Chapter 7 Derek
I liked bonding with my team. My parents still lived outside of Traverse City, my brothers had fled to opposite coasts the moment winter became optional, and I had been in Chicago seven years.
This city had absorbed me in the way cities do when you stop fighting them—gradually, without ceremony, until one day you realized you couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
Mackenzie and Cooper had made that move with me.
Young and stupid and certain, the three of us packed into a sublet in Wicker Park while I found my footing with the Frost. I didn’t think about that much anymore.
I thought about it slightly more lately for reasons I was actively choosing not to examine.
My team was my family. That was just true.
I had stood in Morrison’s wedding in a rented tux that didn’t quite fit in the shoulders.
I was his daughter Rosie’s godfather—a fact that still startled me sometimes, that a man as steady and deliberate as Luc Morrison had looked at me and decided yes, him, that one.
I had carried Petrov home from bars more times than I could accurately count, had held Jensen’s daughter at the hospital when she was forty minutes old, had driven Avery to urgent care last December when he’d convinced himself his bruised rib was broken.
Volsky and I were still in the early, careful stages of friendship—the kind where you were still learning what the other person found funny and what they found intrusive.
He’d signed with the Frost last year after his rookie contract with the Buffalo Bolts expired.
On paper, it should have been a full season to build chemistry.
In practice, we’d barely shared ice time.
I’d gone down with the ACL tear just as the ink was drying on his new contract.
I spent six months rehabbing, watching games from the press box, charting plays I couldn’t execute.
By the time I returned, Volsky had torn his rotator cuff.
We had practiced together but this was our first season playing together on the top line.
It meant we were essentially starting from scratch.
And that mattered, because Volsky played left wing to my right.
On paper, we were mirror images. Same position, opposite sides, theoretically interchangeable.
In practice, it was more complicated than that.
The best forward lines didn’t just skate the same system, they thought together. They anticipated.
Morrison, our center, needed to be able to read both of us individually—he’d been playing with me for six years and we had the kind of chemistry that made highlight reels.
But a line was three players, not two. Volsky and I needed to find each other the same way Morrison and I had.
We weren’t there yet. We were still in the phase of near misses and half-seconds of hesitation, of plays that almost connected but didn’t quite.
Coach Reeves had been patient about it—”Chemistry takes time, you can’t force it”—but I could feel the expectation underneath. The team needed us to click. This was supposed to be our year. The season was too short for almost.
So when Volsky showed up tonight, sliding into the seat across from me with his usual economy of movement and a glass of something clear, it felt like progress. A small door opening. The kind of thing you couldn’t manufacture but could only show up for and hope.
“What are you drinking?”
“Seltzer.” He lifted the glass slightly. “Rehydrating.”
“No wonder you’re Thomas’s favorite.” I took a pull of my beer to emphasize my point.
“God, I hope not.”
“All those extra hours in the gym? He definitely has a poster of you in his office.”
The corner of Volsky’s mouth twitched. “That’s horrifying.”
“I’m just saying, the rest of us look bad by comparison.”
“Bradley’s out of town,” he said, like that explained everything. “Not much else to do so I put in extra gym time. But I’m picking him up from O’Hare tonight so don’t expect to see me at 7 a.m. tomorrow.”
“The gym will feel empty without you.”
“It’ll survive.”
Petrov had just bought a round for the table, dramatic about it the way he was dramatic about everything, when the door opened and Avery came in with Hana on one side and Théo on the other.
I hadn’t expected him to come. His maybe had sounded a lot like no when he’d said it. So when Théo appeared anyway, it threw me off.
Long sleeved black shirt despite the warm evening.
Hands tucked into the cuffs like he was hiding them.
Shoulders slightly caved in. His eyes did a quick, professional sweep of the bar—cataloguing exits, faces, threats—so similar to the way a player scanned the ice before a faceoff that it made my brain stutter.
Hana spotted our table and made a beeline, already talking before she’d fully arrived.
Then from across the bar— “Kenz! Sully!”
Avery cut through the crowd with Hana in his wake, taller and broader than everyone around him, tattoos on full display in a black T-shirt with the sides hacked out to mid-torso. He clapped me on the shoulder hard enough to slosh my drink, grinning like he hadn’t seen me four hours ago.
