Chapter Two

September

The more Eric thought about it, the angrier the new hire made him.

Ryan fucking Sullivan? Was Conroy kidding him?

If they were going solely by hockey careers, then Ryan Sullivan was a name . He was more than a name. He was a story. A guy who'd been told his whole life that he was too small to play hockey, who'd forced his way into the league and made it in a huge way.

Not only had he been a longtime alternate captain for the Desperadoes, he'd helped lead them to a Cup, scoring the game-winning goal in the Cup-clinching game. He'd had all of the hardware, the MVP award, scoring awards, sportsmanship awards...you fucking name it, Sullivan had won it. He had been inducted into the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility, because of course he was.

Eric remembered playing against him, too. He'd been an annoying little pest even back then, running his mouth at every opportunity and hiding behind Murphy whenever anyone took offense. Sullivan would fight if he had to, but the thing was that he almost never had to. Anyone looking at him funny found Murphy in their face first.

Fine.

Maybe Eric was jealous of the fact that Sullivan had all of the glory Eric had never managed to win with the Stampede. Even if he was jealous, it didn't matter. The fact was that the highest level Sullivan had ever coached was peewee, while Eric had been in Boston this whole time, trying to wrangle the power play into something that actually had a breath of life even after losing three or four of the most important players the team had had over the past decade.

And here Sullivan was, handed the job like he'd been handed every other good thing in his life, while Eric was still asked about the times he'd lost his temper and done something really stupid on the ice. His mother would have said that whining didn't solve anything, but he wasn't whining, he was just pissed off .

Hey, Sullivan texted him and Petey, can we set up a time to speak before I have to do press conferences?

Petey wrote back immediately, sure thing, boss , because that's the kind of guy he was.

Eric didn't answer, because that's the kind of guy he was.

Eric thought about letting his mother know what had happened. That he'd worked his ass off to develop good relationships with his players, that he'd bitten his tongue during three years of Leclerc, that he'd done the best he could and that it hadn't mattered. That, once again, his temper and the fact that he hadn't won shit overshadowed his more recent accomplishments. That it had all come back to bite him in the ass. She would've said something sympathetic, but she wouldn't have understood the deep-seated rage. Maman just wasn't like that.

He couldn't avoid Sullivan, either. Sullivan was coming in to take over the next day of training camp, and when Eric hadn't answered by the close of business that night, he had taken matters into his own hands. I'll see both of you in the coach's office before training camp. Be there by 6:30.

"Be there by six thirty," Eric said mockingly to his empty apartment. No one answered him back.

As much as he wanted to show up late just to piss Sullivan off, Eric was also aware that even if he was currently keeping his job, that wasn't a given. He was in the last year of his contract, so it wouldn't even be that much dead money for Chernoff to keep paying through the end of the season if Sullivan decided to bring his own man in.

So even though he felt like punching something about it, Eric showed up at the practice facility bright and early, although he didn't bother putting in the effort of actually forcing a smile onto his face. It probably would've looked more like baring his teeth, anyway.

Sullivan was already in the office, it seemed, judging from the light sneaking out under the door. Petey waited outside, slouched against a wall with his eyes closed. Didn't matter if they were at home or on the road—Petey wasn't a morning person, and no amount of coffee could shift the martyred look or sleepy eyes off of his face.

"Bon matin, Roney," Petey said.

"Maudit matin," Eric muttered back, ignoring Petey's laugh.

"Ready to meet the new boss?"

"Fuck off."

Petey opened the door first, and Eric followed him in. He hadn't been sure what to expect, but it didn't look at first like Sullivan had changed much since Leclerc had vacated it. The whiteboards hung in the same spot; the same desk sat in the same place. Of course, he'd just been hired; there probably wasn't time to change anything. Sullivan sat behind the desk, looking down at an iPad and a shitload of papers spread all over the leather blotter that Leclerc apparently hadn't bothered to take with him.

When he heard them come in, Sullivan stood, and Eric got his first close-up look at the guy in over five years and his first close-up look at him out of hockey equipment in even longer.

The first thing you noticed was that he was short as fuck. The kind of guy who was officially listed at five-eight but was probably closer to five-six. The second thing you noticed was that despite the fact that he was short, he was anything but small. Built like a bulldog, with a barrel chest and broad shoulders and ridiculously huge legs. His thighs were so distracting Eric had to force himself to look up. He had come dressed for practice in a hoodie and sweatpants in Beacons black and gold, not quite sized right for the proportions of his body.

