POV: Khyle
The parking lot doors were heavy and cold to the touch, and the air that hit Khyle when Shane pushed through them was sharp enough to make him blink. Seattle in the fall had a particular quality to it, clean and dark and faintly hostile, like the city was reminding you it had a winter coming and you should probably be making arrangements.
He let Shane and Logan carry the conversation for the first thirty seconds, which was not difficult because Logan was already deep into his theory about the Shoten's superior selection of draft beer and Shane was agreeing with the enthusiasm of someone who would have agreed with almost anything right now just to keep the atmosphere moving in a productive direction. They were good at that, both of them. The particular skill of filling space with noise when noise was what the situation needed.
Khyle walked between them and said nothing and let it wash over him.
His mind was still in the corridor.
"Khyle." Logan's voice shifted registers, dropping from social noise into something that actually wanted an answer. "Did you not see the look on Jäger's face?"
"I was approximately six inches from his face," Khyle said. "I saw it."
"Then you understand why we extracted you."
"I didn't need extracting."
"You were about to say something," Shane said, the certainty in his voice suggesting this was not a guess. "Something that would have made the rest of the night much more complicated for everyone."
Khyle opened his mouth, closed it, and did not confirm or deny this because Shane was not wrong and confirming it would only encourage him. They reached the row of player parking and slowed, the three of them falling into a natural cluster near the door while Logan fished his keys out of his jacket pocket.
"He's got a valid point, you know," Logan said, in the careful tone of someone testing whether the ground would hold their weight. "Jäger. About the team."
Khyle turned to look at him with an expression that communicated exactly how welcome that observation was.
Logan held his hands up briefly in a gesture of peace and kept going anyway, because Logan had never once in his life let the threat of someone's displeasure stop him from finishing a sentence.
"You're not wrong either," he added. "That's kind of the problem."
"He blocked two of my shots tonight because he took them himself," Khyle said. The words came out more clipped than he intended. "I had clean lanes on both of them. I called for the puck. He ignored me and fired anyway and both of them went wide. We won because I scored despite him, not because of anything he contributed."
"Yeah," Shane said. "And he'd say you were offside on the first one and late on the second."
"I was not offside."
"I know that. He knows that. The point is he's not wrong that you've been calling plays out there like you're running the line." Shane's voice was careful but not unkind. He was doing the thing he occasionally did when he wasn't performing for an audience, where he was actually direct and surprisingly perceptive about things. "You're not running the line, Ichi. You're good enough that it looks like you should be, but you're not. And Gunner's been doing this longer than you have."
Khyle said nothing. He looked at the doors behind them, the long bright corridor beyond them, and then looked away.
"He's a douche about it," he said finally.
"Absolutely," Shane agreed, with feeling. "One hundred percent. No argument from me on that front."
"He's got the interpersonal skills of a car alarm," Logan offered helpfully.
"But," Shane continued, and there it was, the word Khyle had been waiting for since Logan's opening observation, "he's not entirely wrong about what he was trying to say. Even if the delivery was." He paused, searching for the word.
"Aggressive," Logan supplied.
"I was going to say unhinged."
"Both work."
Khyle breathed out slowly through his nose. The cold air helped. He crossed his arms and looked at the ground for a moment, at the salted pavement and the faint dusting of snow that had been trying all evening to settle and hadn't quite managed it yet.
The genuinely irritating part, the part he was not going to say out loud to either of these two because it would be used against him for the remainder of the season and possibly his career, was that some portion of what Gunner had said was accurate. Not the delivery. Not the finger in the chest or the wall or the territorial growling about his team. But underneath all of that, the substance of it.
He had been vocal out there. He had been directing play, calling shots, making the kind of on-ice decisions that technically fell to the captain and the line leader and not to the rookie in his first NHL season regardless of how naturally it came to him. He couldn't help it. He saw the openings before anyone else did and his instinct was to say so, immediately and directly, because in his experience that was how you won games.
Apparently that was not how Gunner Jäger experienced it.
Cooper Daniel would have said something infuriating and cryptic about this that would have made sense three weeks later.
Khyle missed him suddenly and specifically.
He lifted his head as Logan said something about getting moving before they lost their table, and Shane launched back into beer discourse, and the two of them began drifting toward Logan's car with the comfortable assumption that Khyle was coming with them. He let them get a few steps ahead.
He turned and looked back at the doors.
The corridor beyond them was empty. Gunner was gone, the space where he'd been standing holding nothing but the particular quality of absence that followed someone who took up a lot of room when they were present. Khyle stood there for a moment longer than he needed to, eyes on the empty hallway, aware of a feeling he wasn't going to name and wasn't going to examine and was going to set down right here in this parking lot and walk away from.
Something about the absence of him was almost as loud as his presence had been. Khyle didn't know what to do with that information so he set it down carefully and walked away from it.
He turned back toward the parking lot.
"Yo, Ichi!" Logan shouted from somewhere to his left, the cold air carrying his voice clearly across the empty lot. "Let it go, man. Beer and ladies are waiting!"
Khyle walked toward them and thought about Gunner's expression in that corridor. The anger he'd expected. The other thing underneath it that he hadn't. The confusion that had no business being there on a man who seemed so certain about everything else.
He wondered, briefly and against his better judgment, if there was any conceivable version of events in which the two of them found a way to function that didn't feel like being slowly taken apart.
He thought about those eyes up close. The weight behind them.
Nah.
Guy was a jerk.