Crosschecked

Tanner

The thing about fighting was that people always assumed Tanner liked it.

He didn’t correct them. It wasn’t worth the breath, and besides, the assumption was useful. Kept reporters at a distance. Kept opposing players cautious. Kept the world at a manageable remove. Let them think he was an animal. Animals didn’t have to explain themselves.

The clock on the scoreboard read 14:23 in the second period when it started.

He saw it before it happened, the way he always did. Twenty-three years of learning to read bodies. The tension that preceded impact. The weight shift that meant incoming.

Jake Matthews was twenty-two years old and fast and good and absolutely had no idea that Brennan—Philly’s left winger, third round pick, career built on being someone else’s problem—had been lining him up for six full minutes.

Christ, kid. Pay attention.

Tanner was already moving when Brennan hit him.

It was a clean check, technically. The refs would say so. Clean enough to be legal, dirty enough to matter—the angle chosen to catch Matthews wrong. The kid went down hard. Helmet to the boards. The sound was not a good sound.

The arena went briefly, collectively still.

And then Tanner was there.

He didn’t remember crossing the ice. That part never came with him cleanly. The distance collapsed and then he was just present, in Brennan’s space, and Brennan had enough time to register what was happening before Tanner’s hand closed in his jersey.

“Sullivan.”

Someone said his name. He didn’t stop.

The first punch landed the way they always did. He’d been doing this long enough that it didn’t look like rage from the outside. He knew that. From the outside it looked methodical.

Which was, in its way, worse.

Brennan got one in. Tanner let him. Didn’t matter.

By the time the linesmen got between them—two of them, because it always took two—Matthews was back on his feet at the boards. Helmet off. Dazed and young and fine. Probably fine. Tanner observed this in the half second before the penalty box door closed behind him.

Fine. The kid was fine.

He sat down.

The crowd noise settled back into itself. The game resumed. Tanner pressed the back of his wrist against the split at his cheekbone and stared at the ice and waited for the quiet that came after. Not peace, exactly. The absence of the thing that had been present.

His hands were steady.

They were always steady after. During, even. That was the part he’d never been able to explain to anyone who asked, and the reason he’d stopped trying.

Fighting major. Five minutes. His seventh in as many games.

Fantastic.

He knew what was coming before he was even off the ice.

Carlos Pérez was waiting in the corridor outside the locker room. Which meant Carlos had left his seat in the third row sometime during the second period and navigated through the bowels of Capital One Arena to intercept him.

Which meant this conversation had been building for longer than tonight.

Carlos was a good agent. Patient. Strategic. Relentless in the way that worked for both of them. He was also, currently, looking at Tanner like a man staring at a bill he couldn’t pay.

"Seven,” Carlos said.

Tanner said nothing. Pressed a towel to his cheek.

“Seven majors, Tanner. Seven consecutive games.” Carlos fell into step beside him. “Do you know what ESPN ran during the third intermission last Tuesday?”

“I don’t watch ESPN.”

“They ran a segment. An actual segment.” Carlos pulled out his phone, held it up. Tanner did not look at it. “They’re calling you a liability. They’re saying the Ravens organization has a—and I’m quoting—a culture of tolerating dangerous behaviour. The league has sent two letters. Two.”

“Matthews is fine.”

“That is not the point—”

“He went into the boards wrong.” Tanner stopped at the locker room door. “Brennan’s been running our rookies all season. Someone was going to answer for it.”

“I know.” Carlos’s voice shifted. Lost the agent quality. Became something more honest. “I know, okay? I know. You’re not wrong about what happened out there. You’re never wrong about what happened out there.” A pause. “That’s not the problem.”

Tanner looked at him.

Carlos looked back, and in his expression was the thing neither of them said often: this is unsustainable.

“The league is watching,” Carlos said quietly. “The front office is watching. And you have eight years of this in the headlines. Eight years of segments and opinion pieces and Twitter threads about whether Tanner Sullivan is too dangerous for the sport.” He put his phone away. “I need you to give me something to work with. Some kind of public-facing evidence that you’re not just a weapon with a jersey on.”

Tanner said nothing for a long moment.

Then: “you want me to do press.”

