The Alpha's Goalie

Benji had the ice to himself for eleven minutes before the rest of them ruined it.

He’d made that deal with every season privately, like every deal he made—no witnesses. Get to Wexford Arena before the team. Cut the first lines into sheeted ice nobody had touched. Take the crease while the building was still dark past the boards and the only sound was his own edges and the hum of the compressors under the stands.

He skated a slow arc to the top of his circle and stopped, spraying snow, and gave the empty net the look he’d been giving empty nets since he was six. Then he went and stood in it. Tapped the left post with his stick. Tapped the right. Tapped the crossbar, once, because his mother had done it that way and he’d kept it long after she’d stopped being around to see. The mask he’d pull down when they came was the program’s—teal and white, a design a committee had settled before anyone thought to ask him, fifteen years of wearing what he was handed.

This part he loved. This was the whole reason he tolerated the rest of it.

Alone, he let his scent out. That was the other thing the empty barn was good for. Cedar and cold water, his mother used to call it, back when she was still around to call it anything, and out here with no one to read him he let it settle over the ice like breath fogging glass. Ten minutes of that. Then the tunnel door would open and he’d pull it back in, tight and flat and unreadable, drilled into him before he was ten. A Tanaka doesn’t leak, Benjamin. A Tanaka gives them nothing. By the time the team hit the ice he’d be the coach’s blank little goalie again, scent shut like a door.

The overhead banks came up in stages, blue-white, and the empty barn turned into a real rink. Benji dropped into his stance and held it, thighs burning pleasantly, and watched a puck that wasn’t there come down the wing.

Then the tunnel door banged and the season arrived, and he stopped loving anything.

They came in like they always did—loud, enormous, taking up more room than physics allowed. Sticks clattering the boards. Someone’s speaker already going. Wexford teal and the smell of twenty-odd alphas and a scattering of betas who’d learned to be louder to compensate, all of it rolling across the clean ice he’d had to himself thirty seconds ago.

“Tanaka’s already out here.” That was Ziemann, the alternate, gliding backward with his arms spread like he owned the place, because he mostly did. “Coach’s kid beat all of us. Again. Makes the rest of us look like shit, Benji.”

“Not hard,” Benji said, and didn’t come out of his crease.

Ziemann grinned and let it go, which was the correct response, and that was the extent of Benji’s relationship with the Wexford Wardens: correct responses, kept short. He’d been their goalie for three years. He could tell you Dvořák favoured his backhand under pressure and LaChance, the freshman, still flinched at slap shots he had no business flinching at, and Ziemann ran his mouth to hide that he tracked the room better than anyone on the roster. He could tell you all of it. He couldn’t have told you where a single one of them ate lunch. He was the only omega who started for Wexford, and the only one nobody made a thing of, because the coach’s kid in net was a fixture of the building like the dead clock over the scoreboard—there, overlooked, older than the freshmen.

You didn’t get close to hockey players. He’d learned that at the goddamn family dinner table—a skinny omega kid watching big alphas eat his mother’s cooking, talk about their plus-minus, and leave.

“Bring it in.” His father’s voice, and the whole building reorganized itself around it.

Kaz Tanaka came down the bench-side boards in a Wardens quarter-zip with a whistle he never needed to use, and the team drifted to him like filings to a magnet. Benji watched it happen from forty feet away. He’d been watching it happen his entire life and the pull of it still worked on him too, in a way he didn’t have a clean word for.

“Good summer?” his father asked the group, and got a ragged chorus, and laughed. “Yeah, I don’t care. It’s October. Summer’s fucking dead.” More laughter. He pointed his stick at LaChance without looking. “Angus. You grew.”

“Coach.”

“Good. We’ll use it.” Easy, warm, measured. He knew the freshman’s name and the freshman’s summer and the dose of attention that would make an eighteen-year-old skate through a wall for him. He knew it about all of them. “Stretch. Then flow drills. Then we find out who spent June on a beach.”

They loved him. Every one of them, openly—the easy love you’re allowed a coach who remembers your birthday and never once makes you feel small. Benji had spent three years watching his teammates get from his father the version of Kaz Tanaka that Benji got maybe one month in four, and he’d stopped being able to decide whether that made it better or worse.

He loved his dad. He genuinely did—and no one would have understood that.

