Chapter 6
Calder
I get to the rink before dawn and immediately know something is off.
The ice is empty. No music drifting through the speakers. No spinning blur at centre ice. No sharp turns carving rhythm into the surface. Just cold air and silence, and my hockey bag dropping near the boards harder than necessary.
The entire point of getting here early is to train before the team session starts. Not to notice the absence of one figure skater.
I step onto the ice and start running drills. Puck control. Acceleration. Shot repetition. Routine. But the rink still feels wrong, too still, and my eyes flick once toward the entrance before I catch myself.
I push harder into the next drill. A clean shot slams against the boards. Usually that sound overlaps with orchestral music and Arabella muttering insults at me from centre ice. I reset another puck.
The back entrance swings open.
I react before I consciously process the sound. My eyes moving towards the door. I look down again. My hands feel steadier when music, soft strings, fill the rink. I stare down at the puck near my stick for half a second longer than I need to.
Arabella steps fully into view already pulling gloves onto her hands while scanning the rink. Her eyes land on me immediately.
"You're early," she says.
I snort and push a puck into motion. "You're late."
She narrows her eyes stepping onto the ice. "Some of us require sleep to survive."
"Hockey players don't sleep."
"That explains the emotional intelligence."
I almost laugh. Instead I shake my head once and skate backward toward centre ice.
I tell myself I am tracking movement while running drills. Ice awareness. Athlete instinct. Except after a few minutes I notice I have completely stopped paying attention to my own training.
Arabella pushes into a jump sequence across centre ice. I watch the setup without meaning to — edge control, then timing, then the explosive lift off the blade. The precision registers. Not graceful. Controlled. There is a difference most people miss.
Most people watching figure skating see performance.
I see mechanics. Explosive power balanced over blades barely wide enough to stabilize landings.
Joint control. Recovery speed. Pain tolerance built into muscle memory.
These are not soft skills. They are the same architecture that makes any elite athlete expensive to break and expensive to replace.
Arabella lands the jump slightly off-centre.
Before I have fully processed that, she resets and does it again.
And again. No frustration. No hesitation.
Just repetition. The kind that hurts, that tears at the same joint in the same place over and over, that stops being about talent somewhere around the thousandth time and becomes purely about refusal.
The willingness to destroy your body chasing a correction that is one millimetre wide.
I've made that face. I know what it costs.
Arabella misses a rotation slightly and swears under her breath before resetting the sequence. No dramatic frustration. No visible self-pity. Just quiet fury directed entirely inward.
My stick rests loosely against the ice while I watch her repeat the sequence four more times until the landing finally comes down clean. The satisfaction that crosses her face afterward is tiny, controlled quickly, but I catch it.
Once I start watching properly, I can’t stop.
I’m mid-drill when a puck gets past my stick because I’m watching the way she reads the ice before a jump instead of watching my own line.
The puck slides wide and hits the boards at the wrong angle.
I don’t make sloppy passes. I reset my grip and take the next one harder than necessary. It doesn’t help.
I run the acceleration sequence and lose half a beat on the turn because I am tracking her exit edge instead of my own footing.
I fix it and push into the next rep and lose the same half-beat in the same place.
I stop. Stand still for a second. Restart from the beginning of the sequence with my head deliberately down. Two clean reps. Then a third. Better.
Arabella skates past me during her step sequence, close enough that cold air follows in her wake. I look away and fire a shot at the boards. Then another. The impacts come sharper now, the rhythm tightening the way it does when I am trying to compress something back down before it expands.
Arabella glances over from centre ice. "One day," she calls, "you're going to lose a fight against your own anger issues."
I snort despite myself. The grip on my stick eases slightly.
She goes back to her sequence. I go back to mine. I manage four clean drills in a row and then the puck catches the heel of my blade on a set shot I have made ten thousand times and bounces wide off the boards instead of finding the net. I watch it slide to the corner and stay there.
I have not missed that shot in three years.
I stand there and run a quick systems check — grip, stance, follow-through — and find nothing wrong with any of them. The mechanics are fine. The problem is not in my wrists or my edge or my release angle.
