11. Break the Ice
Chapter eleven
Break the Ice
Luke
One Week Later, December
T here’s a quiet that only exists in an empty arena at midnight.
Quiet. Not Silence.
The ice machine hums its low, mechanical prayer.
Overhead lights buzz on their after-hours setting, casting everything in that blue-white glow that makes the rink look like it belongs in a dream.
Somewhere in the building, a pipe clanks.
The boards creak and settle like an old house breathing in its sleep.
It’s a quiet I love. Have spent my life in. Even after the injury, after the realization that the NHL wasn’t happening.
The rink never judged. Never asked questions. Just let me be.
Tonight, I’m in my office pretending to be productive.
The men’s game ended two hours ago with a solid win against Bridgewater, 4-2.
I’d stayed after to help Marner break down the third period because apparently having no social life and an obsessive need to analyze hockey is a personality trait I’ve leaned into.
Grayson called me after his game against Montreal. We talked for twenty minutes about his upcoming schedule. Then he asked how Emma’s doing three times in slightly different ways, like rearranging the words might produce a different answer.
“She’s good, Gray.”
“Good good? Or Emma-says-she’s-good-but-actually-isn’t good?”
“She’s focused. Ready for tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. Where she’ll face her former team.
“And you’ll be there if anything happens?”
“I’m her coach. I'll be there. I’ve got her, Gray.”
Just not in all the ways I want to have her. Yet .
It’s been a week since Thanksgiving.
Eight days since I sat at Jeanette’s table with Emma’s knee pressed against mine. With her hand two inches from my hand and the entire Cole family treating me like I belong.
Eight days since she told me about Drew. About why she really left BC. About the thing she didn’t say out loud but left hanging in the air between us like smoke: I left because of you. Everything is because of you.
Eight days of trying to be her coach. Of Cole instead of Emma. Of taking cold showers that do absolutely nothing at all.
My phone goes off with a notification I don’t expect.
It’s from the rink’s security system. The one Calloway insisted all coaching staff have access to after some freshmen broke in last spring to play broomball at 3 AM.
SILVER PINE ATHLETICS — PRACTICE RINK ACCESS 12:07 AM — Keycard: COLE, E. — Student-Athlete
I’m already standing. Grabbing my skates because they’re still in my office from this morning’s session.
Walking through the tunnel that connects the main arena to the practice rink with the calm, measured stride of a man who is absolutely not racing toward a woman he shouldn’t be alone with at midnight.
The temperature drops as I approach the rink, the familiar ice-cold that’s been part of my life for as long as I can remember. The smell hits next: ice and rubber and that indefinable hockey smell that means home to me in ways my actual childhood home never did.
Then I hear it.
The sharp crack of a puck hitting boards. The scrape of skates cutting ice. The aggressive, furious skating that speaks to exorcising demons rather than practicing drills.
Emma’s running a shooting drill, except there’s nothing methodical about it. She’s firing pucks at the net like they personally offended her, each shot harder than the last.
One goes high, clanging off the crossbar with a sound like a gunshot, and her muttered "Fuck!" echoes.
She skates hard to collect another puck, and even from here I can see the tension in her shoulders. The barely-contained violence in every movement.
This isn’t practice.
This is warfare against her own thoughts.
She stops at center ice, her hair dark and messy in a way it never is at practice. Pulls out her phone. And her entire body looks like it was hit by a blow.
A text, maybe. Something related to tomorrow?
The phone goes back in her pocket and she skates again. Faster, like she can outrun whatever she’s feeling. Whatever she saw.
Despite the voice telling me that I should leave, I go where my heart's telling me to be. On the ice. With her .
Emma’s head snaps toward the tunnel entrance. Even from across the rink, I can see her cycle through surprise, recognition, and something that looks dangerously close to relief.
“Come here this late often?” I call out.
She doesn’t slow down. Just redirects her path so her next lap brings her closer to where I’m standing at center ice. “Funny. I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“Got a security alert on my phone. Student-athlete accessing the facility at midnight tends to generate questions.”
“And you came to ask them in person?” She arcs past me, comes too close. “Could’ve just texted.”
“Could’ve.” I fall into stride beside her, matching her pace. My knee protests. It always protests this late, when the cold settles into the scar tissue. “But then I wouldn’t get the real answer to why my starting left winger is burning calories she’ll need for tomorrow’s game.”
