Chapter 5 #2
The spin in the air. The sickening, stomach-dropping realization that the height was wrong.
The rotation that ran out of sky. Her blade catching the ice at the wrong angle—my blade, my ice, the memory so immersive that the tense collapsed and past became present—and the sound.
That wet, structural, permanent pop that had rearranged the fundamental mechanics of my right leg and every plan I’d ever built on top of it.
The humiliation. Twelve thousand mouths forming the same O. The little girl in the front row who’d been shielded by her mother’s hand. The announcers struggling to maintain their professional composure while narrating the end of a career in real time.
The blood. Red on white. Intricate and terrible, spreading across the ice in patterns that looked almost intentional, as if my body were leaving a message in a language I couldn’t read.
The temperature. Simultaneously scorching and freezing—the paradox of shock, the body’s confused attempt to regulate itself amid catastrophic input, running hot and cold simultaneously like a furnace with a broken thermostat.
And then: silence.
The deafening, absolute, world-ending silence that had swallowed twelve thousand voices in a single inhale and replaced them with the distant, rhythmic beeping of a heart monitor confirming, at intervals that felt too widely spaced, that the body on the stretcher was still technically alive.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Consciousness flickering. In. Out. The fluorescent lights of the medical tunnel strobing overhead like a film reel with missing frames.
Faces materializing and dissolving. The sting of an IV needle.
The cold of the cervical collar against her throat—my throat.
Always mine. The memory refused to maintain its distance, refused to stay packaged in the third person where it was manageable, insisted on collapsing the wall between then and now until there was no difference at all.
A touch to my cheek.
Not a grab. Not a shake. A touch. Careful, warm, deliberate—the pad of a thumb against the curve of my cheekbone, applied with the specific, calibrated tenderness of someone who understood that the wrong pressure would shatter rather than ground.
My eyes opened.
Green.
A particular, unmistakable green. Deep-water green.
Dark-stone green. The green of a man whose eyes had been built for patience and tracking and the kind of sustained, unwavering focus that could read a shooter’s intention from forty feet away and translate it into a save before conscious thought had time to intervene.
Luka’s eyes.
They were close. Closer than they should have been, which meant he was close, which meant—
It took me a full minute to reassemble the scene.
I wasn’t standing. I wasn’t at the boards. I wasn’t even on my feet.
I was crouched on the ice. Knees drawn to my chest, arms wrapped around my shins, body folded into a tight, defensive curl that I recognized with a sickening lurch of clarity as a fetal position.
My blades were beneath me, tipped on their sides, and the cold of the frozen surface was seeping through my leggings and into the bones of my knees and shins with the indifferent thoroughness of a substance that didn’t distinguish between athletes and rubble.
I had a panic attack.
A full, dissociative, flashback-triggered panic attack, and I didn’t even feel it happen.
Luka was kneeling in front of me. On the ice.
In full goalie gear—pads, chest protector, the works—which meant he’d been here, in this rink, at this hour, and had either witnessed my descent or found me at the bottom of it.
His gloves were off. Bare hands, one of which was still cradling the side of my face with a gentleness so at odds with the size of his palm that the contrast made my sternum ache.
His scent enveloped me. Rain-soaked stone and clove and bitter dark chocolate—layered, warm, immersive, filling the space between us with an intimacy that had nothing to do with proximity and everything to do with the way my Omega biology responded to this particular Alpha signature.
It didn’t excite. It stabilized. Grounded me the way a deep chord grounded a melody—pulling everything back to center, giving the scattered, fragmented pieces of my awareness a tonal home to return to.
I blinked. Stared at him. Tried to reconcile the man kneeling in front of me with the timeline I’d constructed in which he was supposed to be irrelevant.
His voice, when it came, was barely above a whisper. Low and rough and stripped of every layer of bravado and charm and flirtatious deflection he’d worn during our encounter in Rink Four. This was Luka without the armor. Luka in the raw.
“And what’s clouding my diamond’s shine to bring her to tears, hmm?”
Tears.
I blinked again. Felt it this time—the wetness.