Théo came last. Measured steps. Sat down at the edge of the group like he was reserving the right to leave quickly.
“Hey everyone, this is my brother Théo,” Avery said, gesturing vaguely. “Théo, my team.” That was it. Avery was already sliding into a seat, scanning the beer list.
Hana rolled her eyes and took over. “Théo, this is Kenzo, my brother. Sully, Morrison, Petrov…” she went down the line while I flagged the server.
“What are we drinking?”
“IPA on tap,” Avery said.
“Espresso martini,” Hana said.
I looked at Théo. He glanced at the table briefly. “Vodka with sugar free Red Bull please.”
“Coming right up.”
The table expanded around the newcomers the way our table always did—Petrov immediately engaging Hana because Petrov engaged everyone, Jensen leaning across to say something to Avery about this afternoon’s skate.
Someone brought up Detroit, our biggest rival and universally despised and the conversation caught fire the way it always did when Detroit came up.
Théo sat with his drink when it arrived, sleeve still pulled over one hand as he held the glass, and watched the room with those dark, assessing eyes.
I wasn’t staring but I was aware of him. The way you’re aware of something slightly out of place in a familiar room—not alarming, just present.
Volsky left without announcement around ten. One moment he was there, finishing his drink, and the next his chair was empty. Going to pick up Bradley from O’Hare, he’d mentioned earlier, with that barely there shift in his expression that happened whenever Bradley came up.
I stared at his empty chair for a moment too long.
I missed the simple domesticity of being in a relationship—having somewhere to go after the bar, someone to text when the game went well or badly, someone who knew how I took my coffee without asking. Mackenzie had been my whole adulthood. A future I’d treated like a guarantee.
Starting over at 28 didn’t feel like freedom. It felt like standing at the edge of something big and dark.
I drank my beer and looked somewhere else.
Shortly after, a song came on that made Hana grab Avery’s arm with sudden urgency. “We’re dancing,” she announced, in the tone of someone who was not making a request.
“I don’t know how—” Avery started.
“You absolutely do. I’ve seen you. Come on.” She was already pulling him toward the small cleared space near the back.
Avery shot me and Théo a look over his shoulder that was equal parts amusement and mild suffering. I raised my drink. He went.
Which left Théo and me at the end of the table, the rest of the group loud and self-contained enough that we existed in a pocket of relative quiet.
He looked down at his drink, sleeve still pulled over his hands. Not uncomfortable exactly—or if he was, he wore it like armor. Most people met my friendliness halfway. Théo didn’t. And I couldn’t tell if it was because he didn’t trust me or because he didn’t trust anyone.
“How long have you been figure skating?” I asked.
His eyes lifted from his glass. “Since I was seven.”
“Singles the whole time?”
“Yes.” He looked away.
“I looked you up after we met yesterday,” I said.
“Oh?” He stilled but otherwise didn’t react to this nugget of information.
“You landed a quad axel in competition,” I said. “I watched the clip like six times and I still don’t fully understand how a human body does that.”
The stillness shifted into something else. Not quite softened, but changed—like a frequency adjusting.
“It’s just physics, really. I wasn’t the first to land one. There are better skaters that make it look even more effortless.”
“I didn’t mean—” I shook my head. “It was amazing, Théo.”
He stared at his glass, jaw tight. “Thanks.”
I tried again. “How long have you been skating competitively?”
“Since I was nine.”
“That’s a long time. You must love it.”
Something flickered across his face—there and gone. “I used to.”
“Used to?”
“It’s complicated.” He took a sip of his drink, clearly hoping I’d take the hint and drop it.
I didn’t. “When’s your next competition?”
“I don’t know if there’s going to be a next competition.” The words came out clipped. He caught himself, exhaled slowly. “Sorry. That was—” He shook his head. “I’m having an existential crisis about my skating. You don’t need to hear about it.”
“A crisis?” I kept my tone light but my brain snagged on something else—Avery. The two of them didn’t seem close. Avery never shut up during workouts and yet last week was the first time I’d ever heard him mention his brother.
Something had brought Théo to Chicago. And the more I watched him, the more I suspected it wasn’t just “a change of scenery.”
“There’s a ceiling,” he said, matter-of-fact. “You can be the most technically gifted skater on the ice and they’ll still find a way to tell you something’s missing.”