The third thing that Eric noticed, anyway, was that despite the fact that there was nothing about his face that was classically good-looking or anything, Sullivan was...shit. There was only one way to describe it, and that was: Sullivan was hot. Silver fox, broken nose, light brown eyes, smiling mouth and stubborn chin hot. Something about the way he held himself, like he had too much energy to be contained in that small of a space. Some answering thing in Eric thrilled to the surface, itched to contain him.

Not that it mattered if Sullivan was hot. It didn't matter what he looked like, because Eric fucking hated him.

There was a second where they just stared at each other, wordless. And then Sullivan opened his mouth and Eric hated him even more. Hated him and his stupid fucking Boston accent.

"It's good to meet you both," Sullivan was saying, and Eric fought the urge to shake his head like a dog escaping from a bath and trying desperately to clear the water from its eyes. "I know things are probably going to be a little awkward given the way we started off, but I want you both to know that I'd like this to be a collaborative environment."

Eric's face made expressions he couldn't entirely control, no matter how he desperately tried to rein them in. A collaborative environment. Fucking hell.

To make matters worse, Petey was nodding along with this little speech like it was exactly what he'd wanted to hear. Petey's playing career had ended after one too many concussions, and Eric had worked with him long enough to know that he still suffered from some of the effects of post-concussion syndrome.

He'd tried a variety of therapies and eventually found that microdosing psychedelics worked better than any traditional treatment. Whether it was his natural personality, the psilocybin, or a choice he'd made, Petey was probably the most aggressively chill person Eric had ever met. While it normally meant that they got along well, right now, it made Eric want to shake him and yell, now is not the time to be agreeable, you stupid fuck.

"Is everything clear?" Sullivan asked, and Eric realized, belatedly, that they'd been staring at each other again and that his face was probably doing the thing where his eyebrows drew in above his glasses and people assumed that he was angry with them.

In this case, at least, the assumption was correct.

"Crystal," Eric said, drawing out the word as sarcastically as possible.

Sullivan gave him an odd, quizzical look, and then smiled at the two of them. "I'm going to go down to the locker room to talk to the boys before we start camp for the day. I'd like you to be there with me."

"Makes sense," Petey agreed, and Eric wanted to draw his finger sharply across his throat in the international sign for shut the fuck up .

Instead, he said, "Lead the way."

Ryan wasn't sure how well the speech had gone. He was used to giving speeches; he'd given a shitload of them in Dallas. They'd come naturally and hadn't flopped like a lead balloon. But the thing about giving speeches in locker rooms was that everyone was on the same page, everyone wanted the same thing: to win. In the locker room, he was a respected teammate and comrade, not an interloper who'd taken a job that probably both of them wanted.

Well, maybe not McCaskill, a middle-aged veteran with a paunchy belly and sleepy eyes who seemed about as easygoing a guy as Ryan had ever met.

Aronson was a different story.

They had played against each other not infrequently over the years. Aronson was a couple of years younger than Ryan, but they'd both taken a while to crack a major league roster and had come up right around the same time. They had never played in the same division, though, so at most it was three or so times a year.

There had been one contentious playoff series that the Stampede had lost. Ryan had never really looked at Aronson while they were playing. He'd been just another guy on the ice, a pest who lived to get under other players' skins, who never shut the fuck up, no matter what.

Looking at Aronson now, Ryan was surprised he'd never noticed him before. Whatever the issues with his personality, Aronson was...noticeable. He was tall. Not as tall as Murph, but definitely a lot taller than Ryan, with the kind of body players got sometimes when they still worked out regularly but weren't working out for a playing season, gangly and muscular but not bulky.

It was his face, though, that was hard to look away from.

Aronson's nose dominated his face, strong and pronounced, but the rest of his features seemed almost too big, too. Huge dark brown eyes and an equally broad mouth, twisted in a smirk or down in a frown. Your attention went right to those eyes, too, because his glasses magnified them, huge-lensed wire frames. Heavy eyebrows with the same sarcastic tilt as his mouth, just pointed in the opposite direction. He had what seemed like a perpetual five-o'clock shadow on his chin and jaw and a mop of unruly, wavy black hair that was just a little bit too long.

He was wearing the same thing they all wore, Beacons sweats in preparation for practice. He looked, a little bit, like a looming crow.

