Brouwer looks up at him, raises an eyebrow. “Chapman, if anyone needs to spend some fucking time lying in the sun, it’s you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” David demands, but Brouwer just snorts again and then pointedly turns a page of the paper. David’s not foolhardy enough to insist for an answer, even if he has no clue whether Brouwer just insulted him or not. Knowing Brouwer, he absolutely did. David isn’t sure what the insult means, but he’s fairly sure Brouwer isn’t just calling him pale.

Even if everyone spends their time getting sunburned instead of getting their head in the game, it doesn’t end up anything like their last game in Sunrise, which David is fervently grateful for. They notch a goal in the first, an ugly one that just squeaks through, and match the Panthers one for one in the second, David getting a positional tap-in. He receives an absolutely crushing hug from Eisler afterwards, which he accepts with good grace because it was Eisler’s pass he put in the net.

The third period’s a back and forth mess. No one’s playing particularly well, the Panthers thankfully as off as the Islanders; it’s a series of turnovers and quick-whistled icings until the Panthers pull their goalie with a minute and a half left, scrambling around like they’re short-handed instead of up a man, until Farmer pulls the trigger on an empty-net goal, putting the Panthers out of their misery.

It wasn’t a pretty game, but it’s a win, and it’s a win against the Panthers. A win against Lourdes, who was rarely on the ice at the same time as David, but whose presence David had felt in Farmer gritting his teeth through a hasty stitching — the high-stick somehow didn’t get Lourdes a double minor — and in a secondary assist on the only goal to get past Knutsen.

It’s a win, but David doesn’t feel the way he thinks he should, fidgety when the beat reporters come over to him, though he believes he hides it well enough. He has all this excess energy humming through him, like he needs to go lift some weights in the hotel gym, swim laps in the over-chlorinated pool, run a few kilometres until his blood stops singing.

He doesn’t want to go back to the hotel with the team, the idea of the bus making him feel claustrophobic, so he says he’ll take a cab. It’s a short ride anyway. Kurmazov gives him a look and then shrugs it off, tells him not to go out and get in trouble, as if David would.

David lingers in the visitor’s room, making sure he won’t get hauled onto the bus, playing a round of Sudoku on his phone, the equipment managers giving him a bit of a berth. When he leaves the arena’s ringing with silence, hollow around him, except for the fact that just down the hall, hands in his suit pockets and hair curling wetly around his ears, is Jake fucking Lourdes.