Pride (Demon Daddies #4)

Chapter 1

Maria

Let it go. Let it go!

The Disney playlist started the way it had every Saturday for nine years, and the way it would, I assumed, keep starting until the speakers above the penalty box finally surrendered to dust and stopped.

Let It Go first. Always Let It Go first.

I’d asked Marcus three years ago if we could maybe—just for variety—swap the running order, and he’d looked at me like I’d suggested we replace the Zamboni machine with a goat, so I’d stopped asking.

The cougar embroidered on my left breast had a thread coming loose at his paw.

I noticed it every Saturday and never remembered to fix it.

The kids came in at nine on the dot, dropped at the lobby by parents already half-fled toward The Daily Grind across the parking lot for coffee they were going to drink alone in their cars for the only forty-five minutes of their week that belonged to nobody. I understood.

“Boots on, sweethearts.” I crouched at the bench in my doubled white trainers, the laces wound twice around the back of my ankles to keep them tight, and started the long Saturday business of small feet and rental skates and Velcro that had been chewed on by toddlers since the Bush administration.

“Theo, buddy, that’s the wrong foot. That’s okay. We’ll fix it.”

Theo was four and looked, in his red puffer jacket and his oversized helmet, like a tomato with limbs.

He held my shoulder for balance with the absolute confidence of a person who has never been let fall in his life.

I let him. I would let any of them. That was the deal we’d made, the six of them and me, the first day of every season: I would not let them fall on my watch unless they wanted to, and they would, in exchange, not tell their parents about the snacks I kept in the office drawer.

“Coach Maria.” Nova was already laced. Of course she was. Nova was six and laced her own skates better than I laced mine, which was saying nothing and everything. “I’m going to do a spiral today.”

“Are you, now.”

“I watched a video. Online.”

“Did you, now?” I tightened the last cross of Theo’s laces and gave them the little tug the rental Riedells needed to actually lock. “Well, Miss Nova, let’s see what we’ve got.”

She skated off—not toward the cones, toward open ice, because Nova had the disregard for cones that all genuinely gifted skaters have from the age of about five—and I stood up too fast and my right knee made the sound it always made, a small popcorn click that no one ever heard but me.

Nine years on, and the body still kept its little receipts.

The boards were patched in three places with hockey tape, black on white, where the kickplate had split along the grain. I rested my forearms on the top rail and called them in.

“Okay, my tinies. Warm-up lap. Slow. Slow, Theo—slow is not the same as stopped, buddy, you can keep moving—eyes up, Mae, look where you’re going, not where you’ve been. Hannah, sweetheart, bend your knees. Bent knees are happy knees. Lower. Lower. There she is.”

Six puffer jackets in six different colors made their wobbling way around the perimeter cones I’d set out at six-forty.

The rink lights were on the half-power setting we used for class—high enough to see by, low enough that the parents drinking coffee through the lobby glass didn’t have to squint.

The air smelled of refrigerated water, rubber matting, and the faint copper ghost of the Zamboni we used to finish the surface.

The cold sat on the back of my throat like a coin.

“Eyes up, Theo. Eyes up. The ice isn’t going anywhere.”

“My eyes keep going down.”

“I know, buddy. Tell them not to.”

“I told them. They didn’t listen.”

“Tell them louder.”

He did. He yelled eyes up at his own face, and a laugh came out of me before I could stop it.

Nova came around the second cone on her outside edge, and the outside edge was clean. Cleaner than it had been last week. Cleaner than my outside edge had been at her age, and that was a sentence I did not allow myself to finish even in my own head. I bit the inside of my left cheek instead.

“Beautiful, Nova. Soft knees. Soft, soft. There.”

She glanced at me on the pass. Six years old, and she already had the skater’s glance—the one-second check-in with the coach that said did you see me, and I had seen her, and I nodded, and she carried it forward into the next cone like it was fuel.

“Mae, eyes up. Hannah, knees. Theo, you are doing great, buddy, you are doing so great.”

The Disney playlist rolled into How Far I’ll Go.

I knew, because I had been counting in my head, that we were twelve minutes in and that meant we had two warm-up laps left and then the cone weave and then the swizzles and then the long quiet stretch I gave them at the end where they could just skate, slow, the way you skate when no one is watching, which was the part I loved the most and could not look at directly.