Ryan realized, too late, that Aronson was staring back at him. He frowned. He was just sizing up the coaching staff he had to work with, there wasn't anything wrong with that. Ryan had to shake himself a little, weirdly unsettled by the whole thing.

He couldn't afford to be distracted right now, either. He had the locker room to talk to. This would be establishing the rapport he hoped to have with the players for the rest of the season. Maybe beyond, if it worked out for him and he liked the work and Conroy wanted to remove the interim tag from Ryan's title, not that he was going to do anything except ignore the pressure and do his best to focus on the day-to-day. And then after practice, he would have to meet with the media for the first time.

Growing up in a hockey town like Boston, Ryan was used to the kind of scrutiny a head coach received. It probably wasn't as bad as it was in Toronto or Montreal, but it was definitely way more intense than Dallas. Ryan was pretty much prepared for the skepticism he'd end up facing, but he had to be on top of things to do it. Getting distracted worrying about Aronson wasn't it.

As Ryan packed up his shit to head down to the locker room with McCaskill and Aronson, his phone buzzed in his pocket. He checked it. The banner said Dad . Ryan sighed: he could ignore it, but that only meant his dad would keep calling, and today was not the opportune time for that shit.

"Dad," Ryan said, "I don't really have time to talk right now, I have to go down to the locker room to meet the guys."

"I won't keep you. I know how busy you are," Dad said, and Ryan's skin crawled when he heard the tone. Oh, Dad was pissed. He wasn't yelling and his voice wasn't loud, but he was pissed . "Were you ever gonna tell your father that you're coaching the Boston fuckin' Beacons, or was I always gonna have to find out fifth-hand from Christopher down the block?"

"I was going to tell you, it's just been kind of a crazy couple of days, I've barely had a chance to breathe." He could see Aronson watching him from the corner of his eye, those heavy eyebrows raised. Like he was either skeptical or making fun. Ryan's skin felt itchy, like he was going to snap, either at his dad, or at Aronson. He didn't like it one bit: it wasn't the frame of mind he needed.

Dad hissed out a breath between his teeth, and said, "So you're back home now, eh?"

"For now."

"You gonna come home to see us?"

"I don't know. Probably sometime soon. Dad, I really can't talk. I'm headed down to the locker rooms and then I gotta meet the media."

"You do what you gotta do, Ry. But I gotta say that if you don't come home, the family's gonna be real disappointed. I'm already real disappointed. All we ever wanted to do was celebrate your success."

Ryan exhaled. For a second, he wanted to laugh.

All we ever wanted to do was celebrate your success sounded like a threat when it came out of Dad's mouth. A lot of things did. Particularly when Ryan knew what was waiting for him if he went back home to hang out with his brothers and their families. Dad wouldn't know about the impending divorce yet, and that was another thing he'd have to put off as long as humanly possible.

He'd gone for a four-mile run this morning before heading to the practice facility and he still felt as fidgety and defensive as he always did when he got too close to Southie.

Aronson was still watching him, quizzical and judging.

Bizarrely, Ryan felt the need to explain. It wasn't any of Aronson's business. He hated talking about this shit, even with Murph, who implicitly understood because his family was the same way. Something about the way Aronson was looking at him just slipped right under his skin. "My family. They're all, uh, hockey guys, too. But I'm the one who's gotten the furthest, so...it gets complicated."

"You don't have to explain to us," Aronson said hastily, looking away for the first time to exchange a glance with McCaskill.

"It's not going to be an issue," Ryan said firmly. "I'm setting my phone to silent."

To his surprise, Aronson laughed. He had a nice laugh, like his voice: deep and somehow bigger than his body. "Might as well chuck it in the toilet at that rate."

"I'll take that under advisement," Ryan said dryly.

Aronson, his brown eyes dancing, held the door open for him. "After you, boss."

And for the first time, Ryan walked into the home locker room of the Boston Beacons as their head coach.

Eric surveyed the room as they went in. The boys looked both interested and apprehensive, which was about to be expected considering the way that Harrison Leclerc had gotten fired.

An entire shitty season last year hadn't been enough to do it. An entire season of Caleb Cook underperforming hadn't been enough to do it. The management group had looked at the injuries and the loss of personnel and said we're gonna roll it over into next season . Of course, it was difficult to roll it over into the next season when your head coach was screaming and spitting in the face of one of your franchise players. Even a slow-to-move front office couldn't ignore that. The incident had been the last straw for Leclerc, and he'd been summarily tossed on his ass.

