Puck Me Harder

ELLE

The Riverside Chronicle newsroom smells of stale ambition and cold coffee. I've been freelancing long enough to know it, that specific cocktail of fluorescent desperation you only find in mid-tier local news outfits. A place where everyone is one good story away from somewhere bigger or resigned to being exactly where they'll die

I will not resign myself. But today, I am not here either.

“Elle. In my office. Now.

Sienna Chen doesn’t ask. She commands it the way she does everything, with the sort of casual authority that makes you forget you have a choice. Her office is basically a glass box in the corner of the newsroom, so everyone can see this conversation taking place. Everyone's watching. I can feel it, the prickling of eyes following my every movement as I get up and walk toward her.

I get what this is. I've been avoiding her calls for three days.

She says, "Sit," and I sit. The chair is not comfortable. Probably deliberately.

Sienna is forty-eight, ruthlessly competent, and has been senior editor of the Chronicle for six years. Besides, she's the only one in this building who ever took my work seriously. That's the thing that makes this bad.

"You haven't opened the assignment file," she says. No question.

"Busy."

“With what? Your last piece was turned in 4 days ago. She leans back in her chair and looks at me. I emailed you the sports editor brief. The Forge title shift. Access is embedded for six months. This is the job, Elle. "This is the mission."

The forge. Of course it’s The Forge.

"I don't want to," I say flatly.

“You’re not—” Sienna stops herself. He draws a breath. She’s good at that kind of thing, at adjusting her reaction when she wants something out of you. "Elle, see what I'm putting in front of you? Full embed with a pro hockey club, 6 months of unlimited access, and their championship run begins this year. Your byline on a serialized story that could be national. This is the thing that gets you into a big outlet. “This is the thing that gets you out, like, like this newsroom was a prison. Like my life is something I’m trying to escape from.

Perhaps so.

Go find somebody else,” I say.

“I don’t want anybody more. I want you. Sienna folds her hands on the desk. There are times when I think she might act carelessly, and that makes it harder. What’s happening?”

"Nothing's happening. “I’m not interested in doing hockey.”

It’s a lie so thin you can see through it. You know, and I know. And we both know the reason.

Sienna lets out a slow breath. "It is about Blake Delvalle."

I say nothing. Not saying anything is a kind of confirmation.

That was five years ago, Elle. You were kids.

"No," I said. "I get up. "You can't send me off on this, and you know it."

"You're not being assigned to anything. "I'm giving you the most important assignment of your career, and you're running from it because you're afraid."

Afraid, the word hangs between us. It’s so raw, so naked, I almost want to laugh. I can't. Because she’s right.

“Find somebody else,” I say again, and walk out.

I do not wait for her to answer. I don’t wait for anything. I just go.

~FIVE YEARS BEFORE~

I am twenty-four, and I am in love so thoroughly, so desperately, that it terrifies me.

Blake lives in a small one-bedroom in the Arts District and is barely scraping by on his rookie contract. But his is his; my hand is shaking, and I'm setting the candlesticks on the little dining table we bought together at an estate sale.

It took four hours to eat supper. My favorite is beef tenderloin with truffle butter, roasted potatoes with rosemary, and a salad. I chopped the vegetables for it as if I were defusing a bomb. I even made dessert, a chocolate mousse with candied orange peel. From the ground up. This was Blbirthday's birthday, and since it only happens once a year, I wanted this to be perfect.

The table looks as if it were taken from a magazine. I arranged it like that: candlesticks were sticks symmetrically placed; the cloth napkins were folded; and the rose petals were artfully scattered about the plates I bought. I took a picture before he got home because I wanted to remember what it looked like before it got real.

It’s simply perfect.

He should have eaten here at eight. He finishes practice by seven. It takes twenty minutes to drive across town.

He's coming at midnight.

I’m still awake, just barely. just. The food is cold now. The candles have burned so low. I'd already fired them an hour ago. I couldn't watch them go to waste.