The slick, cooling tracks that ran from the outer corners of my eyes down the curves of my cheeks and along the line of my jaw, collecting at the point of my chin before dropping, silently, onto the ice between my knees.
I’d been crying. Not the loud, cathartic, heaving kind that announced itself and demanded acknowledgment.
The silent kind. The kind that happened when the body decided to grieve without consulting the mind, releasing the pressure through the tear ducts while the conscious self was somewhere else entirely—trapped in a flashback, locked in a memory, drowning in a stadium that had gone quiet five years ago and never fully found its volume again.
Fuck.
Seeing Luka’s face through the blur of those tears did a thing to my chest that I was in no condition to analyze and even less condition to defend against. Because his expression—stripped of the smirk, stripped of the charm, stripped of everything that made him tolerable from a safe emotional distance—was open.
Vulnerable in a way I’d only seen once before, years ago, in a hotel room in Halifax when he’d told me about his mother and I’d realized that the quiet, brooding goaltender I’d been sleeping with was actually a man carrying entire geological layers of pain beneath his composure.
And the memory did what memories do when you’re already unraveled: it pulled another thread.
We were good once.
The thought arrived without permission and settled into the wet, aching cavity behind my ribs like a creature returning to a burrow it had never fully abandoned.
We were good. For a handful of months that had felt, at the time, like a rehearsal for a life I might actually get to live.
Late nights in his apartment where the conversation outlasted the sex and the sex was already obscenely long.
The way his hand fit against the small of my back when we walked through a crowded room.
The stupid, mortifying, wonderful way he’d called me diamond—not because I was decorative, but because I was difficult to break.
And I dared to think we could go the distance. An actual, structured, committed relationship—not the situationship carousel, not the fuck-buddy purgatory, but the real, terrifying, vulnerable thing where you hand someone the combination to every lock you own and trust them not to rob you blind.
And that crashed too.
My vision blurred further. Fresh tears pooling at my lash line, building until the surface tension broke and they spilled, tracing new paths down cheeks that were already mapped with salt.
I lowered my head. Pressed my forehead against my drawn-up knees.
Let my hair—loose, unbraided, a curtain of purple and turquoise and platinum—fall around my face like a barrier between me and the man whose scent was dismantling every wall I’d built in his absence.
I shook my head. “Nothing,” I whispered. The word was hoarse. Fractured. Convincing absolutely no one, least of all the goaltender whose entire professional existence was predicated on reading what people were going to do before they did it.
I pushed to my feet. Too fast. The blood rushed from my head in a sickening vertigo-laced plunge, and the world tilted—the boards swinging left, the ice lurching right, my legs—those supposedly elite, Olympic-caliber legs—buckling at the ankles like they’d forgotten the basic engineering of upright posture.
His arm was around me before I finished swaying.
Fast. Instinctive. The goaltender’s reflex translated to a different context—the same lightning-quick lateral read, the same anticipatory positioning, the same ability to be exactly where the crisis was going to land a half-second before it landed there.
His forearm pressed against my waist, stabilizing, his hand splaying across my hip with a grip that was firm without being forceful, supportive without being possessive.
Fuck.
The contact. The contact. His touch sent electric currents through the fabric of my practice top and into the skin beneath—not the sharp, startling shock of static discharge but the sustained, humming, bone-level vibration of a current that had been dormant for five years and had just been handed a power source.
Every nerve ending in the stripe of skin beneath his palm fired simultaneously, and the sensation radiated outward in concentric waves—through my ribs, up my spine, into the base of my skull where the Omega receptors lived and where his scent was already doing its quiet, devastating work.
It felt like being alive.
Not surviving. Not enduring. Not the grim, white-knuckled, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other version of existence I’d been operating within since the fall. Alive. The real, full-spectrum, nerve-ending-firing, blood-warming, heart-kicking version that I’d forgotten was an option.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss this.
Miss him.
Even if it’s only in this cracked-open, defenseless, five-in-the-morning-on-the-ice moment when everything I’ve constructed to keep myself safe has temporarily collapsed—I miss him.