Chapter 2
I Hate That He Noticed
I get to the rink earlier than usual.
Entirely a personal choice. Completely unrelated to Calder Hayes. The fact that this happens to be twenty minutes earlier than yesterday and forty minutes earlier than last week is a coincidence I refuse to examine too closely.
The back door sticks slightly before giving way beneath my shoulder. Familiar. Comfortable. The key the owner gave me years ago scrapes softly in the lock behind me as I step into the darkened rink.
For a second I just stand there breathing it in. No crowds. No music yet. No pressure. Just cold air and untouched ice stretching beneath the dim overhead lights.
This is mine.
Or at least it was before a six-foot-something menace with a hockey stick decided my training schedule was apparently a group activity.
I flick the lights on one row at a time, the rink slowly waking around me in pale strips of white and silver. My skate bag drops onto the bench with a familiar thud.
Routine settles in automatically after that. Laces tightened. Hair fixed. Music queued. Control rebuilt piece by piece.
My breath fogs in front of me as I lace up, fingers moving quickly through a process I've repeated thousands of times.
Tight enough for stability. Tight enough that everything feels locked into place.
I run through the program in my head while my hands work.
Entry edges. Combination sequence. The step section Coach keeps marking down because my right hip pulls on the back cross.
By the time I finish tying the final knot, the entire program is already waiting for me.
Every transition. Every correction. Every landing exactly where it's supposed to be.
The first push onto the ice is relief.
Smooth. Pristine. Perfect. My blade glides across the untouched surface like cutting through glass. No gouges. No churned-up snow. No hockey stops tearing through carefully maintained edges.
My eyes flick automatically toward the opposite side of the rink. Empty. The reaction should be relief. Instead a strange sense of disappointment catches me off guard. Irritating. I push harder into the next glide before I can examine that too closely.
Halfway through my second run-through, the back door opens.
I do not look immediately.
That lasts approximately half a second. My attention snaps toward the sound before I can stop it.
Calder steps inside carrying a coffee cup like he owns the place. Relaxed. Unhurried. The sort of confidence that comes from never questioning whether you're welcome somewhere. He doesn't look toward me. Just sets the cup on the boards, rolls his shoulders once, and reaches for his stick.
Something sharp and unreasonable stirs beneath my ribs. I push harder into the sequence before he notices me watching.
The music swells through the speakers as I gather speed, forcing my attention back onto the choreography. Outside edge. Turn. Landing. Ignore the hockey player. Ignore the fact that he somehow looks more irritating with coffee.
A loud crack explodes through the rink.
I flinch slightly as a puck slams against the boards. Harder than yesterday. Another follows. The impacts cut straight through the music, sharp enough that I can feel the vibration through the ice beneath my blades.
Subtle.
About as subtle as a fistfight.
I catch sight of him from the corner of my eye as I skate through the next sequence.
Coffee still on the boards. Stick in his hands.
His movements look lazy at first glance.
Then you watch for more than five seconds.
Every shot lands exactly where he intends it.
Every stride finishes balanced. Every adjustment happens before he needs it.
Annoyingly efficient. The kind of control that only comes from repeating something thousands of times until it settles into muscle memory.
The recognition lands before I can stop it.
Calder Hayes might be insufferable, but he is not bad at what he does.
I grit my teeth and keep skating.
He shoots again. This time the puck skids near my edge path. Close enough to register. Not close enough to actually interfere.
My eyes narrow.
Another follows. Same distance. Again. Testing the boundary he drew himself days ago, finding out whether it still holds or whether I'll flinch first.
I don't flinch.
I reset the combination entry instead and push into it harder than the music technically calls for. Triple flip. Clean landing. Transition into the step sequence. I keep my chin up and my arms controlled and I do not look at him once.
Across the rink another puck detonates against the boards. Competitive. Fine.
I reset faster this time, sharper into the choreography.
Higher extension on the arabesque. Cleaner edges through the turns.
Every movement a fraction more deliberate than it needs to be.
A fraction sharper. A fraction higher. By the time I catch myself holding a landing longer than Coach would probably approve of, the point has already been made.
Across the rink Calder's speed increases too. I notice because his hockey stops become more aggressive. Because the impacts against the boards get louder. Because the space between each shot tightens until the rhythm starts matching mine in a way that feels entirely too deliberate.
My next turn cuts harder into the ice than it needs to.
I launch into another jump. He fires the second I land it. The crack of the puck against the boards follows my blade touching down so closely it almost feels timed. Once could be coincidence. Twice could be coincidence. Three times starts feeling personal.
My pulse kicks strangely harder beneath my ribs.
I glide backward through the next transition and catch him watching me openly.
Not my face. My footwork. His eyes track the movement of my blades across the ice with sharp, unnerving focus.
Not polite interest. Not boredom. Study.
The sort of concentration athletes reserve for things they are trying to understand.
Somehow that is worse than the puck baiting.
I look away first.
I push harder into the next spin to cover it. Fast enough that the rink blurs briefly around me. The music pulses through the speakers. My skirt flares with the rotation. Blade biting cleanly into the ice. If Calder Hayes wants something to watch, he can keep up.