Blake opened the door, and he's still in his gear, most of it. His jacket was over the expensive street clothes he’d been wearing more lately. His hair is damp from his shower at the practice facility. He smells like the training room, liniment and sweat and that industrial soap they use.

At first he doesn't even see the table.

“Hey, baby,” he says, and his voice sounds wrong, tired, far away. He still has his gym bag. Sorry I am late. The coach called an emergency practice. The rivalry game is two weeks away and—”

"It's your birthday, Blake.

My voice is low. I don't mean accusatorily, but it does come across that way. One by one, it falls.

Then he looks at me, and I see his eyes go to the table. The candle burns. The rose's petals. The plates of cold food that I had made for four hours.

"Oh, baby," he says, his voice full of genuine remorse. I can read it in his face. But it is the regret of one who has already died. I'm so sorry, "I didn't," said Coach. "

"I know what Coach said. "I get up. My legs are stiff from sitting so long. "B'day wishes.

He walks the space between us and kisses my forehead. A kiss from someone in love with you but thinking of something else. Now I know the difference.

“Are we doing this tomorrow?” he asks. I'm dead as fuck, Elle. I can't even—" He pulls away from me and collapses directly onto the couch, still wearing his jacket.

Tomorrow never arrives. Not how I thought it would be.

I tidy up by myself. The bacon is congealed and gelled, and the sauce is separated into gray and oil. I shovel it into the bin. The mousse now has a skin on it. The candlesticks smell sharp. I blow them out even though they are dead already.

Blake is asleep by the time I finish. Real sleep. The kind that makes innocent slackensacks his face. The kind where he won't notice me leaving the room.

I do leave. Not the apartment, but the moment. I sit on the edge of the bed and watch him sleep and know with a burning clarity that I have already lost him.

He just doesn’t know it yet.

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When I come home, the assignment file is on my kitchen table.

I didn't download it. Sienna did that for me probably, sent it to my account, and made sure it was accessible, a digital gift-wrapped box I couldn't say no to.

My apartment is the antithesis of Blake's. All angles, no furniture. Nothing extraneous. Nothing to be disappointed about. The walls are bare except for one framed photo I never look at. My best friend Kai and I at our twenty-third birthday, both of us howling with laughter at something I've already forgotten.

I'm sitting at the table, a gray particleboard thing from IKEA, and I open the file THE PUCK: THE FORGE'S ROAD TO GLORY.

There is a blurb under it. Some kind of story about the team's expected trajectory, their new roster, their championship window.

And then:

NEW CAPTAIN: BLAKE DELVALLE APPOINTED AS THE LEADER OF THE FORGE

The words are on my screen. I am in my kitchen. There is a space between the two that should be bigger than it is.

“Blake is the captain.” The captain of the forge. Five years, and he's gone from promising rookie to franchise face. The guy who's going to be on every news and news sports network is the kind of coverage that means you can't live in this city without seeing his face.

I look at the picture they have included. Now he's gotten older. His face has acquired the kind of hardened look that comes from being hit repeatedly for five years in a contact sport. His eyes are more acute. He’s not as soft as when he collapsed on my couch at midnight when he was twenty-three.

He looks like a guy who won and kept going.

I don't look at the rest of the file. I can't do that. I don't. I pick up the phone and pull up Sienna's name in my contacts. For a long time I hover my finger over the call button.

She was right. On pretty much everything. About me being afraid. About this being the task. About me having to go back in there and take it anyway.

But I can't go that way. Not yet. Not on this day.

Before I can make the call, my phone buzzes.

SIENNA CHEN (5:47 PM): I will wait for your reply. But not for ever.

I turn the phone face down on the table.

I still have the assignment file open on my laptop. Blake’s captain photo gazes up at me from the screen, and I realize I’ve been holding my breath for five years and not quite known it.

I'll have to start breathing sometime.

But not tonight.