Chapter 30 Remi
My body is cooking itself.
That's the only way I can think to describe it.
Three days since the game and the heat that's been threatening for weeks is sitting right there, right at the surface, like a fever that won't break.
I woke up this morning with thick slick on my thighs and Crew's hand on my forehead and his face doing the thing it does when he's worried but doesn't want to say it.
"You're burning up," he'd said.
"I know."
"We need to call someone."
"I have a meeting with Marilyn at ten. I'll be fine."
He didn't believe me. I didn't believe me either.
The cab drops me at the Pinnacle at nine-fifteen. I'm early, deliberately, because the arena is cold. The ice is cold. The air around the ice is cold. And right now cold is the only thing standing between me and a medical emergency.
I push through the tunnel entrance and the temperature drops and my body exhales. Not a real exhale, something cellular, as if every overheated nerve ending in my skin just unclenched at the same time.
The rink is occupied.
Junior figure skaters. The same group I've seen every day during the team's rest period, eleven to one, little bodies in bright jackets carving lines into the ice with more enthusiasm than technique.
Their coach, a woman in her fifties with a whistle and the patience of someone who has explained the same footwork sequence four hundred times and will explain it four hundred more, is at center ice.
I know because once my life was nothing but that. The ice. The spins. The jumps. The endless repetition until the muscle memory was so ingrained it was the same as breathing.
I sit in the third row behind the glass. Press my palms flat on the cold seat and let the chill creep up through my wrists and up my arms.
That's so much better.
The girl in the pink jacket is there. Her dark ponytail bounces as she skates.
Maybe eight or a little older. She's working on the same spin that I watched her attempt last week.
The same spin that died at two rotations every time, the rotation stalling because she drops her right shoulder on the entry.
She sets up. Her left foot moves out. Arms tuck in and she pushes. Her body rotates twice and then she opens up, wobbling slightly before catching her balance.
She's getting better.
My body mirrors her unconsciously, the way it always does when I watch skating. The slight shift in my shoulders, the instinctive correction my muscles want to make on her behalf.
Years and years of training don't disappear because your body gives out. The knowledge lives in the tissue, in the tendons, in the memory of a body that spent a decade learning how to defy gravity for three and a half rotations at a time.
She tries again.
Two rotations.
The shoulder drops.
And the spin dies.
I lean forward with my hands gripping the seat.
She looks up with tears in her eyes. Scans the stands and finds me.
Her whole face lights up.
My heart does a strange little flip.
She skates to the boards and stops in a spray of ice.
"You're Remi Silver." Her voice is a sweet little gasp.
"I am."
"The figure skater."
Those three words hit me somewhere I wasn't prepared. Not the omega. Not the girlfriend. Not the woman who fell at the Olympics.
The figure skater.
"Can I have your autograph?" She's digging in her jacket pocket, pulling out a crumpled program from what looks like a junior competition. "My mom says you had the best camel spin in the world."
"Your mom is very kind."
"She said you were robbed at the Olympics."
I laugh. It comes out wet. "Your mom and I would get along, but I did fall."
I sign her program. She stares at it as if I've handed her something holy.
"Can you show me something?" she asks. Looking at the ice. Then back at me. "A spin? I can't get past two rotations and my coach says I'm dropping my shoulder but I don't know how to stop doing it."
Your coach is right. You are dropping your shoulder. I've been watching you do it for a week and my body has been screaming the correction at you through the glass.
I look at the ice.
I haven't been on the ice since my knee gave out at the Olympics. After weeks of physiotherapy and being told my knee is recovering while my body still doesn't feel like it has.
But a camel spin doesn't require a jump. A camel spin requires balance, core strength, and a blade.
"Give me a second," I say.
I walk down to the rink entrance. My hands are shaking, which I tell myself is the heat and not the fear. I grab a pair of rental skates from the rack by the boards. They're terrible. Have dull blades, no ankle support, but they'll let me do what I need to do.
I lace up. Stand. My knee protests with the familiar ache behind the kneecap.
No longer pain.
I step onto the ice.
The cold hits my blades and travels up through my legs and into my chest and I nearly cry. Not from pain. From recognition. The ice knows me. My body knows the ice. It hasn't forgotten me, and I haven't forgotten it.
I glide. Slow. Feeling the edges. My knee holds. It aches, but it holds.
The little girl watches me with eyes the size of saucers.
"Okay," I say, skating to her. "Show me your setup."
She demonstrates. Left foot. Arms in. Push. The shoulder drops at the entry. The rotation stalls.
"There," I say. "Feel where your right shoulder went?"
She nods.
"It's dipping forward. When it dips, your center of gravity shifts and the rotation loses its axis." I position myself beside her. "Watch me."
I set up. Left foot. Arms in. Take a breath and push.
The camel spin catches and holds. Three rotations. Four. Five. The world blurs and centers and blurs again. My body doing the thing it was built to do, the thing I spent my life perfecting, the thing that didn't die when my knee did. I come out clean. My landing is steady.
The girl's mouth is open.
"Did you see my shoulders," I say. "They stayed back. See if you can do it. Once you perfect it, the rotation lives in your core. Now you try, you have to feel your stomach pull in, not your shoulders. Keep your shoulders pinned and let your center do the work."