“Can’t sleep.” She says it simply, like it’s not loaded. Like sleeplessness at midnight the night before playing her former team at their home rink isn’t the most obvious sign of anxiety I’ve ever seen from someone who claims she doesn’t get anxious.
“So you walked to the rink.”
“How do you know I walked? ”
“There’s one car in the parking lot, Cole. It’s mine.”
She glances at me. The blue-white light reflects in her dark eyes, and I have to look away.
“I needed the air,” she excuses. “And the walk.”
“It’s a twenty-minute walk from the hockey house. At midnight. In December.”
“Twelve."
“In the dark.”
“I had my phone.”
“Emma.” Her actual name slips out before I can cage it. “That’s not safe.”
“I’m a hockey player, Luke. I can handle a dark campus.”
She’s deflecting. I know because I’m fluent in Emma’s deflection patterns the way some people are fluent in French.
With full comprehension of the grammar, the idioms, the subtle shifts in tone that signal when she’s actually fine versus when she’s pretending to be fine because vulnerability makes her want to crawl out of her own skin.
She’s not fine .
I let the silence ride for a lap. Two. We skate side by side, the only sound our blades carving parallel lines into fresh ice.
It’s easy. The kind of rhythm you can’t manufacture.
The kind that exists between two people who’ve been circling each other long enough that their bodies have memorized the orbit.
“Last night’s game was good,” I offer eventually. Not pushing. Just opening a door she can walk through or ignore.
“It was fine.” That word again.
“You had two assists and a plus-three. That’s better than fine .”
“My backcheck was sloppy in the second period and I took a stupid interference penalty.”
“Which you killed off by blocking a shot that probably left a bruise the size of a softball on your thigh, but sure. Sloppy.”
She stops skating. Turns to face me. “Fine, the truth? I keep thinking about tomorrow. About walking into that building. Seeing them.”
“Your teammates?”
“Former teammates.” She runs her fingers through her hair, a rare nervous gesture. “I keep running scenarios. What Drew might say. What Liz might do. Whether Coach Harris will shake my hand or pretend I don’t exist.”
“You don’t need Harris’s approval. ”
“I know that. But I spent two years in that program, Luke. Two years of 5 AM practices and road trips and winning a conference championship. You don’t just... turn that off because the ending sucked.”
I know. God, I know. Because Silver Pine was my program once, too. And walking back into this building as a coach instead of a player still hits me in the chest every time I step on the ice.
“You want me to tell you it’ll be okay?” I ask.
“Will it?”
“Probably not. It’ll be weird and uncomfortable and there will be at least one moment where you'll regret every decision you've made.” I skate a slow circle around her. Not crowding, just moving, because standing still with Emma in the quiet feels too intimate and I need the motion to stay sane. “But you’ll play. And you’ll be incredible.
And by the second period, you won’t care about any of it because you’ll be too busy destroying their defense from the left circle. ”
She watches me circle her. I watch her watch me. The rink is so quiet I can hear her breathing.
Then I say the one thing I know will loosen whatever she's locking up tight. “Let’s play.”
“What?”
“One-on-one. Best of three. Winner gets...” I search for stakes that aren’t dangerous. Come up empty. “Bragging rights.”
“You’re serious.”
“I’m standing on ice at midnight. I passed serious about forty-five minutes ago.”
It works.
Her anxiety drains out like someone pulled a plug, replaced by something feral and competitive and so purely Emma that I'm already smiling.
“You realize I’m going to destroy you,” she says, settling into her stance. “You’re twenty-five with a bad knee and you haven’t played competitive hockey in three years.”
“And yet here I am, volunteering to be embarrassed.”
“You will be,” she agrees, grabbing a puck from the bucket by the boards. “But when I win, I want something real.”
“Define real.”
“You have to answer one question. Honestly. No deflecting, no ‘we can’t,’ no running away.”
My stomach bottoms out. “Emma… ”
“Those are my terms, Coach.” She drops the puck at center ice. “Take them or skate home.”
I should skate home.
I take them.
Here’s what people don’t understand about Emma Cole on ice: she’s not just fast. She’s not just skilled. She’s intelligent in the way that separates good players from great ones—reading trajectories, anticipating movements, processing spatial information at a speed that borders on precognitive.
I know this because I’ve studied her game for years. Longer than I should have. Longer than any coach studies a single player, and longer still than any man should study a woman he’s not supposed to want.