Chapter 3
Psychological Warfare
I get to the rink first again.
Which is becoming a pattern I am absolutely not acknowledging.
The back door sticks slightly before giving way beneath my shoulder. The overhead lights flick on one row at a time, pale reflections stretching across untouched ice.
I drop my bag onto the bench and pull my phone out before I can think too hard about what I am doing. Then I turn the music louder than usual.
Petty. Absolutely.
The satisfaction is immediate.
Good.
If Calder gets to fire pucks at the boards like a caveman announcing territorial dominance, I can make the rink shake with orchestral strings before sunrise. Fair is fair.
I step onto the ice and immediately take centre instead of keeping to my usual side. Deliberately. My blades carve long sweeping lines straight through the middle of the rink as the music echoes around the empty arena.
This is my ice first.
At the very least, I was here first.
I push harder into the choreography, extending wider than normal during the transitions. Taking up more space. Letting my sequences drift closer to the hockey markings instead of carefully skirting around them. If someone ends up having to adjust this morning, it is not going to be me.
A challenge. Not spoken. Obvious anyway.
I am already imagining exactly how Calder is going to react. The jaw flex. The way he will shoot harder just to prove a point. The precise, controlled aggression of someone who does not like losing ground.
My mouth almost curves upward before I catch it.
Absolutely not. This is psychological warfare. It is not fun.
A loud clang echoes from the back entrance. Right on cue.
I do not look toward the sound immediately. Mostly because I know he will notice if I do. Awareness spreads sharply through me anyway.
Calder steps fully into the rink a few seconds later, hockey bag over one shoulder, coffee in hand. Then he stops. Not dramatically. Just long enough to take in the rink once.
The louder music. Me cutting directly through centre ice. The complete lack of effort I am making to stay politely on my side.
His eyes lift to mine. One eyebrow arches slightly.
I watch him put it together.
The music.
The territory.
The fact that I am standing exactly where he is going to hate me standing. Something shifts across his face. Recognition first. Then understanding. Then, annoyingly, amusement. My grip tightens around the edge of my sleeve.
The audacity.
Something tightens unexpectedly beneath my ribs before I can stop it. Because that immediate understanding, the way he reads the whole situation in one look, feels more unsettling than it should.
Calder drops his coffee onto the boards without breaking eye contact. Then he steps onto the ice.
And retaliates.
His first hockey stop sprays ice aggressively across the surface. Louder than necessary. Sharper than necessary.
My mouth twitches despite itself.
Oh.
So we are committing to the bit.
He pushes harder into his strides after that, taking up more space than usual as he cuts across his side of the rink. Wider turns. Faster acceleration. Closer passes near the centre line. Not reckless. Every movement feels like an answer to a question I asked with the volume dial.
I drift through centre ice during a transition and Calder claims the space behind me the second I clear it.
He looks alive. Not angry. Not irritated the way he was in the first two days. Engaged. Like this specific version of the morning, where we are openly making each other's lives difficult, is somehow the most interesting thing that has happened to him all week.
My next turn comes in sharper than it should.
The rink settles into something strange after that.
Not quite rhythm. More like two people testing where the other will give.
I push through a sequence near the boards and Calder accelerates across the far end without acknowledging me, which is its own kind of acknowledgement.
The music fills the space between us. His shots fill it back.
Somewhere along the way the whole morning stops feeling like shared ice time and starts feeling suspiciously like a conversation.
I glare over my shoulder mid-transition. "Do hockey players have a medical inability to exist quietly?"
Calder catches another puck against his blade without missing a stride. "Do figure skaters know any music that doesn't sound haunted?"
"It's called orchestral scoring."
"It's called psychological warfare."
I snort before I can stop myself.
Annoying.
I gather speed into the next jump. Calder skates directly through the space I vacated the second I land it. Territorial. Again.
"Careful," I call out as I glide backward through the transition. "You almost interrupted actual athleticism."
"Oh, sorry." His voice carries across the rink casually. "I was distracted by all the dramatic arm waving."
My jaw drops slightly. "The arm movements are choreography."
"They look exhausting."
"At least my sport has artistry."
"At least my sport survives physical contact."
I push into a spin hard enough that my skirt snaps sharply with the rotation. Across the rink Calder accelerates immediately after. I increase speed through the exit edge. He cuts harder into his next turn. Somewhere along the way it has become impossible to tell who started answering who.
I come out of the spin and skate straight through the centre line.
Calder cuts across from the opposite direction at the exact same moment.
Too close. We both shift automatically. His shoulder misses mine by a clean inch, the cold air displaced by his movement brushing briefly across my skin before he passes. Neither of us slows down.
We end up near the boards at the same time, both reaching for water without having planned it.
He leans against the barrier, breathing harder than he'd probably like to admit.
Water bottle in hand, I watch him from approximately two feet away in the specific way that tends to make people uncomfortable.
He notices. Of course he does.
"What," he says. Not a question.
"Nothing." I take a sip. "You look like somebody who doesn't know what to do with an unscheduled hour."
His expression doesn't change. That's how I know I landed somewhere real.
"I train here every morning," he says.
