18. February 19, Saturday #2
Jayden tore his gaze away from Ilya like it physically hurt. He reached to latch onto Jason’s stick, nearly overbalancing. Jason adjusted without missing a beat, tugging him gently into motion, towing him toward a loose group of kids near the far boards.
“I’ll be over there!” Jayden yelled back, glory-drunk, as if they might somehow lose track of him in the vast expanse of half a rink.
They disappeared in a trail of giggles and snow spray.
Silence didn’t exactly fall between Zoey and Ilya, but the air shifted. The nearby chaos blurred into a background hum.
She let herself drift closer on the thin squeak of her blades.
“Hey,” she said softly.
He looked at her like she’d just surprised him. As if she wasn’t the one person who always seemed to appear with a camera whenever he did anything remotely human. “Hey,” he echoed.
Up close, she could see the faint flush on his cheekbones from the chill, the way his mouth still hadn’t quite relaxed. Last night sat between them in the half-foot of space like a live wire.
She lifted the camera so she had something to do with her hands. “He’s obsessed with you, you know,” she murmured, watching Jayden cling to Jason’s stick, laughing as he was dragged along, his butt scraping across the ice, having already given up trying to stay on his feet.
“Mm.” Ilya’s jaw ticked. “He likes hockey.”
“That’s not all he likes.” She tipped her head, studying him. It was probably the ice making her reckless. Or the fact that every reasonable part of her brain was yelling do not do this and she apparently enjoyed ignoring cautionary signage.
“He’d make a great defenseman,” she said. “He already picked the perfect role model.”
His throat moved. He didn’t look at her.
And because she’d never once in her life successfully chosen the line between appropriate and too intimate and stayed behind it, her mouth went ahead and jumped. “You’d make a great dad.”
The words tumbled out and hit the air between them like a dropped puck. Dangerous and echoing.
Zoey’s stomach whooshed to her feet. She had the brief, insane urge to snatch them back, but—too late. She’d said it. It existed now.
Ilya’s head jerked toward her. For a second, something flared in his eyes—pure, naked, like she’d peeled back skin. Then shutters slammed down.
“No.” Ilya shook his head almost violently, eyes a little wild. “No, I…you’re wrong.”
“Okay,” Zoey dragged out because his tone shot straight past modesty and into full-body flinch. “Wow. Strong feelings there, big guy.”
“I would be terrible,” he insisted, adjusting his grip on the stick with jerky movements.
“Always gone for games. Road trips. Practice. Events. Basically, never home. Kids need consistency. They need you to be there. I have captain shit. Media. Meetings. I forget everything. I can’t even keep track of one fucking dog. ”
That last bit came out sharper, edged with something that sounded too much like self-loathing to just be about Fido.
Zoey blinked. “Fido’s missing?”
His mouth thinned. “Yes. No. I don’t know…
” He broke off, jaw flexing. “I haven’t seen Fido in weeks.
The guys say the food’s not touched. I should be down there more but between the losing streak and…
everything, I’ve barely made it to the group home either.
And he still looks at me like I’m a superhero.
It’s…not deserved.” His eyes stayed locked on the far end of the rink.
“Or,” Zoey began, keeping her voice mild because he looked ready to bolt, “he’s a kid who remembers who bothers to see him. Even if it’s not as often as you’d prefer.”
He flinched almost imperceptibly.
Before she could follow that up—slide a little closer and poke at that raw place that told Ilya I wouldn’t be perfect, therefore I don’t deserve that kind of love—Tommy shouted from the opposite net.
“Serg! I need you to show these monsters how not to shoot like confused raccoons!”
Ilya latched onto the interruption like a lifeline. “Coming,” he called, already angling his skates away. He hesitated just long enough to cut Zoey a quick glance. “You’d be a good mom,” he added, his face still showing confusion from Jayden’s devotion.
Then he pushed off, long strides sending him gliding across the ice toward the older kids.
The line of his back was rigid, the set of his shoulders all wrong for a man supposedly just going to demonstrate slapshots to a bunch of surly teens.
He wasn’t just brushing off a compliment earlier. He’d looked…spooked.
He’d been gone for road trips, grinding through a losing streak while managing PR commitments. And still, even with that absence, Jayden looked at him like he hung the damn moon.
Why couldn’t Ilya see that showing up at all mattered?
Zoey’s chest ached.
Movement in the stands caught her eye. Up in the lower rows, Nina sat with her clipboard propped on her knee, pen flying as she checked off names and made notes.
