Ten Years for Wanting

The locker room smelled like sweat, cheap body wash, and something Malik had long since stopped trying to name. Ego, maybe. Twenty-four men who believed they were God’s gift to the ice and each other’s worst enemy off it. The stench had its own personality.

He pulled his jersey over his head and let the routine settle into his bones. Pads off. Tape stripped. Skates unlaced with the same mechanical precision he’d been using since he was fifteen. Comfort lived in the ritual, even here. Especially here.

“Yo, Willy.” Gretzko—his real name was Garrison, but the rookie had made the mistake of saying he’d modeled his game after Wayne, and the room had turned it into a leash. Gretzko dropped onto the bench beside him, still pink-faced from the third period. “You see Hargrove’s new girlfriend? Absolute fucking smoke show. Like, criminally hot.”

Malik smiled. “Yeah? Good for him.”

“Good for him?” Gretzko looked personally offended. “Bro, she’s like a ten. Maybe an eleven. Hargrove’s a six on his best day. That’s divine intervention.”

From across the room, Petrov snorted. He was shirtless already, his tattoos catching the fluorescent light in a way that made them look cheaper than they probably were. “Hargrove couldn’t pull a muscle, let alone a girl like that. She’s gotta be after the contract.”

Laughter. Sharp, quick. The room ate it up.

Malik kept his head down and worked at the tape on his wrists. Pull. Tear. Roll. Discard. Again.

“Speaking of pulling,” Kessler said, and his voice had that edge—the one that meant he thought he was about to be hilarious and everyone else would pretend to agree. Kessler was a second-line winger with a $4.2 million cap hit and the emotional range of a parking meter. “Did anyone see that figure skater on TV last night? The one from Nationals?”

“Which one?” Gretzko asked.

“The dude.” Kessler let the word sit for a moment, gauging the room. “The one in the sparkly shirt. Looked like he raided his sister’s closet.”

Petrov laughed first. Then Hargrove. Then the wave rolled outward—each laugh louder than the last, each one a small act of allegiance.

The sound landed in Malik’s chest like a stone into still water.

He smiled.

He always smiled.

“Guy could probably out-skate half this roster,” Malik said, and the delivery was perfect—warm enough to pass as a joke, pointed enough to redirect. The room pivoted. Gretzko started arguing about edge work. Kessler moved on to something about his truck.

The moment passed.

They always passed.

Malik reached for his water bottle and took a long drink, letting the cold settle his throat. His hands were steady. His jaw ached from the smile he’d been wearing for two and a half hours, but that was fine. That was the price of the seat.

Four seasons on this team. Two hundred and twelve regular-season games. Thirty-one playoff appearances. One conference final. Zero people in this room who knew the first real thing about him.

You gave them the version they could stomach, and you kept the rest locked so deep that some days you almost forgot it was there.

Almost.

Coach pulled him aside after the room cleared out.

Billings was a decent coach. Tough where coaches need to be tough, and soft in exactly none of the places that counted. He liked Malik because Malik produced. Simple math. Points equaled approval. Approval equaled safety.

“Good game tonight, Will.” Billings had a habit of shortening last names, like he was building camaraderie one syllable at a time. “That breakaway pass in the second was textbook.”

“Appreciate it, Coach.”

“Listen.” Billings folded his arms. He had the look—front office, trade talk, something Malik was supposed to care about. “We’re making a move. Management’s been in talks with Boston for a couple weeks now.”

“Boston.” Malik kept his voice neutral. Interested but unbothered. “Who are we looking at?”

“Center. Veteran. Exact kind of guy we need if we’re going to fix that second line.” Billings paused, and something crossed his face—like he was trying to read Malik before he delivered the rest. “Fraser Vaughn.”

The name landed.

It landed the way a bad edge takes your feet out—sudden, lateral, your brain three full seconds behind your body.

Malik blinked.

“Vaughn,” he repeated, because his mouth was still working even though the rest of him had gone somewhere far away and very quiet.

“You know him?”

“Played with him.” True. Technically true. The most dangerous truth—the kind that covers everything by revealing nothing. “Years ago.”

“Right, you were both in the UHL, weren’t you? Same draft year or something?”

Same draft year. Same team. Same billet house for six months because the host family had taken them both in, two seventeen-year-olds sharing a twin bedroom in a suburb outside Edmonton with wallpaper peeling off the ceiling and a bathroom lock that stuck if you turned it too hard.

Same bed, some nights.

“Something like that,” Malik said.

Billings nodded, already moving on. “He’s a competitor. Tough son of a bitch. Exactly the kind of edge this lineup’s been missing. Front office wants to announce it by Wednesday.”

Wednesday. Four days.

“Sounds good, Coach.”

“Glad you’re on board.” Billings clapped him on the shoulder—we’re done here—and walked away.

Malik stood in the hallway outside the locker room for a long time after that.

The arena was emptying. He could hear the muffled Zamboni through the walls, that low mechanical hum that always dragged him back to being young and stupid and certain the world would eventually arrange itself into something survivable.

Fraser Vaughn.

He pressed his back against the cinder block wall and closed his eyes.

Ten years. A full decade of building a life on top of what he’d buried. A career, a reputation, a version of himself that laughed at the right moments and said the right things and went home alone to an apartment that looked like a magazine spread because there was nobody in it to make it messy.

And now the league—the universe, God, whatever cruel architect was running this particular simulation—had decided to drop Fraser Vaughn into his locker room.

The last time he’d seen Vaughn off the ice. Really seen him. A parking lot in Edmonton, November, cold so sharp your lungs felt full of glass. Vaughn’s face half-lit by a streetlamp. His bag already in the car. Four minutes of conversation that gutted Malik for four years.

He’d told himself it was right. Vaughn leaving. Separating before the league separated them. Before someone found out. Before the thing between them became the thing that ended them both.

Funny how right and worst could wear the same face.

His phone buzzed.

He pulled it out. Group chat. The team’s unofficial thread—no coaches, the one where Kessler posted memes that would’ve gotten them all fined if PR ever saw them.

Kess: heard we’re getting vaughn from boston Kess: guys a machine. zero personality tho lol Petrov: dude doesn’t smile. ever. Gretzko: maybe he’s just built different Kess: built like a brick wall with a bad attitudeHargrove: as long as he scores idgaf

Malik stared at the screen.

His thumb hovered over the keyboard. He could type something easy. Something light. Should be good for us or let’s see what he’s got. Something that sounded like a teammate and nothing like someone who’d once memorized the exact pressure of Fraser Vaughn’s mouth against his collarbone in the dark.

He locked the phone. Put it in his pocket.

Walked to his car.

Drove home to the magazine-spread apartment, poured two fingers of bourbon he barely tasted, and stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Biscayne Bay while the city burned orange and violet beneath him.

Fraser Vaughn was coming to Miami.

Fraser Vaughn, who played center like he was trying to punish the ice for existing.

Fraser Vaughn, who he had loved from seventeen to twenty-one with the kind of ferocity young men are only capable of once—total, annihilating, the kind that leaves scar tissue so deep it becomes architecture.

Malik set the bourbon down. Pressed his forehead to the glass. The bay glittered forty stories below, dark mirror.

His phone buzzed again.

He ignored it.

Then it buzzed a second time. A third.

He pulled it out.

A different thread this time. Private. A number he’d deleted from his contacts three years ago but still recognized—the way you recognize your own handwriting, or your own voice, or the shape of a wound you gave yourself.

Unknown: We need to talk.