And honestly, good fucking riddance.

Eric had also done what he'd could to diffuse the tension over the last few seasons, but it hadn't been good enough. He wondered sometimes whether the guys blamed him for that, whether they blamed him for the dismal record, too. Whether they wished he'd been fired along with Leclerc. It was easy to see the affection that the d-men had for Petey, because he was the kind of guy who was easy to be friendly with.

Eric wasn't.

He looked around the room at his guys. Caleb Cook and Kai Williams, inseparable as always, watched the trio of coaches with interest and suspicion. Travis Sinclair, one of the veteran forwards, threw him an ironic little salute from his spot on the outside end of the horseshoe. Davit Kancheli, the baby goalie they'd had to call up and throw into the starter's net after Kristian Rajala retired following his hip surgeries. All of them probably had expectations for the season and most of them were probably in the shitter, as it were. There was only so much he could do about that.

It was an awkward time to come into camp. Before cuts were made. Probably one of Sullivan's first jobs would be meeting everyone and then getting to know them and then having to tell some of them they were going back to their juniors teams or Europe or the minor leagues. And that would be some of their only interaction until next fall.

He glanced sideways at Sullivan, standing at attention in front of the guys. He thought about Sullivan's phone call with his father, how frustrated he'd seemed after hanging up. Eric could almost see Sullivan's entire body vibrating with concealed energy, like he'd wanted to punch a wall or go running down the hallway. He turned all of that now on the room. It wasn't quite a smile but the hint of one trembled on the edge of his mouth.

"Good morning," Sullivan said. "As some of you might know, I've been hired to take the reins as the interim coach for this season. Before we started camp for the day, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about my vision for the season. What I'd like for this team to become, if we have the opportunity to continue working together beyond this year."

Eric had played hockey for a long time, and he had coached for a shorter but not insignificant amount of time. All in all, he'd been listening to coaches giving fucking speeches of varying sorts for the last thirty-five years at least. Most of them left him cold or weren't particularly effective. He remembered the Stampede's coach trying to rally them after they'd gone down 3-2 in the Western Conference Finals against the Desperadoes.

It had been so flat he'd almost felt like laughing.

No one was laughing now.

Gradually, as Sullivan spoke, all of the faces in the room turned toward him. The murmured conversations ceased. The players listened, rapt, as he talked to them about how he wanted to approach this differently, build something sustainable. How he was going to learn right along with them, and how he wanted them to play hockey, and the structure of their personal style within the larger game. To learn how to make the right reads. About learning to think in concepts rather than relying only on mechanical systems, and the freedom to make the calls they saw fit.

Sullivan talked about how he was going to mess up and he hoped they'd talk to him about it, and how he anticipated the players also messing up, but that he would rather see a mistake in the service of trying something new than no mistake and not trying at all.

He didn't raise his voice. He was steady and calm and confident, and it was hard to look away from him. There was something about his face. The sincerity and genuine excitement so visible. Sullivan was just magnetic.

It was fucking infuriating .

It was petty, but the better Sullivan sounded, the more Eric wanted to strangle him and shake him by his obnoxious little neck.

In the center of the room, Sullivan was giving an impassioned speech about how the wins didn't matter this season as much as learning the right habits did, as much as learning how to play as a team. And that if they all trusted each other and learned to play as a group the way he envisioned they could play, eventually the wins would start coming. He talked about playing defense in the offensive zone and offense in the defensive zone. He talked about being a dynamic 200-foot force.

Sullivan talked about how the most rewarding parts of the latter half of his career hadn't been winning the Cup, but mentoring younger players, learning the game and helping to teach it to others. That he might not have had the title, but that he'd been doing this for years, and if they trusted him, he'd repay that trust in what he could give them.

Sure, it sounded good.

A lot of bullshit sounded good if you wrapped it up in a pretty bow, if you ignored the fact that the roster was the roster and no amount of sweet-talking it could whip aging veterans and baby rookies with barely three seasons between them into shape. Of course Sullivan thought that he could just waltz right in and make things better, of course he hadn't understood that the last season had been such a grinding misery.

He hadn't ever had to try.

Things had just been handed to him .

Belatedly, Eric realized he was glaring and that it was pretty much at odds with the rest of the room, which was just now breaking out into applause. And then even more so as the guys started to get up to come and introduce themselves to Sullivan and shake his hand.