"Exactly." I gesture toward the rink with my water bottle. "You train. Every morning. This is the one place nobody's timing you, grading you, or telling you what comes next."
The silence that follows is about a beat too long.
Something shifts behind his eyes, quick, controlled, but not quick enough.
He picks up his stick from the boards and turns it once in his grip.
I've seen him do that before. After comments that get too close.
After observations he doesn't immediately want to answer.
The movement is casual if you aren't looking for it. I am looking for it.
"Fascinating theory," he says finally. Flat. Giving nothing.
"It's not a theory." I cap my water bottle. "You come here because nobody from the organization sees this session. No coaches with clipboards. No performance metrics." I keep my voice easy, like I'm discussing the weather. "Same reason I do."
He looks at me then. Actually looks at me, not the assessing scan he usually does but something more direct, like he's trying to work out how I got past the version of himself he usually shows people.
I smile at him. Pleasantly.
The jaw flexes.
There it is.
"You make a lot of assumptions for someone who's known me a week," he says.
"And you've fired approximately four hundred pucks at the boards like a man trying to outrun his own thoughts." I step back onto the ice. "I notice things. It's a whole skill."
For a second he says nothing. The stick turns once in his grip.
His gaze drops briefly to the ice before returning to me.
Small things. Easy to miss if you weren't paying attention.
I push off before he can recover whatever response he was reaching for, which feels suspiciously like winning. I'll take it anyway.
Calder cuts across his side of the rink with more aggression than the drill technically requires, forcing me to adjust my line on the next pass. I drift wider. He claims the vacated space. I drift wider again on the next sequence, deliberately this time, and steal it back before he gets there.
At some point the whole morning stops feeling like training.
I hate how entertaining this has become.
I push into the combination sequence faster than the music requires.
Calder responds almost immediately from the opposite side of the rink.
I increase speed through the transitions.
He cuts harder into his turns. Neither of us acknowledges it.
The pace just keeps climbing, each adjustment answered by another.
At one point we both cut toward the same patch of ice simultaneously. Both moving fast. Neither of us expecting the other.
Calder twists sharply sideways to avoid clipping me. His skate catches for a fraction of a second. Most people would miss it.
I don't.
Not enough to go down. Not enough to matter. Just enough that the recovery arrives half a beat late. My eyebrows lift.
The sound that escapes me is involuntary. "Was that your graceful hockey choreography?"
Calder shoots me a flat look while regaining his line. "It was strategic."
"Right." I skate backward, keeping my expression neutral with significant effort. "Very controlled. Really captured the spirit of a very large, very angry animal."
He looks at me for exactly half a second.
Then something almost happens. A breath that might have been the beginning of a sound.
His mouth presses together. He looks away first and pushes hard off into another drill, and there is something deliberate about the focus he puts back into the movement, the way a person resets when they have just noticed themselves about to do something.
The almost-laugh settles somewhere inconvenient before I can shove it away.
I turn back toward centre ice before the moment can become anything else and push into the next pass harder than necessary.
Arms up. Chin forward. The choreography is still here.
The program still exists. The Worlds are still less than a year away.
Yet somehow the most distracting thing in the rink is the fact that Calder Hayes almost laughed at one of my jokes.
We do not have another conversation. He drills. I run the program. But the energy between us is different from the first few days. Less hostile. More distracting.
I end practice before he does. Deliberately. Because focusing on jumps is getting harder when Calder is on the ice.
I step off and pull my guards on and unlace my skates. I shove things into my bag without looking toward the boards. The crack of pucks against the wall echoes through the rink behind me.
I sling my bag over my shoulder and head for the exit.
Almost free.
"You're still anticipating the outside edge."
Calder's voice cuts across the rink. Low. No challenge in it. No smug satisfaction. Just the flat delivery of something he has noticed.
My hand stills on the door.
I do not turn around immediately. Cold air settles sharp in my lungs while I make a deliberate choice about how much this annoys me.
Then I turn.
Calder stands near the boards, one hand loose on his stick. He is not doing it to provoke. He is not smirking. He is looking at me the same way he looks at the ice before a shot, like he has assessed something and is now simply reporting it.
"Every time you go into the transition," he says, "you brace for the edge instead of committing to it. You're half a beat early."
For a second all I hear is the hum of the lights above the rink.
Because he is right. It is the exact note Coach has been leaving on my session reviews for six weeks.
Trust the edge. Stop pre-loading the correction.
Six weeks of coached repetition and it is still there, and Calder Hayes has identified it from across a rink where he was supposedly doing his own training.
I hold his gaze for a moment. There are at least twelve responses available to me. Most of them involve sarcasm.
"Thank you," I say. Evenly. Not warmly. Not coldly. Just accurate.
Something moves briefly across his face, not quite surprise, before he nods once and turns back toward the boards.
I push through the exit door.
The cold outside hits sharp against my face and I walk half a block before I slow down. Not because I am upset. Because I need a second to deal with the fact that Calder Hayes keeps identifying technical flaws I pay professionals to identify. It is becoming deeply inconvenient.
I am still annoyed when I get home. That's fine. Annoyed is manageable. Annoyed I know what to do with.
I toss my keys onto the counter harder than necessary. Calder's voice follows me into the apartment anyway.