She tries. Left foot. Arms in. She pushes, and this time the shoulder stays and the rotation catches.
Three full rotations.
She screams. It’s a big fat kid scream that makes me smile. I remember it. I’ve made the same scream a thousand times. It's the sound of a child who has just done the impossible. Her coach looks over. The other kids look over.
"Again," I say, smiling.
She does it again. Three rotations. Clean exit.
"Well done. You're a fast learner. One day I'll see you at the Olympics."
"I really want that. Will you be here tomorrow?" she asks, cheeks flushed, grinning so hard her face must ache.
"I don't know," I say.
"Please?"
The chill of the ice beneath my skates is a blessed relief. The cold keeps my body temperature down. Luckily, the ache in my knee is manageable. I’m still so happy because I’ve just completed a camel spin in rental skates on a hockey rink. It feels like coming home.
"Maybe," I say.
Her grin gets wider. “See you tomorrow.”
She skates to show her coach.
I stand in the middle of the rink and breathe, and the cold air fills my lungs, and I'm a figure skater standing on her ice and it doesn't matter that I can't jump and it doesn't matter that the Olympics are over and it doesn't matter that my designation means my body is trying to burn itself alive.
The ice is still mine.
Marilyn's office is warm after the rink. I'm grateful for the meeting because it gives my body something to focus on that isn't the low simmer in my abdomen.
She sits behind her desk with the composure of a woman who runs twenty-six professional hockey players with firm calm.
"How's the knee?" she asks.
"Much better, thanks."
"Good." She folds her hands. "I'll get to it. I want to offer you a role with the team."
"Doing what?"
"Discipline coach." She watches my face.
"The players need structure. They're alphas, most of them, and they have the emotional regulation of caffeinated toddlers.
Your presence has already changed the dynamic with Steele and Crew.
It's not the omega influence. You're calm.
You read situations. You see tensions building before they detonate. "
"I was a figure skater, Marilyn. Not a therapist."
"You managed your own biology for ten years while competing internationally. You kept your composure under conditions that would have broken most people. And you've been living with two of my most alpha players for weeks and neither of them has threatened anyone." She pauses. "Recently."
I smile.
"It would be part-time. Flexible. You'd attend practices, games when you feel up to it. Be present. Help me manage personality clashes."
"I'll think about it," I say.
Marilyn nods. "Then I'll see you at eleven tomorrow."
"I said I'll think about it."
"And I said eleven." She taps her pen on the desk. "At the same time the junior skaters are on the ice. In case you were wondering."
I stare at her.
Of course Marilyn sees everything that happens in this building.
Eleven the next morning. I'm on the ice.
Not because Marilyn told me to be. Not because I decided on the coaching role.
Because I came back to the ice after my meeting with Marilyn yesterday.
And somehow that turned into me showing the girl a footwork sequence, and somehow that turned into me spending forty minutes on the ice with a group of junior skaters who don't know I can't jump anymore and don't care.
They just want to learn.
Sophia is her name, I learned it this morning, is working on the spin again. Four rotations now. Her right shoulder stays pinned. Her exit is getting cleaner.
"You're rushing the entry," I tell her. "Slow it down. The speed comes from the rotation, not the setup."
She nods and tries again. Four rotations. Clean entry. The exit wobbles but she stays on her feet.
"Better."
She beams. And what happens in my chest when she looks at me is similar to the feeling of competing. And I don’t mean the adrenaline of a triple axel or the desperate need to prove myself on a world stage. But happiness.
Sophia's mother appears at the boards around noon. She’s petit, with Sophia's dark hair and a patient smile.
"I wanted to thank you," she says. "Sophia hasn't stopped talking about you since yesterday."
"She's talented. She just needed someone to tell her about the shoulder."
"It's not the shoulder." Her mother shakes her head. "It's you. She's never been this excited about skating. She was ready to quit two weeks ago and now she's asking me to bring her early."
"She wanted to quit?"
"She said she wasn't good enough. She couldn't land the spin.
She watched the other girls do it and decided she was broken.
" The mother pauses. "Then she saw you watching her from the stands.
And she told me, 'Mom, Remi Silver was watching me skate.
If Remi Silver is watching, I must be doing something right. '"
The ice blurs.
"You'd be the best coach for her," Sophia's mother says. "But I know you're probably desperate to get back to competing."
I look at the ice. At Sophia, who is practicing the spin again without being asked. At the other kids, two of whom have been quietly copying the footwork sequence I showed them.
"Do you really think I could coach?"
Her mother laughs. "My daughter can now land a spin she's been failing at for three months because you spent ten minutes with her. You coached her into believing she could do it. That's not a small thing."
I stand there. The cold air on my skin. Sophia spinning. The other kids skating.
I think about the Olympics.
I think about the podium I never got to stand on and the career that ended on a rink in Italy.
I think about the years of suppressants, the injury and the omega drop. All the months of recovery I still haven't completed.
"I'll see you tomorrow," I tell Sophia's mother.
She smiles. "Sophia will be thrilled."
I watch Sophia land the spin again. Four rotations. Clean. She looks over her shoulder at me and grins.
I grin back.
My body is still too warm.
My heat is still sitting at the edge, waiting.
My knee still aches.
Yet I'm standing on the ice in terrible rental skates, and I'm so fucking happy.