Sullivan accepted all of the greetings the same way he did everything, with his pleasant, beaming smile, like there was no place he'd rather be than right here. Like there was no one else in existence except the person he was looking at right then. For the first time in ages, the room crackled with energy, and the boys seemed excited to be there.

Petey looked at him with raised eyebrows.

Eric mouthed I'm fine back at him.

"Come on," Petey said, "you better get it together, bud. We're about to go out on the ice and get the full Ryan Sullivan experience."

"Jesus fucking Christ. Can't think of a better way to spend my fucking Wednesday."

Petey's eyebrows went up again, but all he had to offer was an exceptionally mild "'Kay."

Eric got his shit together and went out onto the ice to do his goddamn job.

Ryan hadn't had the usual amount of training camps that guys generally did, because once it was clear he wasn't going to make it very far in the top junior hockey leagues in the States, and he definitely wasn't going to be drafted by any of the Canadian juniors teams, and then when he wasn't going to get drafted, period, he focused on going through the NCAA. And that meant that after his handful of development camp invites, he had to go back to school, if he wasn't going to play his way into a pro contract. He certainly couldn't afford to pay out of pocket at the rest of the training camp.

Even then, he had always been one of the first ones cut, and it wasn't due to his effort or talent, it was solely because he was small . He remembered the coaches and general managers who'd said shit like come back a little stronger, put on some more muscle, and then we'll see how ready you are. Ryan had always known that despite his size, he was more than tough enough to stick it out in a full major league season, but no one had given him the chance.

He knew where the guys were coming from. He knew how frustrating it felt, even when you knew that it was in your best developmental interests. He knew how frustrating it felt when you knew that it wasn't. And now that the camp was winding down, he had to sit down with most of the juniors players to let them know they would be headed back to their teams. It was tough, especially when he would have made a different decision than the front office but had his hands tied. He tried to offer some encouragement and specific advice about things they could do to get ready and his phone number if they ever had questions.

In at least a few cases he talked to the kid about his own experience: the Beacons had drafted a few undersized but highly skilled wingers, and he'd had to say look, at least you were drafted. That's a huge vote of confidence. Now you just have to prove them right for taking that risk, and a rebuild year is probably not the best time.

"Never gets easier," McCaskill said, turning his sleepy-eyed gaze on the kids who were packing up their lockers. He'd told Ryan to call him Petey almost immediately ("everyone does") but Ryan still didn't feel like they were there yet.

"No, it doesn't," he agreed. "Feels worse the younger the kids are, though. You try telling a ten-year-old there's not a roster spot for him and see how much of a monster you are."

"Couldn't pay me to do it," McCaskill said, and laughed. "Glad I never went that route myself."

"Oh, great," Aronson muttered from the corner, where he'd been flipping through iPad tape, "are we going to get regaled with tales from the peewee trenches now?"

Stung, Ryan turned to look at him. Sometimes he thought that he was probably looking at Aronson too often. He'd catch himself doing it and have to stop. It wasn't his fault Aronson's face was so expressive, like a puzzle Ryan was always one step away from solving.

Aronson looked back, the same way he always did, eyebrows raised over the wire rims of his glasses in a challenge. He'd wait for Ryan to get embarrassed and look away first.

Ryan thought about asking him what the fuck his problem was, but aggressiveness wasn't the way to build bridges, not when he knew that Aronson was probably still stung by not having been offered the job. He couldn't blame the guy for being pissed. But that didn't make it any easier to put up with withering sarcasm every time Ryan did literally anything.

It didn't make it any easier when Aronson looked at him like that and Ryan felt like he wanted to crawl out of his own skin, which was something Ryan had never really felt before.

Instead of saying what he actually wanted to say, Ryan said, "We don't have time for reminiscing. Now that we're cutting through the chaff, I want to start really focusing on getting the guys used to the way I want to hold practices going forward. I've sent you both my general outlines, but I'm interested in hearing what you all have to say."

"It'll be different, but I think it could be fun to implement." McCaskill chewed on the end of his pen, the cap twisted and bent with the imprints of his teeth. "We have a lot of vets, Sully. I'm not sure how that's gonna go over immediately."