Then something black cuts through the edge of my vision.
A puck slices across the ice. Too close. The rhythm shatters instantly. My focus jerks sideways before I can stop it. Not enough to drop me. I've fallen often enough that panic doesn't live in my knees anymore. But enough. The landing arrives half a beat late. Not a stumble. Not clean either.
Irritation flares hot beneath my skin.
Absolutely not.
I stop hard enough that ice sprays around my skates and push off toward him. Calder barely looks surprised. Like he saw this coming three shots ago. Which somehow irritates me more than the puck did.
"You trying to prove a point," I say, "or are you just naturally insufferable?"
His eyebrows lift slightly as he corrals another puck against his blade. "Depends."
"On what?"
"Whether you're naturally dramatic or this is a special performance for me."
I hold his gaze. He looks entirely too calm about the fact that I am considering serious violence before sunrise.
"That puck came through my spin."
"It missed your spin."
"That is not the point."
"It kind of is."
My jaw tightens. "You keep cutting into my space."
"You keep drifting wider on your exits."
The words land fast enough that I pause. Not because he's wrong. Because he's specific. Most people see a spin. A jump. A program. Calder Hayes just picked out a technical flaw from the opposite side of the rink while firing pucks at a wall.
My eyes narrow slowly.
He holds my stare. There is no smugness in it, which honestly would be easier to deal with. He just watches me steadily, like he has already decided the truth of something and is waiting to see if I realise it too.
I push off before this becomes something else and skate back toward centre ice.
The smart play is to ignore him. Reset. Run the program again from the top, keep my head down, finish the session, leave. Ignoring an arrogant hockey player who is apparently incapable of sharing a rink without turning it into a competition isn't the most difficult thing I have done.
I know all of this.
I push into the next pass anyway, and somewhere around the second corner I realise I'm skating faster than the music.
The timing is still there. The choreography still works.
Barely. Coach would notice. Coach notices everything.
I ease off instinctively, then catch myself pushing harder again three seconds later.
Calder cuts hard across his half of the ice.
I transition backward through mine. For one sharp second our paths converge near the centre line, close enough that I feel the displaced air as he turns, and then he pivots away cleanly, precise enough that there is not even contact. Controlled. Always controlled.
He has not actually collided with me once. Not despite the aggression. Not despite how close he keeps getting. Every near miss has a fraction of clearance in it, calculated and held.
I push into the next jump too fast. The landing comes up slightly rough beneath my blade, not bad enough to matter, bad enough that I know it, and a loose puck skids suddenly near my feet.
Before I can sidestep it, Calder reaches across and catches it cleanly against the flat of his blade, barely an inch from my skate, without breaking stride, without making it look like anything at all.
His eyes drop immediately to my footing, checking the landing, not my face.
"Careful," he says. Low. Not mocking.
I look at him.
He is already pushing backward, the puck corralled against his stick, attention already moving back to his side of the rink. Like it was nothing. Like it was just the obvious thing to do and therefore he did it.
Something unsettles beneath my ribs.
Not the puck.
Not the warning.
The fact that he looked at the landing.
I push into the next sequence before that thought can settle anywhere useful.
The rest of the session passes in the same strange rhythm.
We don't speak again. He goes back to his shots.
I go back to my program. The rink should feel bigger with us staying on opposite sides of it.
Instead every movement seems to carry farther.
Every shot against the boards. Every change of direction.
Every sharp stop throwing snow across the ice.
I end practice before he does. Deliberately. Because leaving second feels suspiciously like losing, and I refuse to spend any more time examining why that thought exists.
My muscles ache beneath my jacket as I step off the ice. I pull my guards onto my blades and shove things back into my skate bag without looking toward the boards.
The rink sounds different now. Every scrape of his blades registers. Every shot against the boards. Like my brain has issued a directive, track him, without asking my permission first.
Deeply irritating.
I sling my bag over my shoulder and head for the exit.
His voice cuts across the rink just as my hand finds the door.
"You drift wide before the exit edge."
My hand freezes on the handle.
Cold air sits sharp in my lungs. I turn slowly.
Calder stands near the boards, one hand loose around the top of his stick, exactly as relaxed as he was when he arrived.
He is not looking at me to provoke. He is looking at me the way he looked at my footwork, like it is simply something he has noticed and is now stating, the way you would mention it if it started raining.
"Every time," he adds. "You're consistent about it."
I look at him for a long moment.
He means it as information. That is somehow worse than if he were being smug about it, because smug I know how to answer. This is just accurate. Delivered without ceremony. The kind of thing Coach would stop practice to point out. The kind of thing I spent half of yesterday trying to fix.
"Goodbye," I clip.
I push through the door before he can respond.
The cold outside hits sharp against my face, and I walk the first half-block faster than necessary before I remember there is no one following me and slow down.
The irritating part is not that Calder noticed the drift. It is that he noticed it immediately. About the exit edge. About the drift.
I adjust my bag on my shoulder and keep walking.
Tomorrow I will come in at exactly the same time. I will run the program from the top. I will not pay attention to where he is standing.
That is the plan.
Unfortunately, the plan already has several obvious weaknesses.