Chapter 14
ELIDA
The breakfast buffet is a tactical error.
I realize this the moment I push through the doors. But it’s too late; I’m already committed. The room is bright with morning light. Steam rises from dishes at the buffet. Somewhere a coffee machine hisses.
And everywhere: hockey players.
The team has spread across three tables near the windows. They’re in various states of wakefulness - Barrett is bleary-eyed and reaching for caffeine. Ward is methodically loading a plate with eggs.
I walk to the buffet line with my head up. No-one knows anything. They couldn’t possibly know anything. I select a plate. I add eggs I don’t want. I add fruit for balance. I am a person who has come to breakfast normally, after a normal night, and nothing about my appearance suggests otherwise.
“Elida!”
Tara’s voice. She’s at a table near Calloway, waving me over, and I could kiss her for giving me somewhere to go that isn’t near the team tables.
“Saved you a seat,” Tara says as I sit down. “You seem tired.”
“Didn’t sleep well.”
“New hotel,” she sounds sympathetic. “The beds here are awful.”
I nod and pick up my coffee.
Across the room, someone laughs - Barrett, I think, loud and unrestrained. I try not to even glance at the team table.
I eat a piece of fruit I don’t taste.
Eventually I can’t help it. My eyes move across the room without my permission, seeking him out the way they’ve been seeking him out since I first arrived, and I find him at the end of the team table. Coffee in hand. Talking to Chen.
He looks normal. There’s nothing in his posture or expression to suggest that a few hours ago he was inside me, that I know what he sounds like when he comes.
He looks up and our eyes meet.
His expression doesn’t change - he doesn’t smile or do anything that anyone watching would clock as anything other than a player glancing across a room.
But I feel it.
The memory of his hands. His mouth.
I pull my eyes back to my plate.
My face is hot. I can feel it - the blush climbing up my neck, impossible to hide, completely incriminating. I pick up my coffee and take a long sip and hope the mug covers most of my face.
“You’re flushed,” Tara says.
“It’s hot in here.”
“It’s freezing.”
“The coffee. Hot coffee.”
Across the room, Barrett says something that makes Mercer snort. I push my eggs around the plate without eating and calculate exactly how long I need to stay here before it’s reasonable to leave.
“You okay?” Tara asks.
“Fine. Just tired.”
She nods. She doesn’t push. But her eyes flick toward the team table, and then back to me.
I feel caught.
But she can’t know. No one knows. We were careful. No-one saw him arriving or leaving. There’s no evidence, no witness, nothing but my flushed face.
But Tara has been my closest friend since I arrived. She’s seen me walk into rinks and boardrooms and bars. She’s never seen me like this - distracted and off-balance, stealing glances at a table full of hockey players like a teenager with a crush.
I am a professional, I remind myself. I am a coach. I am twenty-three years old and I have competed in front of thousands of people and I can survive a breakfast buffet.
“More coffee?” Tara asks.
“Yes,” I say. “Please.”
She goes to the coffee station.
Mateo is standing now, plate in hand, heading toward the buffet line. He moves through the room with that unconscious physical confidence - the same way he moves on the ice, like his body knows what to do without being told. He reaches the chafing dishes and starts loading his plate.
He’s being so careful not to look at me that the carefulness itself feels conspicuous. He’s focused on his food with the intensity of a man defusing a bomb. Eggs. Bacon. Toast. Not a single glance in my direction.
It would be convincing if I didn’t know him.
If I didn’t know that normally - before last night - he would have caught my eye and given me a small nod at least.
This feels louder than any glance.
He returns to his table and Tara arrives back with my coffee, setting it down in front of me.
Chen says something to him. Mateo nods. Normal. Everything normal.
But beneath the table, my hands are shaking.
I press them flat against my thighs and breathe.
No one knows, I tell myself. No one saw. No one can prove anything.
I am a professional.
I am a professional.
I am a professional who spent last night letting her athlete fuck her against a hotel headboard, and now I have to sit through the bus ride home.
I take a long sip of coffee.
MATEO
Breakfast is loud and carb-heavy and exactly what I need. I eat without talking much, which nobody questions because I’m always like that before travel. Elida is sitting across the dining room with Tara and Calloway, hair up, coffee in hand, like someone who slept perfectly well.
We’re back upstairs grabbing bags when Mercer catches me.
“So,” he says.
“Mercer.” I grab my bag and head out into the corridor.
“Where were you last night?”
