Page 4 of Penalty Kiss
The GM’s jaw flexes. “Yes.”
Silence does the talking.
My chest tightens. “Levi?”
“Fine,” the doc says. “Exhausted. He sat with you until an hour ago.”
I nod and my head threatens mutiny. “So what does this look like?” I ask the doc. “Day to day.”
“Cognitive rest,” he says. “No bikes to failure, no screaming at your screens, and no pretending your brain isn’t a brain.”
“You’ll likely have—” he glances at the chart, back at me “—headaches, light and noise sensitivity, dizziness, slower processing, and memory lapses. Names. Faces. What you walked into a room for. Under stress, maybe brief blanks—moments that drop out. It’s post-concussion syndrome, better known as PCS. You need to pace it, or it punishes.”
“Best case?” I ask.
“You listen. You recover,” he says simply. “You push, we’re having different conversations in two years.”
The GM clears his throat. “We’ll set you up somewhere quiet. No media. You get better. We evaluate. There’s no timeline… and that’s the point.”
I think of the boys, of sticks thumping the floor, of Coach’s tie undone and that rare smile he only shows when nobody’s watching. I think about Game Seven without me. The one we lost. I think about how empty my stall must have looked.
“Okay,” I say. The word tastes like surrender and sanity.
The doc runs me through the plan: cognitive rest, graded exercise, screens limited, sleep like it’s my religion. Hydration. Headaches will lie; respect them anyway. No contact. No bikes to failure. No pretending I’m bulletproof.
They leave. Nurse Maya returns with water and a pill cup. I lift the cup and my hands shake just enough to make me mad at them.
“Normal,” she says. “Your body’s doing a lot just… being.”
“I’m more of a doing guy,” I say, which is truer than anything else I’ve said today.
“I gathered,” she deadpans, then softens. “If you have a moment where the world pops to static, push the call button. That’s what we’re here for.”
“Static,” I echo. “Great.”
She tilts her head, studies my face the way people do when they want to ask for a selfie but remember they’re in scrubs. “Also… my brother worships you. For what it’s worth.” A small shrug. “If worshippers help.”
“Only if your brother’s bringing tacos,” I say, and it pulls a real smile out of both of us.
The room quiets again. My phone is a stacked tower of messages—Agent. PR. Coach. Most marked “Read” but I have no recollection of them. Then, the family—
Mom with a chain of heart emojis and a text:Eat broth.
Dad:Cameron.That’s it. Which is him saying everything without saying anything.
Luke—my younger brother, the golden child in the family, a trauma surgeon:Call me. No arguments.
I can hear him already:You’d never tell a teammate to skate on a broken leg. Stop trying to skate on a broken brain.
Touche.
The door opens, and the noise in my head drops two notches just because he’s here.
Levi.
He looks like a man who wrestled a series and then sat through the longest night of his life. Stubble, shadows under his eyes, that steady gravity that made me trust him the first day we were stupid and twenty. He takes the chair like a goalie takes the crease: quiet, certain, necessary.
“You look terrible,” I say.