“I want you to do something. Anything. Let people see —” Carlos made a frustrated gesture at all of him. “Whatever thatis, under there. The part that isn’t the fighting. Because I have to tell you. From where the public sits, they don’t know it exists.”

Yeah, Tanner thought. Working theory: it doesn’t.

He pushed open the locker room door.

“I’ll think about it,” he said. Which both of them knew meant no.

The locker room was the kind of loud it got after a win—and they’d won, 4-2, which meant the mood was good despite the drama of the second period. Rey had his music playing from somewhere. Patches was engaged in a loud debate with Sunny about something in French that Sunny did not speak, which had never once stopped Sunny from participating. Felix was already halfway out of his gear with the quiet efficiency of a man who had somewhere better to be.

Jake Matthews was sitting at his stall with an ice pack against the back of his neck and the expression of someone trying very hard to look fine.

Tanner stopped in front of him.

Matthews looked up. He was young enough that he still went slightly wide-eyed around Tanner sometimes—a habit he was mostly growing out of. “I’m good,” he said immediately. “Seriously. The trainer already —”

“I know,” Tanner said.

Matthews blinked.

Tanner sat down at his own stall, one over. Started unlacing his skates. Without looking up: “heads up next time. He was telegraphing.”

A beat of silence.

“...yeah,” Matthews said. “Yeah, I—yeah. I will.”

Tanner nodded once. End of conversation.

Across the room, he was aware of Sunny watching the exchange with the expression he got sometimes—the one that wasn’t the joke. The one underneath. Anton caught Tanner’s eye from the other end of the room and said nothing, which from Anton meant something.

Tanner looked back at his skates.

He’d punch Brennan again. He’d punch him tomorrow. He’d punch him next Tuesday in a different city. The kid had gone into the boards wrong and someone had to answer for it and that someone was always going to be him, because that’s what he was here for, and Carlos and ESPN and the league office could file whatever opinions they wanted in whatever colour binders they had, because the math hadn’t changed.

The math was simple.

You hurt one of his kids, you got hit.

He pulled the laces tight.

He stayed late, the way he usually did. Let the room clear. Sat in the quiet with his hands wrapped around a bottle of water that had gone warm, and let himself be still for a minute before the drive home.

His phone had seventeen notifications. He checked three of them before he stopped.

Sullivan’s career penalty record speaks for itself... can the Ravens keep justifying this liability... seventh major raises serious questions about whether...

He put the phone face down on the bench.

Serious questions. Always with the serious questions. Eight years of serious questions. Twenty separate journalists had built mid-tier careers asking variations of the same serious question, and somehow every six months one of them stumbled into the realisation that they could ask it again with a different verb and get fresh engagement out of it.

He should write them a glossary.

Volatile, unpredictable, dangerous, liability, concern, pattern, troubling, problematic, simply the latest in a long line of —

He cracked his neck. The split at his cheekbone protested.

The quiet of the empty locker room was a particular kind of sound. The building settling. The distant work of the ice crew. The low hum of fluorescent lights. He’d sat in rooms like this for twenty-three years, in every rink from Sudbury to Vegas, and the quiet was always the same. The one constant.

He was thirty-one years old. He had, according to Carlos, an image problem.

He turned his hands over in his lap. Looked at the knuckles. Split on two. Tape still around the third finger where the old fracture lived. His hands looked like what they were. Instruments. Tools built for a purpose. Used accordingly.

Public-facing evidence.

He didn’t have any. He didn’t know how to manufacture any. He didn’t know, if he were being honest with himself for thirty consecutive seconds, that there was anything to manufacture. He was thirty-one years old and built like a wall and people had been looking at him like he was a threat since he was fifteen. At some point you stopped fighting it.

Or rather. You kept fighting. Just not the part that was looking at you.

He stood. Pulled on his jacket. Picked up his bag.

Tomorrow there would be a film session. There would be, apparently, some kind of conversation about his public image and what could be done about it. There would be the eighth game of the season coming fast, and somewhere in the league office, someone was building a case.

Eighth game. He’d punch someone in that one too, probably.

Seven, Carlos had said.

Tanner Sullivan walked out of the arena into the cold Washington night with split knuckles and a split cheek and the silence of a man who had spent his whole life being exactly one thing, and was starting, in ways he had no language for, to wonder what else there was.