Her dark gaze flicked up, tracking Ilya toward the far end of the rink.
Then, briefly, down to Zoey, alone at center ice, camera hanging forgotten.
No pointed eyebrow. No slow, knowing shake of the head. Just a neutral, distracted look, like she was cataloguing another variable on a long list.
Zoey still went hot with guilt.
Right. Almost kissing the team captain the night before she ran the biggest outreach event of her new career. Ten out of ten for professionalism, Williams.
She inhaled, forced her shoulders down, and lifted the camera back to her face.
Work now. Feelings…later.
Preferably never.
She started skating along the boards, letting the rhythm of it steady her.
At the near circle, Ty used his stick to twirl a small girl who was lying flat on the ice, spinning her in tight circles while she shrieked delightedly.
“Canadian washing machine!” he crowed, his smile huge.
Zoey pulled out her phone so she could grab a video. She captured the spinning, the girl’s high laugh ringing out, and the line of other kids forming behind them.
“Do me next!” one yelled.
“Me, me!”
“This is the only time I’m volunteering for laundry duty,” Ty puffed as he finally slowed, staggering comically.
Zoey’s grin stretched her cheeks. Her mind was already editing the clip. Overlay a sponsor logo. Slap some bubbly text on it: Hockey: Take it for A Spin. Tag Ty. Post tomorrow.
The images she was gathering now were gold—gritty, messy, real. Not the glossy, posed shots that management usually wanted. These were what would make people pull out their wallets, their hearts.
For the first time in longer than she wanted to admit, she felt…settled. Like all the weird, disparate parts of her had clicked into place doing something that actually mattered.
She’d spent so long shrinking her needs to fit whatever space was left over around someone else’s dreams. Now she was asking the state to trust her with someone else’s entire life, maybe even more than one of these kids’ lives.
No pressure.
A tiny boy shot past her, legs pistoning, arms flailing, joyous terror in every line of him. He wiped out by the hash marks and popped up laughing.
Yeah. Okay. Maybe pressure was fine.
She coasted toward the far end of the rink, tracking groups.
The little-kid stations were covered with Ty spinning children into oblivion, Jason and Tommy running some kind of controlled chaos that looked vaguely like a drill if you squinted and the middle group had one of the assistant coaches doing skating drills.
Her gaze snagged on the far right corner.
Ilya was there now, near the blue line with the teenagers. At some point he must have officially traded with Tommy because Tommy was now in the corner, swaddled in pads, letting a group of eight-year-olds take shots on him while he flopped dramatically every time they “scored.”
Ilya, by contrast, looked like he’d just stepped into a skills competition.
He lined up a puck, feet planted, shoulders loose, and demonstrated a slapshot in slow motion. Stick drew back, weight shifted, blade slapped the ice with a thump and kissed the puck. Even at half-speed, the shot snapped with a crack that made a few of the kids flinch.
He said something to the group, miming the follow-through, then stepped back and let one of the taller boys try. The kid whiffed completely, spinning half around with the momentum.
Ilya said something to the boy, tapping his own leg. The corner of his mouth quirked, and the boy flushed but grinned back, adjusting his stance.
Zoey drifted to a stop at the boards, watching.
He was different with the teens. Looser, more sarcastic.
They chirped him, he chirped back, trading insults about shot speed and haircuts.
The fear she’d seen around Jayden wasn’t here; the anxiety of breaking something small and tender had been replaced by easy competence.
These kids could talk back, tell him when they were pissed, or when their skates hurt.
They could shoulder some of their own emotional weight.
Did the older kids feel safer for him because they came with fewer what-ifs? Less…fragility?
She realized he’d always been like this. Helping rookies, raising Kira, sitting on panels about mental health in sports. As long as they were old enough to say what they needed, he was involved, steady as a rock.
Put a five-year-old hero-worshipping him in his path and he short-circuited.
Zoey shook off the thought. Not her job to solve his therapy homework in the middle of a clinic.
She pushed off again, making another circuit, checking in on volunteers. As she neared the benches, the temperature seemed to drop a notch; not literally, just the specific chill that came from a cluster of teenagers pretending not to care.
Madison leaned against the boards in front of the bench, with a few other teens, arms folded tightly across her almost-comically-oversized black sweatshirt.
Her dark hair was pulled into a series of complicated braids, a different pattern than the last time Zoey had seen her.
Also new, were the deeper shadows under her eyes.