not an opinion, that's a fact, Mullane." He sets a coffee next to your keyboard. "Oat milk, one sugar, Ava."

You stare at it. "How do you know how I take my coffee?"

"You ordered it at the Breakwater at eleven at night. It was alarming. I remember alarming things." He drops onto the bruise-colored couch, which groans like it knows him, and rips open the chips. "Okay. Show me."

"Show you what?"

"Why my line got cooked on the PK last year." He props his socked feet on the coffee table. "You had it on your phone the other night. Nine of twenty. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it."

"You came down here at midnight to watch penalty kills."

"I come down here at midnight a lot." He shrugs, suddenly a little less cocky. "Old habit. Junior coach used to lock the video room at six, so I'd sneak in through the Zamboni bay. Faceoffs mostly. I lose too many on my backhand side."

You look at him. The captain with the fan accounts. The guy who did a backflip on the ice after a hat trick last spring and got fined for it. Sitting on a dead couch with chip dust on his fingers, admitting he studies his own faceoffs alone at night.

"Okay," you say slowly, and pull up the first clip.

It's two hours before either of you looks at a clock.

He's good at this. Really good. He sees things you can't see, because he's been there: the way a winger cheats a half step toward the boards before a pass, the way a defenseman's stick blade tells you where he's going. You see things he can't, because you've watched it eighty times from above. He pauses clips with his thumb on the remote and says, "Wait, run that back," and you run it back, and he leans forward with his elbows on his knees, totally absorbed, and you have to remind yourself to look at the screen and not at the line of his jaw in the monitor light.

"There," he says around one a.m. "Again."

You run it back. The Gales are up 2-1 against Hartford in February. Early second period. Number 4, Zeke Gorski, the big, quiet defenseman, reaches out and hooks a Hartford forward who is going absolutely nowhere. Lazy. Pointless. The ref's arm goes up. Hartford scores on the power play forty seconds later.

"Gorski does that," Mason says. "Did that. Last year. It drove me nuts."

"How often?"

"Enough that I stopped yelling at him about it, because he'd just look at me like a sad dog." He frowns. "He's a good player. He doesn't make stupid plays. Except, like, a lot of times last year he did."

You scroll through your tags. You've been marking every penalty with a time stamp, and now you sort them. Gorski's penalties line up in a column.

Second period. Second period. Second period. Within the first three minutes after the intermission, over and over.

"Huh," you say.

"Huh?" He's moved closer. You didn't notice him do it. He's on the arm of your chair now, looking over your shoulder, his knee almost touching your arm. "What's huh?"

"Nothing yet. It's just a cluster." You turn your head to explain, and his face is right there.

Close. So close you can see the scar through his eyebrow is actually two thin lines, not one. So close you can smell the coffee on his breath and the cedar soap from the alley.

Neither of you moves.

"This is a bad idea," he says quietly.

"Terrible."

"Your father would put me on a bus."

"Winnipeg is cold this time of year."

His mouth tips up. His gaze drops to your lips, and his hand lifts, slowly, like he's going to touch your face the way he did in the rain...

"... and I want to know who keeps putting quarters in this thing when it says exact change." Your father's voice. In the hallway. Getting closer.

You both freeze.

Then Mason is off the chair in one silent move, and you're grabbing his hoodie and shoving him toward the back of the room, where a rolling rack of spare equipment stands against the wall: shin pads, old jerseys, a row of helmets on hooks. He folds himself behind it with an expression of pure betrayal. You yank a practice jersey down over the gap where his shoulder shows.

The door opens.

"Ava." Your father squints at you over his reading glasses. "It's one in the morning."

"I'm working."

"I can see that." He shuffles in wearing a Gales windbreaker over pajama pants, holding a mug. "Couldn't sleep. Came to watch the Hartford game again. Why is there a bag of chips?"

"I was hungry."

"Two coffees?"

"I was... very tired."

He grunts and sinks onto the couch, right where Mason was sitting. You can feel the equipment rack behind you like it's radioactive. Your father picks up the chip bag and looks inside. "These are the gross ones."

"They're the good ones."

"You sound like Dufresne." He tosses the bag back on the table, and you nearly die. "Don't stay too late, Ava. And don't let anybody tell you you're only here because of me, okay? You're here because you're the best. I read your thesis twice."

Your throat goes tight. "Thanks, Dad."

He leaves. His slippers shuffle away down the hall, and somewhere far off the vending machine thunks, and then a door shuts.

Behind you a shin pad falls off the rack.

Mason emerges, pulling a jersey off his head. He doesn't look amused anymore. He looks shaken.

"I'm sorry," you say. "That was..."

"No, it's fine. It was smart." He picks up his coffee, then sets it down again without drinking. He looks at the door your father went through. "Listen. Coach can't know I was here."

"I know. The rule."

"No." He shakes his head. "Not for the reason you think."

You wait for him to explain. He doesn't. He pulls his hood up, grabs the chip bag, then puts it back on your desk like he's changed his mind and wants you to keep it.

"Goodnight, Mullane," he says, and he's gone.

You sit in the hum of the monitors for a long time, staring at a column of time stamps.

Then your phone lights up with his name. You saved it last night. You didn't mean to.

91 is typing.