Chapter 7
You Sound Worried
I know I'm off before Calder says anything.
My timing feels half a second wrong all morning, tiny mistakes, the kind nobody else would notice. A rough landing. An edge transition slightly too sharp. A delayed rotation. Normally I correct them automatically. Today everything keeps sticking.
My body knows the sequence. That is the irritating part. The mistakes are too small for anyone else to see and too obvious for me to ignore.
I push harder into the next jump sequence. Too hard. My landing skids rough enough that ice sprays sharply beneath my blades.
I reset immediately. Faster this time. Sharper. Which is the wrong instinct, I know it is the wrong instinct, Coach has told me about this specific wrong instinct approximately four hundred times. But the frustration is louder than the instruction right now and so I do it anyway.
Calder glides past near the boards while I reposition. "You're over-correcting."
"I did not ask for commentary."
"You're still doing it."
I ignore him and push into the sequence again. The jump lands cleaner. Still not clean. My jaw tightens. I hate almosts.
Calder watches me quietly from the other side of the rink while I reset for a fourth attempt.
Most people would just see a missed landing.
Calder sees the correction after it. The frustration underneath it.
The way I keep trying to force the program back into place instead of letting it settle.
Knowing he understands what he's looking at makes it worse somehow.
I launch into the jump again. This time my balance shifts slightly too far forward on the landing. Irritation flares hot through me. I exhale sharply and shake tension out through my hands.
"You're forcing it," Calder says. The words land flatly. Technical. But his voice sounds lower than usual. Closer somehow.
I look over. He is watching me with that same focused expression he gets during drills, tracking, analysing, and I hate how much that expression affects me now.
I tighten my ponytail harder than necessary. "I'm fine."
Calder's mouth shifts slightly like he absolutely does not believe me, which irritates me. Mostly because he's right.
I reset the sequence again. My thighs burn, which is not unusual. What is unusual is how heavy everything suddenly feels. Like my body is fighting me instead of working with me. I push backward into position and launch into the jump too aggressively. The landing jars hard through my knee.
"Jesus Christ," Calder snaps.
I look up.
His expression is sharper than I've seen it. Not annoyed. Not competitive. Just angry in that very specific way people get when they watch someone do something stupid and dangerous.
"I'm fine," I shoot back.
"No, you're stubborn."
He skates closer, irritation radiating off him in a way that feels completely different from the territorial irritation of the first week.
"You're forcing everything."
"I know how to train."
"Then stop skating angry."
I hate that he's right. I hate that he knows he's right. Most of all I hate that the concern underneath the frustration is suddenly impossible to miss.
I push into the sequence again before he can say anything else. The jump lands rough. Still wrong.
I hiss quietly under my breath.
Calder exhales hard beside the boards. The sound is familiar.
Not the sharp irritation from our first week, when we were still circling each other like territorial animals sharing the same patch of ice.
Something else. The kind of frustration that comes from watching someone make a mistake you've made yourself.
"You're tired," he says. Flat. Direct.
I stare at him for a second too long.
He would never say slow down or stop pushing so hard or you're going to hurt yourself. So instead it comes out as irritation. As sharp technical observation. As criticism sitting right on the edge of something else without quite crossing over. Calder notices me noticing. His jaw tightens.
"What?"
"You sound worried," I say before I can stop myself.
The silence lands differently from the usual silences between us. Calder goes still. Something shifts behind his eyes and disappears so quickly I almost convince myself I imagined it. He looks away first, grip tightening briefly on his stick.
If I were wrong, he would have laughed. He would have said something sarcastic and irritating and immediately turned it into an argument. He doesn't.
"You're reading too much into it."
His voice is lower now. Less certain. I hold his gaze for a second while cold air settles between us. Then I let it go. Because pushing would change something about this morning, and I am not entirely sure I want it changed.
I skate back toward centre ice.
I push into the next sequence. The jump setup feels steadier now, weight properly centred, shoulders down.
I launch.
I hesitate into the rotation. Half a beat late. The landing comes apart.
The ice rushes up hard enough to steal the breath from my lungs. My shoulder hits first. Pain cracks sharply through my collarbone and jaw. For one disoriented second all I can register is cold and white and the ugly scrape of steel finding nothing to grip.
"Arabella."
Calder is there before I have fully processed the fall.
One hand around my arm, the other braced flat against my back, and the momentum stops.
My face is approximately six inches from the ice.
His grip is very steady and completely without hesitation, the kind that belongs to someone who has pulled teammates off boards his entire career and doesn't think twice about it.
I get my skate under me. He doesn't let go until I'm fully upright, and even then his hand stays at my back for a second longer, checking that my weight is settled before he pulls away.
"You okay?" he asks.
He is still close. Close enough that I can see his jaw is tight and his breathing is slightly off from crossing the rink that fast.
"I'm fine," I say.
He looks at me. His eyes move across my face the way they move across the ice before a shot. Quick. Thorough. Not missing anything. Then they drop briefly to my shoulder, the one that took the impact, and something shifts in his expression before he manages to flatten it.
"I know," he says.
He doesn't move. The rink is very quiet. His hand is no longer at my back, but he hasn't stepped away and the space between us is smaller than it has any reason to be. I am aware of his breathing. The tape wrapped around his hands. The cold air everywhere except the narrow space between us.
I should say something.
I should make a joke. I should tell him to stop looking at me like that. Instead I just stand there.
For a second neither of us moves.
I stand there and look at him, and he stands there and looks at me, and for a few seconds neither of us does anything to make this smaller than it is.
Then Calder exhales slowly through his nose and takes one step back. The distance returns. He looks down at the ice and then back up at me, and when he speaks again his voice has found its usual flatness.
"Your timing slipped before the landing," he says. "You hesitated going into the rotation."
"I know."
"Your shoulder okay?"
"It's fine."
He nods once. Studies me for a half-second longer than the assessment requires. Then he pushes off toward his side of the rink and retrieves a puck and goes back to his drill, and the rink fills back up with the sounds it is supposed to have.
I roll my shoulder carefully. Nothing catches. The ache is already fading. I skate a slow lap instead of throwing myself straight back into the sequence. One edge. Then the next. Letting the ice settle beneath me again. Letting my breathing settle with it.
Across the rink, Calder fires a shot against the boards. His first shot hits harder than it needs to. The second one too.
I reset near centre ice and push into the jump sequence again. This time the hesitation doesn't come. The rotation is clean. The landing settles properly beneath my blade and I hold it through the exit and breathe out slowly.
From the other side of the rink I hear Calder's drills find their rhythm again, the puck impacts steadying into something regular and controlled. Neither of us speaks. The session runs itself out the way it always does, gradually, without ceremony.
Calder collects loose pucks. I pull guards onto my blades. The rink settles back into ordinary silence around us.
"Don't stay too long," he says on his way past, not slowing down. A short nod. The scrape of skates against concrete as he heads for the exit.
The back door swings shut behind him.
I stand at the boards for a moment with my bag half-packed and cold air settling around me. My shoulder already aches in the particular way that promises to be worse tomorrow.
My fingers pause briefly on the zipper of my bag.
I think about how fast he crossed the rink.
About the fact that he didn't hesitate. About the way he looked at my shoulder before he looked away.
The zipper catches. I tug it free. Then I finish packing and push through the exit, letting the cold outside hit my face.