“Bed.”
“Funny,” he says, falling into step beside me. “Because I got up for water around two and your bed was empty.”
“Light sleeper,” I say. “Went for a walk.”
“A walk.”
“Fresh air.”
“In Ridgewood. At two in the morning.”
“It’s a nice town.”
Mercer rolls his eyes. “I also may have noticed that you got a text right before you left.”
“No idea what you’re talking about.”
“Met someone at the bar?”
“Mercer.”
“What? I’m just saying. Why are you being weird about it?”
“Can you leave it?”
He considers this for a moment.
“I mean, obviously I could have hooked up too. I had loads of offers in the bar. I was tired.”
“Sure.”
“Loads of offers,” he says again, too firmly.
“Absolutely.”
Chen falls into step beside me on the way to the bus.
He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Just walks, coffee in hand.
“Mercer is telling everyone you hooked up with someone but you’re telling everyone you went for a walk.”
“Is he?”
“Two am. In Ridgewood.”
“Nice town.”
“Mmm.” He takes a sip of coffee. He doesn’t say anything else. But I catch the look - brief, knowing - that says I see you, I know more than you’ve said, and I’m not going to make you talk about it right now.
We walk to the bus.
ELIDA
The bus finally pulls into campus and everyone piles off.
I hang back, letting the team filter off first, and I’m coming down the steps when Mateo appears beside me and his hand finds the small of my back for one brief moment as he takes my bag from me without asking.
“I’ve got it,” I say.
“I know,” he says, and hands it back once I’m at the bottom of the steps.
Tara falls into step beside me as the team disperses toward the building. “My office. Ten minutes?”
Her office smells like the good hand cream she keeps on her desk. She closes the door and makes me a coffee then sits across from me and looks at me with the expression I’ve come to recognize - steady and direct.
She wraps both hands around her mug. “Russo played really well this weekend.”
I say nothing.
“I’m not going to make this into a big thing. I just - I saw. Just now, off the bus. And I saw at the rink last week when I walked in, and I’ve been watching this develop for a while. I like you. I want you to be happy. And I think he’s - I think he’s a good person.”
“He is,” I say.
“But.” She sets her mug down. “You’re staff.
I know you’re young, and I know technically you’re a consultant, not a coach, and I know it’s more complicated than that.
But you’re still on the staff, Elida. And he’s a player.
And if Calloway finds out officially… I want you to think about what happens if this goes wrong.
Not for him - he’ll be fine, he’s leaving at the end of the season either way.
For you. You came here to rebuild your career. I don’t want to watch you risk that.”
“I know.”
“I’m not telling you what to do,” she says quickly. “I promise I’m not. I just-” She reaches across and squeezes my hand once. “Be careful. Okay?”
She’s genuine and on my side. I nod.
I walk home in the cold. I’m fine - I’m a grown-up who can make her own decisions and assess her own risks. I know the difference between then and now.
I know the difference.
The apartment is exactly as I left it.
I drop my bag by the door and sit on the sofa in my coat.
I should eat.
I should unpack and shower and write up my session notes from the weekend and be a functional person.
I sit there a while longer instead.
It’s fine, I tell myself. Last night was only one night. Two adults making a choice. Nobody’s career is over. Nobody got hurt. It doesn’t have to be complicated.
But I know even as I’m thinking it that it’s already complicated.
I shower and eat then I get into bed. Eventually I manage to fall asleep.
The rink in the dream is Stockholm.
I’ve dreamed it so many times that some part of me recognizes it immediately and knows what’s coming. But I can’t stop it.
Erik is at the boards.
He’s exactly as I remember - tall, composed, and attentive. He’s watching me run the combination. I can feel that it’s good. He skates out to meet me.
“Better. But here-”
His hands on my waist.
And this time in the dream something is different - I can see it clearly - the thing I couldn’t see at twenty-one.
It’s the calculation underneath, and the way his eyes move over me like I’m something he’s already decided to have.
But still I lean in when he kisses me because dreams don’t let you rewrite the past even when you can see it coming.
Then it’s later. Months later. His apartment in Stockholm, the one I knew as well as my own by then. I’m in his bed and he’s beside me. It feels like the most natural thing in the world because he’s made it feel that way so carefully and so deliberately over so many months.
I loved him.
I loved him and I trusted him and I gave him everything - my career, my body, my absolute belief that he saw me clearly and wanted what was best for me.
And then the photographs appeared.