“Tanaka.” His father’s eyes found him last, like always, and warmed, like always, in front of people. “You planning to join us, or are you just gonna charge rent on that crease?”

“Rent,” Benji said. “You’re behind.”

The team laughed, delighted, coach’s kid mouthing off, and Kaz laughed too, and only Benji caught the half-second where the laugh didn’t reach anywhere. Then it was gone, and his father was moving the group into flow, and Benji told himself he’d imagined it. He told himself a lot of things.

He didn’t get to skate the flow drills. Goalies never did. He worked his angles at the top of the crease and let the bodies rush past him in waves, tracking pucks, reading the rush before it developed, and this was the other thing he loved and would never say: that he was better at reading these men than they were at being read. He knew what they’d do before they did. Fifteen years of it. His father had taught him to see the whole sheet instead of chasing the puck, and it was the one gift from Kaz that Benji had never once resented.

“Goalie drills after,” his father called. “Shooters, get your feet under you. Then we do a little competition. Wake everybody up.”

Benji already knew what the competition would be. It was always the same on the first hard day back. Breakaways. Shooters against the goalie, one on one, the oldest and stupidest and most humiliating exercise in the sport, designed by some sadist a century ago to remind a goaltender that he stood alone and everyone got to watch him fail.

He loved that too. That was the sickness of it.

“Tanaka, you good?” Dvořák, gliding past, actually asking, which for Dvořák counted as a soliloquy.

“I’m always good,” Benji said, and dropped and stretched into his butterfly and came back up, once, twice, feeling the ice through his pads, and for a moment the barn narrowed to the only thing that had ever made sense to him. Puck. Net. Him. Nothing his father did at home could get through a mask.

A rush came at him in the third wave, Dvořák walking the line, and Benji saw the seam open before Dvořák did—saw the weak-side winger drifting into the soft ice behind the defence, saw the pass that hadn’t been thrown yet already hanging in the air of his head. He was moving before the puck left the blade. When the one-timer came it came where he already was, and he took it in the chest and smothered it and heard the winger swear into his cage.

“That’s bullshit,” LaChance said, awed by nothing again. “He didn’t even look.”

“He looked,” Dvořák said. “You just didn’t see him do it.”

“How’s he do that.”

“Ask his dad. His dad built him.”

Benji flicked the puck to the corner and said nothing, because Dvořák wasn’t wrong, and because built by Kaz Tanaka was a sentence that meant two completely different things depending on which side of the front door you were standing on.

“Nice read.” His father, passing behind the net, pitched it just loud enough to carry to the line. “You see that, boys? That’s fifteen years. That’s a kid who did his homework.” Warm. Proud. A broad hand landing on the crown of Benji’s mask, once, like you’d cuff a good dog, and the room ate it up—coach and his goalie kid, the whole wholesome picture.

Only Benji felt the fingers press half a beat too hard against the cage before they let go. A private punctuation mark, for an audience of one. We’ll discuss the homework you didn’t do when we’re home.

“Thanks, Coach,” Benji said, to the ice, and his father was already gone, clapping his hands, moving the drill along, beloved.

The team clustered at the far blue line while Kaz set it up, and Benji skated back into his crease and tapped the posts again, left, right, crossbar, and looked down the ice at the loose knot of teal jerseys deciding who went first.

They were arguing about it, laughing, shoving. Then they stopped, and the knot opened, and let one man through.

Benji knew who it would be before he saw the number. Of course it was him. It was always going to be him.

Leon Pérez came off the blue line at a lazy roll, stick across his thighs, in no hurry, because he’d never once had to hurry to be looked at. Six-three of him. The C stitched over his heart. The hair already a disaster where his helmet had crushed it. Projected first round, the whole country waiting to find out which club got him, and he skated toward the top of the circle like the drill was a favour he was doing everyone.

Benji had shared a locker room with him for three years and thought about him approximately never.

“Captain’s honour,” Ziemann called from the line. “Try not to cry, Prez.”

Pérez didn’t answer. He set a puck on his blade at the hash marks, dead centre, and rolled it under the toe of his stick, back and forth, unbothered, and lifted his chin at Benji across thirty feet of clean ice.

“Coach’s kid,” he said, like it was the whole of what Benji was. “Ready?”

Benji dropped into his stance.

“No,” he said. “But you can go anyway.”