Chapter 7
Rhys
I’m only six minutes late, which honestly feels like a personal record considering how shitfaced I got last night.
Somehow managed to drag myself back home and not throw up.
But I have a tremendous hangover and feel like it’s about to get a whole lot worse.
I come down the tunnel still pulling my gloves on, expecting to find Jamie pacing at the boards with a stopwatch and a disappointed, pained expression.
I’m already bracing for him to spend an hour bitching at me about form and teamwork and blah blah blah.
Instead, I stop walking entirely.
He’s alone at center ice, not looking at me, not even looking at the tunnel.
He’s not doing anything dramatic — just moving through what looks like a simple puck handling drill, slow and methodical, like he’s been here long enough to already be somewhere else in his head.
The rink is almost silent except for the scrape of his blades, the crack of the puck, and the sound of my breathing as I track him across the ice.
Soft, steady, completely focused on Jamie.
I’ve seen Jamie on the ice a hundred times by now. In practice, in games, in the middle of shouting matches where we’re close enough to share air but have never felt more far apart. I know exactly how he moves out here.
I’ve never seen him like this, though.
There’s nobody to perform for. No team watching, no coach taking notes.
It’s just him and the ice and I’m starting to understand that this really is the thing he loves more than anything else in the world.
The thing he carries all the time — the constant wound up quality of him, like every muscle is stiff, waiting for something to go wrong — he puts it down here.
His shoulders sit lower. His stride covers more ice.
The way he handles the puck is unhurried.
Almost gentle. Like being out here alone — outside the game, outside the pressure — he can finally breathe.
The fluorescent lights reflect back in the green of his eyes and catch the shine of his blond hair whenever he turns. I watch him from the boards for far longer than I should.
“You just gonna stand there watching me?”
He still doesn’t look at me. Just redirects the puck smoothly off his backhand. I step onto the ice. The cold hits the back of my throat and I skate towards him and try to think of something to say that doesn’t reveal I was doing exactly that.
“I’m six minutes late,” I say. “That’s basically early for me, you should be proud.”
“It’s not early and you stood there for an extra ten.
” He skates over finally, and his expression is the usual — composed, controlled, giving nothing away.
Captain face. I’m starting to be able to tell the difference between that and whatever else lives underneath it.
His eyes do a quick check over my entire body, focused on my gear—fast and assessing.
“Shoulder warm?”
“Yeah.”
“Then show me your wrist shot.”
I blink. “What?”
“Your wrist shot. I want to see how you shoot.”
I take the puck he passes me and line it up, slightly annoyed at being tested like a freshman. I wind up and release — clean, fast, top corner. The sound of it hitting the net echoes in the empty rink. Jamie watches it, following every move, but says nothing.
“Again. But don’t muscle it so much. Let your blade do the work. Gently.”
“I’ve been taking shots since I was six.”
“I know. Again.”
I bite down on the response trying to claw its way out of me and take the next puck. This time I do what he says, slow the motion down, loosen my grip, and focus on the follow through.
It goes in cleaner than the first one.
I hate that it does.
“Your instinct is to overpower everything,” Jamie says, skating a slow circle around me in a way that should feel condescending and somehow doesn’t.
Close enough that I can feel the air move every time he passes.
“It works because you’re good enough to make it work.
But it’s going to stop working at the next level and you know that.
Or you might hurt yourself at some point. ”
I turn to face him. “Is that why I’m not playing center?”
His nostrils flare. “Partly.”
“What’s the other part?”
He looks at me for a beat too long. That serious face that gives nothing away. Then he passes me another puck.
“Again.”
We go like that for almost an hour. Him watching, correcting, me following and occasionally arguing and then following anyway because the corrections are working and I’m too honest with myself to pretend otherwise.
Even though it physically hurts me to not be a dick about it.
Every adjustment is physical first — he shows me before he tells me, uses his own body to demonstrate what mine is doing wrong, and there's a precision to it, like a low electric current.
The way he positions himself relative to me.
The way he watches. The way his eyes track every movement I make like he's reading something important in it.
It’s intense, in a way that shocks every nerve ending.
At one point he skates behind me. I’m set up to shoot and I’m aware of his presence everywhere, the warmth of another person in the cold, close enough that the air between us is a few degrees hotter than the air anywhere else on the ice.
His hands find my shoulders and I shudder, such a small movement it could easily be missed.
His palms flat against my shoulder pads, fingers wrapping over the top, thumbs pressing into the space between my shoulder blades to adjust my angle.
I feel the pressure through the padding, through the jersey, and my whole back registers it like a signal.
He speaks close to my ear like he has no idea what he’s doing to me right now. Low. Focused. Walking me through the footwork, the weight distribution, a thorough explanation of what I'm doing wrong. His deep voice at that proximity raises the hairs on the back of my neck. I can feel him breathing.
