Chapter 14 Théo
Sunlight was starting to break through the tightly packed buildings when I gave up on sleep entirely.
I had been awake for twenty minutes, maybe longer, staring at the ceiling and listening to Aspen’s light snoring at my feet. The soft morning light filtered through the shades making the apartment hazy—it made it easier to pretend that I was anywhere but Derek Sullivan’s apartment.
I didn’t move. Aspen was sleeping and I didn’t want to disturb him.
That was what I was telling myself.
A faint creak from the hallway. Muted shuffling. Then Derek emerged.
Shirtless. Low slung athletic shorts. Hair sticking up in every direction, eyes still carrying the particular blurriness of someone who had not yet fully committed to being awake.
Stubble shadowed his jaw and a thin scar bisected his left eyebrow—I hadn’t noticed that before.
It was strangely satisfying, that small imperfection.
Proof that the golden boy wasn’t entirely factory standard.
He moved through the apartment with the unhurried confidence of a man in his own space, bleary but unselfconscious, and I had approximately three seconds to compose my face into something neutral before he looked up.
There were a lot of muscles and bronzed skin and veins popping in places I didn’t know veins could pop. Dark hair dusted across his pectorals, down his sternum, a trail of it disappearing into his waistband, which sparked a curiosity I found immediately inconvenient.
I focused on a spot on the kitchen cupboards.
Aspen chose that moment to shake himself awake and launch off the couch toward Derek with his full morning enthusiasm.
“Hey buddy.” The morning rasp in his voice sent a shiver down my spine. He crouched down to rub behind Aspen’s ears and Aspen pressed his entire face against Derek’s bare chest.
Lucky dog, I thought and then caught myself thinking it and suddenly the urge to leave was overwhelming.
Why hadn’t I left last night when I had the chance? This wasn’t a walk of shame—nothing had happened—but it had the same awkward energy. The morning after without the before.
“Thanks again for watching Aspen.” He paused, hesitating, like he wasn’t sure what the protocol was here either. That made two of us. “Do you drink coffee? I’ll put on a pot before I walk him.”
“I’m fine. I should go home,” I said, already calculating the fastest route to the door. “I need to shower before I head to the rink.”
“Shower here. We can drive in together.”
The offer hung in the air between us. Casual. Reasonable. The kind of thing roommates or friends might say to each other without it meaning anything.
We were not roommates. We were barely friends. I had slept on his couch and used his shower gel and spent an unreasonable amount of time noticing the little trail of hair that disappeared into his waistband. Showering here again felt like crossing a line I couldn’t quite articulate.
I opened my mouth to say no.
I knew how to say no. I said no constantly. I was, by most accounts, extremely good at no—deployed it regularly and without remorse, had been told more than once that I could stand to soften my delivery. No was not a word I had ever had difficulty with.
But he was looking at me so expectantly, his eyes patient and kind, his hand still moving behind Aspen’s ears. No agenda. No pressure. Just an offer, extended without strings.
“Uhm,” I faltered. “Okay. I can put on the coffee.”
What the fuck, Mathéo?
Something crossed his face—not surprise exactly, more like a quiet satisfaction. The expression of someone who had made a small bet and won it. “Great, thank you.”
He disappeared back into his room and came out a minute later in a Chicago Frost t-shirt that was soft with age, yanked the Frost hat from the hook by the door—the one I had borrowed—and leashed Aspen up.
The door closed behind them.
I stood there for a moment, replaying the last thirty seconds. I had just agreed to shower at Derek Sullivan’s apartment. Again. While he was here. And then drive to the rink with him. Like we were—what? Friends?
It wasn’t the worst idea I’d ever had. The bar was admittedly low. I shuffled off the couch and stood alone in his kitchen, the silence pressing in.
You could still leave, I told myself. He would understand.
But I didn’t leave. I found the filters, measured out the coffee and water, and put on a pot.
◆◆◆
His shower was significantly better than Avery’s. The water pressure alone was worth accepting his invitation to shower here.
I used his shower gel. Warm and citrusy. I stood under the water for longer than necessary, telling myself it was the good pressure, and tried not to think about the fact that I was going to smell like him for the rest of the day.
Appealing, said some part of my brain.
Shut up, I told it.
I dried off and dressed in my skating clothes—a t-shirt with a fitted black jacket and compression leggings—and went back to the kitchen to pour two cups of coffee and wait.
Derek returned with Aspen and a paper bag from a café on his route. Turkey bacon, egg, and cheddar on English muffins, wrapped in wax paper, the bag spotted with grease in a way that suggested they were good.
“Hope that works,” he said, setting one in front of me and unwrapping his own without pausing.
“Thank you.” I picked mine up. Took a few bites from the egg and turkey bacon, working around as much of the muffin and cheese as I could manage without making it obvious. The coffee was black and strong and I focused on it.
Derek ate the way he did most things—easy, unhurried.
He told me about the road trip. Detroit, which he described with a specific, cheerful contempt that suggested a long institutional history between the Frost and the Vipers.
They’d still won—tight, grinding, the kind of road win you earned with bruises and patience.
He complained about a bad call in the third that cost them a power play. About Petrov getting into it with a Detroit defenseman after a hit Derek called “objectively dirty,” which somehow still ended in offsetting penalties.
I found myself hanging onto his every word.