Behind me, in the lobby, a paper-cup lid clicked off and a mother said something about the weather to another mother and the door wheezed open and shut.

The ordinary Saturday sounds of an ordinary Saturday rink in an ordinary strip mall behind a Big Lots in Spokane Valley, Washington, in November, in the ninth year of my retirement from a sport I had never actually announced retiring from, because nobody had asked.

“Slow, Theo. Slow. But don’t stop! Slow doesn’t mean stopped.”

“I know, Coach Maria.”

“You’re doing great, buddy.”

“I know.”

The ache lived where it always lived, just under the sternum, low and patient and harsh. I leaned on the rail and I watched six small people in puffer jackets find their feet on the ice, and I told myself, that this was enough. That this was, in fact, more than enough. That I was lucky to have it.

Most Saturdays, I almost believed it.

“Big finish, tinies. Big finish. Hands up—hands up, Theo, both hands—and bow.”

They bowed. They bowed like four-to-seven-year-olds bow, which is to say they bent abruptly at the waist and most of them kept going and Hannah went down on one knee on purpose because Hannah had decided last week that she was a princess and princesses curtsied, thank you very much.

I clapped from behind the rail. I always clapped at the end.

“That was beautiful. All of you. That was beautiful. Off you come. Slow, Theo. Not stopped! There you go, buddy.”

They came off in a ragged little line and I held the door for them, hand on the latch, body angled so that if anyone tipped on the threshold I’d catch them.

Nobody tipped. Nova thanked me on the way past—she always thanked me even though she was just six years old—and the rest of them piled onto the bench in a heap of puffer jackets and Velcro and the high thin voices kids use when they’re proud of themselves and trying not to show it.

I knelt on the rubber matting in front of Theo and got to work on his rentals.

“Were my eyes up, Coach Maria?”

“Your eyes were up, buddy. Mostly.”

“How much mostly?”

“Like seventy percent mostly.”

“Is seventy good?”

“Seventy is excellent for a Saturday.” I worked the lace out of the bottom hook and started the long unweave. The rentals were Riedells from, I was guessing, 2009. The eyelets were warped. You had to know them. “Next week we’ll go for seventy-five.”

“What about a billion?”

“Billions’s a goal for next week.”

I got the second boot off, set it neatly under the bench, and stood.

The knee clicked. Of course it clicked. No one heard, of course, especially as the playlist had cycled to A Whole New World and Hannah was singing along, badly, into Theo’s helmet.

The lobby door wheezed open and the mothers came in with the paper cups from The Daily Grind, the ones with the kraft sleeves. They came in their puffers too, the adult version: long ones, in navy and oatmeal and one good camel, and they collected their small ones with distracted competence.

“Mae, jacket. Hannah, where’s your other glove. Theo, baby, did you have fun?”

“My eyes were up seventy percent!”

“That’s wonderful, sweetheart.”

“It’s excellent for a Saturday. Coach said.”

I helped where I could. Found Hannah’s glove, which had migrated under the bench.

Re-Velcroed the strap on Mae’s helmet that Mae had Velcroed wrong.

Said the small warm things mothers liked to hear, which were variations on she did so well today and he’s getting so much stronger and honestly, just a delight, and I meant all of them.

I never said anything to a parent about their kid that I didn’t mean.

It was the one rule I had carried over from before, when an awful lot of people had said an awful lot of things to me they hadn’t.

The lobby thinned. Mae went. Hannah went. Theo went, with a backwards wave from his mother’s hip that I returned from behind the bench. The door wheezed twice and the rink got quieter.

Kate Linden was still there. Nova’s mom.

Kate was—and I want to be fair about this, because Kate was a good person and I liked her—the kind of mother who hung back.

The kind who let the others clear out first. The kind who waited.

She was forty maybe, or close, with the kind of jaw and the kind of posture that told you, before you’d known her thirty seconds, that she had skated, and skated seriously, and skated long enough ago that her body was now angry about it in the same quiet way mine was.

State level, I’d been told. She sold real estate now.

She had brought Nova to me on a Saturday in September two years ago and she had not, in two years, missed a single class.

She was standing by the bench with her camel coat folded over her arm and her empty paper cup in her hand, and her shoulders were set in a particular way I had not seen them set before. Slightly forward. Slightly braced.