Ryan thought about asking Aronson whether he had any opinions, but one look at Aronson's thundercloud of a face, the eyebrows drawn down again in a scowl, put him off of that idea pretty quickly. No sense in picking a fight this early. They would be doing the drills Ryan's way whether Aronson liked it or not, although Ryan would take his concerns into consideration, of course.

"You're the boss, Coach," Aronson said, after a moment.

Aronson was still looking at Ryan in that particular piercing way that he had, and Ryan felt his hackles rise in the same way that they always had in games, when an opposing player thought he could try to intimidate him just because he wasn't as big. Ryan shook it off. What the hell was his problem? This wasn't a game. This was a collaborative working environment, and he couldn't just battle Aronson in the corners if he didn't like the way Aronson was looking at him.

On the ice, it was a different story.

Ryan split the still-oversize roster up into groups with mixed d-men and forwards, set them in drills against in a few different areas, took one for himself and assigned the assistant coaches to the others. Their new skills coach—Heidi Hughes, a USA Hockey women's hockey legend, a former team captain married to her Canadian rival—worked with the remaining group.

The players took to it right away. They did high-intensity repetitions of each drill. That morning Ryan had them working on a variety: the 2v2 rush, a 4v4 in-zone, a high 3v2. Ryan wanted to see how they adapted, because the small-area work was a big change from the repetitious single-focus drills they'd been doing before.

Unsurprisingly, Cook and Williams were the two standouts: they had what Ryan was looking for in the team he'd like to mold. Not just a killer instinct but intelligence. Even in the drills, you could see them thinking two or three steps ahead, moving their bodies into a position in anticipation rather than reaction.

Somewhat surprisingly, Travis Sinclair also adjusted well. The book that Ryan had on him hadn't been particularly impressive: he'd had a lot of injuries that he'd played through and a lot of injuries he couldn't play through despite his best efforts; his point totals reflected the time he'd missed. But Ryan wondered whether this was a case of a guy not being given a chance to play to his strengths by a previous administration. Or a guy who was finally healthy and might have something to prove. He made a note to try Sinclair out as the other winger on what would inevitably become the Williams and Cook line.

After the practice ended and before the players left for their homes or hotels, Ryan pulled Cook aside for a talk in his office. A look flickered over Cook's face. Worry or frustration, Ryan couldn't tell. Cook's expressive face showed everything, even if it was opaque. With his curly blond hair and huge brown eyes, he looked a little bit like a comical Renaissance cherub. One of the scowling ones shooting arrows at suffering saints. He was small, too. An inch taller than Ryan, and that wasn't saying much.

Even before Cook had been drafted by the Beacons, Ryan kept a half an eye on his career. It was hard not to with a player with that much talent, who also reminded him so much of himself. Not only that, a sure sign that things were changing. Ryan had been undrafted, but Cook was a later first-round pick.

"Hey," Ryan said, "don't worry about it, bud. I'm not doing anything except checking in, because you had kind of a rough start to the camp."

Cook looked at him warily. "It was okay."

Ryan couldn't help it—he laughed. Cook relaxed almost immediately, like he knew they were on the same page.

"I don't wanna talk shit about anyone," Cook said, when Ryan had gotten control of himself. "I really tried last year; you know? But it didn't—I just didn't know what he wanted from me."

"I've been there. Sometimes you just don't see eye to eye with a coach. I don't expect you to always see eye to eye with me. But I just want to make clear from the beginning, that if you have an issue with your usage—or with anything, really—you can feel free to come and talk to us about it."

"Really?" Cook asked, doubtful.

"Really. Like I said. I'm learning, too. And if things aren't working for the individual players, they're not going to work for the team. And I won't always know if they aren't working if you don't tell us. I mean, if we're getting blown out every game, I'll know. The analytics I'll know. But the more subtle things, I won't."

Cook laughed again. "Man, Coach. It sounds kinda too good to be true."

"It doesn't have to be."

"Uh, forgive me for saying so, but I've been disappointed before. I'm gonna withhold judgment."

The kid had balls; Ryan had to give him that much. Again, Ryan was reminded of himself at twenty, still stuck in Division 1 hockey and bitter as hell about it, determined to prove everyone wrong. If he had anything to say about it, Cook wouldn't have the same experience. "That's absolutely fair. Just give me a chance, and be honest with the staff, is all I'm asking."

Cook surveyed him, eyebrows raised. "I can do that."

Ryan held out his hand and Cook shook it. It was a firm handshake, nothing to prove. Ryan only wished he felt the same about training camp.