It wasn’t the hockey. I couldn’t have cared less about the hockey.
It was his voice—a warm rumble, with that slight morning rasp still clinging to the edges.
The kind of voice you could fall asleep to.
Or wake up to. Or just sit in a sun drenched kitchen and listen to while pretending you cared about power play opportunities.
Avery constantly jabbered because silence made him uncomfortable. I could hardly recall a single thing he had told me about his team in the last few weeks. But Derek made me want to lean in.
I realized I had been quiet for too long.
“How’s the training going?” he asked, in the careful tone of someone who had been waiting for a gap in the conversation to ask.
I took a sip of coffee. “Fine.”
“Yeah?”
“Getting back into the rhythm of it.”
He looked at me over his sandwich with those honest, earnest eyes. He had a piece of egg on his lower lip that he hadn’t noticed yet. I looked away.
“The triple was giving you trouble the other morning,” he said. Not judgmental. Just—he had been watching, apparently, more closely than I had registered.
I felt my spine stiffen. “It’s a calibration issue. It’ll resolve.”
“Sure.” A beat. “What kind of triple is it? Axel?”
“What do you know about triples?” The words came out sharp. Sharper than I intended, maybe. Or maybe I didn’t need hockey players weighing in on my technique.
He didn’t flinch or back down, just responded in that earnest Derek way of his. “I know a triple axel is three and a half rotations and the only jump that takes off from a forward edge. I’ve been researching it.”
“Congratulations, you can Google. You and every backseat figure skating judge.”
“YouTube, actually. There’s a channel—this former skater who does technical analysis.
” He picked up his coffee, unbothered by my tone.
“He went through all the jump classifications. Axel, lutz, flip, loop, toe loop, salchow.” He said the last one carefully, like he had rehearsed the pronunciation.
“The quad axel is the hardest because of the forward takeoff. More rotations to fit into less air time.”
I stared at him.
He knew the jump classifications. He knew about forward takeoffs. He’d watched technical analysis videos—plural—about a sport that had nothing to do with his career, his team, or his life.
I set my cup down harder than necessary. “Derek.”
“Hmm?”
“You looked up figure skating jump classifications? For fun?”
“I was curious.” He shrugged, like this was normal. Like he hadn’t just admitted to researching my entire sport because—what? He’d watched me skate a few times? “You landed a quad in competition. I wanted to understand what I was actually watching.”
I opened my mouth to say something cutting—something about hockey players and their limited understanding of actual skating, something about how watching a YouTube video didn’t make him an expert—but the words died in my throat.
He wasn’t being condescending. He wasn’t trying to coach me or fix me or prove something. He had just... wanted to understand. Like it mattered to him.
I didn’t know what to do with that.
“What does a hockey player know about edge work anyway?” I said finally. Still dry but the venom had leaked out of it somewhere.
He pointed at me with his mug. “Actually, that part I do know. I’ve been skating since I was four. Edges are edges.”
“Figure skating edges are not hockey edges.”
“Mechanically—”
“Mechanically,” I said, “you are using maybe thirty percent of what the blade can do.”
He opened his mouth and then closed it, considering this with apparent sincerity. Not offended. Just... thinking about it. “Okay. That’s fair.” A pause. “Is that condescending or is that just true?”
“Both.”
He laughed. Short and genuine, surprised out of him. Aspen looked up from his water bowl at the sound of it.
Something shifted in the kitchen. Some ambient tension I hadn’t realized was present loosening slightly, like a joint popping. The defensiveness I’d walked into this conversation with felt suddenly excessive. Misplaced.
“It’s nice that they’re letting you use the rink. Are you also getting ice time somewhere else?”
“Uhm, no.” I picked up my coffee. Set it down. “I’m not officially training. I don’t know if I’m—it’s not—” I stopped.
This was ridiculous. I never explained myself to anyone.
Sabrina knew better than to ask. Avery had tried once and I’d shut him down so efficiently he hadn’t brought it up since.
Strangers, journalists, casual acquaintances—they got nothing.
A shrug. A redirect. A look that made it clear the topic was closed.
But Derek was sitting there with his coffee and his patient expression and his genuine, unhurried curiosity, and suddenly I was flustered.
I was never flustered.
“That was nosy of me,” he said simply. “You don’t have to explain anything to me.”
No pressure. No follow up questions. Just an easy out, offered without judgment. It made me want to explain, which was possibly the most irritating thing he’d done yet.
What was this guy’s deal?
I had very limited experience with people who didn’t require anything back.
In skating, everyone required something—coaches required performance, judges required a narrative, the audience required spectacle.
Even Sabrina, who loved me without conditions, required that I occasionally tell the truth about how I was doing.
Derek Sullivan apparently just required... my vague responses. And maybe not even that.
I didn’t know what to do with that.
“You should get ready,” I said, quieter now. “I don’t want to make you late.”
He nodded and crumpled his wax paper and stood. He was hanging up his hat when I said, without entirely planning to, “Triple axel. That’s what was giving me trouble.”
He looked up.
“Three and a half rotations,” I said. “Forward outside edge takeoff. You were right about that part.”
He had the decency not to make it weird. Which, frankly, was more restraint than most people showed.
“You’ll get it back,” he said.
I picked up my coffee and didn’t answer. But I didn’t disagree either.