Swear I could taste the cold on his skin. The sweat and exertion and something that’s just Jamie underneath.
His thumbs drag lower for a second before pressing in again, correcting my posture, and I become violently aware of the space between us. Or the lack of it. The line of his chest barely not touching my back. The way my body keeps trying to lean into it like it wants more.
“Now shoot,” he says, against my neck.
I miss the shot by two fucking feet.
“You okay?” he asks, brows knitting together.
He hasn’t moved back yet. Still too close.
“Fine,” I whisper. “Ice in my eye.”
We both know I’m full of shit.
Then he steps away and the cold rushes in to replace him and I can breathe again without being too obvious about it.
"Again," he says.
I go again and don’t miss the second one.
He moves on. Calls the next drill. We keep working and I spend the rest of the session doing two things simultaneously — being focused on the hockey, because we are actually working very well together and I take the game too seriously to waste that — and being hyper aware of him.
Every time he skates into my orbit. Every time he stops too close to show me something and I see the way his weight shifts when he moves, the way his hands look and flex when he handles the puck, the tension held in his jaw when he's lost in his thoughts.
We skate to the boards after the hour is up, both breathing harder than either of us will probably admit.
I reach for my water bottle and drink and watch him over the top of it as he reaches up to pull off his helmet.
I notice the way his blonde locks fall back in front of his face — and there it is, the small wince, a fraction of a second, the slight catch in his movement when his arm comes up. He covers it fast. Not fast enough.
The shoulder.
“That’s still bothering you,” I point out.
“It’s fine.”
“Didn’t ask if it was fine.”
He looks at me with the kind of expression people get when they realize they’ve seen something they were never supposed to see — and from me, of all people, he has no idea what to do with it.
“You weren’t a total asshole today,” he says instead, deflecting, but there’s a flicker of something almost like humor in his eyes.
I huff a silent laugh. “Wow, so you can make a joke. I’m surprised, Captain.” I tease right back.
And then Jamie smiles. Small and sudden, like it escaped before he could stop it.
And fuck, my breath stutters for a second.
I think that might be the first real smile I've ever gotten from him.
It changes his whole face. Softens him. Pulls out faint laugh lines on the left side, makes him look younger, warmer, like there's an actual person underneath all that restraint instead of just tension and control and gritted teeth.
It's gone almost immediately.
But I’m still staring at the place it was, feeling my chest pull painfully tight over the fact that he even smiled at me like that at all.
It throws me off enough that I don’t immediately realize he dodged the shoulder question.
“Same time Thursday,” he says, breaking me out of my thoughts. He picks up his helmet and skates away before I can say anything back.
I get to the locker room and sit on the bench and stare at my skates for a long time.
What the actual fuck was that.
Not the practice.
The other thing.
Him behind me with his hands on my shoulders and his voice at my ear and my whole nervous system deciding to freak out.
I've been around Jamie for months. I've been in locker rooms with him, on the ice, in gyms, and have never noticed him like that. Half the time I’m too pissed off at him to even spare him a second glance.
I start to unlace my skates.
Okay.
Maybe it’s because at practice, he’s always sweating and yelling, right in my face, all pissed off. I’d watch those little droplets fall down the side of his temple, volume turned off—couldn’t tell you why I was being yelled at.
Turned me on.
I guess I have an authority kink. Or maybe I just like the idea of him telling me what to do in that deep voice while looking at me like I’m two seconds from ruining his entire life.
So, whatever, I noticed he's hot.
That's fine. That's allowed. That's just eyes working as they should.
Jamie Nash is objectively, aggressively, almost offensively attractive and I have been close enough to him to confirm this and apparently somewhere between hating him and being told to stop hating him I dropped my guard long enough to let that actually seep into my subconscious.
That's it. That's all this is.
We got along for an hour. He was decent to me for an hour and I wasn't a complete asshole and we had one practice where the ice between us felt like something other than us wanting to choke each other out and my stupid brain decided to reward that by noticing the way he looks and the feel of his hands and the laugh lines I've never seen before because he's never smiled at me before.
I keep telling myself he’s just another problem to survive. But he smiles at me one time and I suddenly forget every good decision I’ve ever made.
Maybe we can find a happy medium. Put hockey between us like a wall and figure out how to coexist without wanting to kill each other.
Everyone’s tired of our shit anyway. I know the team feels it every time we’re in the same room.
But I cannot, under any circumstances, notice Jamie Nash like that again.
Number one: he’s straight.
Number two: he hates me.
Number three: it’s a horrible idea.
Number four: he’s the captain.
Number five: he has zero personality.
And yet, somehow, I think I’ve completely forgotten how to count.