I shove harder into the next drill.
We end up at the boards at the same time without planning it, both reaching for water.
Arabella leans against the barrier beside me, still breathing hard from the last sequence, and for a few seconds neither of us says anything.
The rink hums around us. Outside the boards, ordinary morning noise has started up — a Zamboni somewhere below, a door opening and closing in the corridor.
"Do you actually have friends?" Arabella asks. "Outside the team. Like, actual ones."
She says it the way she says most things — light, casual, designed to produce a reaction. I have three responses ready before she has finished the sentence.
I don't use any of them.
I take a drink of water and look out across the ice.
"I have teammates," I say.
It comes out more flatly than I intend. Arabella glances over. She looks back toward the ice and says, "Same thing," and her tone makes it clear she knows it isn't.
She's right and I'm not going to say so.
I skate harder in the next sequence than the drill requires.
We are somewhere in the middle of a loose argument about whether sports psychologists are useful or just expensive when it happens.
Arabella resets the jump again. I catch the setup from the corner of my vision — outside edge, shoulders aligned, weight centred — and then something shifts half a second too late. A tiny hesitation going into the rotation.
Her landing comes down wrong.
The sound of blade against ice snaps sharply through the rink as Arabella loses balance and hits the surface shoulder-first.
I am moving before I consciously process it. One second I am near the boards. The next I am crossing the rink hard enough that my skates spray ice behind me, my body making the decision before the rest of me catches up.
Arabella pushes herself upright quickly, irritation already flashing across her face before I even reach her.
"Jesus," I say roughly, stopping beside her. "You okay?"
Arabella blinks up at me once like she is slightly surprised I am already there. Then she rolls her shoulder carefully. "I'm fine."
I crouch slightly anyway, eyes moving across the relevant information: shoulder mobility, weight distribution, breathing pattern. No obvious injury. My shoulders loosen before I can stop them.
Arabella plants one skate beneath herself and pushes upright. "You moved fast," she mutters.
I straighten. "Occupational hazard."
She holds my eyes for a second longer than usual. I step back.
"Your timing slipped before the landing," I say. "You hesitated going into rotation."
Arabella looks at me. Not reacting to the correction. Reacting to something else.
I start framing the technical explanation. She's already looking at me like it doesn't apply.
I stop talking.
Neither of us says anything. Arabella looks down and brushes ice off her sleeve. I put space between us.
Practice ends without ceremony. Arabella changes out of her blades and slings her bag over one shoulder without looking toward me, and then she heads for the exit.
"See you tomorrow," she calls, already through the door.
I collect the loose pucks. Tape my stick. Run two more drills that I don't actually need to run. Then I pick up my bag and leave.
The bakery on the corner has its lights on. I have walked past it every morning for three weeks and not gone in until yesterday. I go in again. My shoulder still has the ghost of a reflex in it from crossing the rink too fast. I need somewhere to stand still.
I order at the counter.
Arabella is already there.
She is at a small table near the window with her skate bag against the wall and both hands wrapped around a cup, looking out at the street. She glances over when I walk in. Something moves briefly across her face before she looks back out the window.
Her skate bag was visible through the glass from the street. I came in anyway.
I collect my coffee and sit down across from her, because the alternative is standing at the counter pretending I don't see her, which would be worse.
"Coincidence," I say.
"Obviously," she says.
We drink our coffee. Outside, the city is starting to wake up properly now — more traffic, a light on in the apartment building across the street, the first signs of a morning that belongs to people with reasonable schedules. Arabella keeps her eyes on the window. I keep mine on the cup.
"Teammates," Arabella says, after a while.
She says it to the window. Not a question. I take a drink of coffee and say nothing.
The quiet that follows has no business being comfortable. I notice it and say nothing about that either.
"Same time tomorrow?" she asks eventually, already standing, pulling her bag onto her shoulder.
"I'm always there at the same time," I say. "That's what a schedule is."
The corner of her mouth moves slightly. Then she goes.
I stay until the cup is empty. I have a team session in two hours. The morning is getting lighter outside. There are things I should be doing.
I sit there anyway.