Chapter 7
SEVEN
Andrei
The cameras had finally stopped rolling. The production crew packed their equipment in silence, loading cases and cables into black vans that would carry tonight’s footage back to editing rooms where our lives would be judged and weighed frame by frame.
I stood outside the rink entrance, watching the last van disappear into the October darkness, and felt the familiar weight of performance lifting from my shoulders.
Griffin emerged from the building behind me, his hair disheveled from running his hands through it, his face showing the first genuine expression I’d seen from him all day.
“Jesus,” he said, exhaling a cloud of breath into the cold air. “I forgot how exhausting it is to be charming for twelve straight hours.”
“You weren’t that charming.”
He laughed, the sound cutting through the quiet campus night. “Thanks for the pep talk, Sokolov. Really what I needed to hear.”
The rink stood behind us, dark except for the emergency lighting that cast everything in soft amber shadows.
Looking at it now, empty and silent, I remembered all the times we’d snuck in here as kids when the weight of expectations or disappointment or just the need to feel ice beneath our skates had driven us to pick locks and disable alarms.
“Remember when we used to do this?” Griffin said, following my gaze. “Just us and the ice?”
I remembered. I remembered everything about those nights, catalogued and stored in the part of my brain reserved for moments when Griffin looked at me like I was the only person in the world who mattered.
“Phoenix gave me his spare key,” he said.
My grin was immediate, transforming my tired face into something bright and mischievous. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
Five minutes later, we were inside, the familiar chill of the rink wrapping around us like an old coat.
The ice stretched before us, perfect and untouched, reflecting the emergency lights in scattered pools of gold.
Our footsteps echoed as we made our way to the equipment room, finding skates and sticks with the muscle memory of people who’d been doing this longer than we’d been doing anything else.
Griffin laced his skates with quick movements. In the dim light, his profile was sharp and clean, all angles and shadows that made my chest tight with something I’d been carefully ignoring for most of my adult life.
We stepped onto the ice together, and the world shifted. Here, without coaches or cameras or expectations, we were just Griffin and Andrei again. The way we’d always been before everything got complicated.
Griffin pushed off first, gliding backward across the center line with his arms spread wide, face tilted up toward the rafters. The sight hit me with unexpected force. This was how he looked when he was completely himself: unguarded, joyful, moving through space like he’d been designed for it.
“God, I missed this,” he said, spinning lazily as he spoke. “Just skating without someone timing us or critiquing our form or asking how it feels to be living our dreams.”
I followed him onto the ice, finding my rhythm in the familiar push and glide.
The emergency lighting turned everything dreamlike, casting long shadows that moved with us as we circled the rink.
Griffin’s hair caught the amber glow each time he passed beneath a light, and I found myself timing my movements to stay close enough to watch the way joy transformed his entire being.
We skated in silence for several minutes, reacquainting ourselves with the peace that only came from empty ice and the sound of blades cutting through the night. Then Griffin, because he was Griffin and couldn’t resist filling the silence with stories, started talking.
“You know what I was thinking about today?” he said, carving a lazy figure eight near the blue line. “That time when we were thirteen and I tried to impress Katie Morrison by skating backward while juggling pucks.”
I snorted, the memory surfacing with painful clarity. “You mean when you ate shit in front of the entire peewee league and their parents?”
“I prefer to think of it as an ambitious athletic experiment that didn’t quite achieve its intended results.”
“You knocked yourself unconscious, Shaw. Coach had to carry you off the ice.”
Griffin’s laughter echoed through the empty arena, rich and uninhibited. “Worth it, though. Katie was totally impressed.”
“She was horrified.”
“Same thing.”
He was beautiful when he laughed. That was the thought that hit me as I watched him skate backward, arms gesturing as he defended his thirteen-year-old self’s questionable decision-making.
The emergency lighting turned his skin warm gold, highlighted the sharp line of his jaw and the way his eyes crinkled at the corners when he was amused.
I’d always known Griffin was attractive.
You couldn’t spend a decade in his orbit without noticing that people gravitated toward him, that servers lingered at our table and classmates found reasons to walk past wherever he was sitting.
But this was different. This was the moment when attraction became something deeper, more dangerous.
Griffin Shaw laughing in an empty hockey rink, completely free and radiating the kind of joy that made everything else fade into background noise.
This was when I’d fallen in love with him, though I hadn’t understood it then.
Thirteen years old, watching my best friend make an ass of himself for a girl’s attention, and all I could think was that I wanted to be the reason he looked that happy.
“Your turn,” Griffin said, pulling me back to the present. “What’s the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever witnessed you do?”
I tried to think of something appropriately humiliating, but Griffin was already grinning with the satisfaction of someone who’d remembered the perfect story.
“Oh, wait. I’ve got it. Junior-year tryouts, when you were so nervous about making varsity that you threw up right before your skating test.”
“I had food poisoning.”
“You had anxiety, and we both know it. You spent three hours in the bathroom that morning giving yourself a pep talk in the mirror.”
The memory should have been embarrassing, but Griffin told it with such affection that it felt like a gift.
He remembered the details that mattered to me, not just the funny bits: how scared I’d been, how badly I’d wanted to prove myself, how he’d sat outside the bathroom door offering commentary and encouragement until I’d finally emerged ready to skate.
Especially the “I’m a strong, independent woman” part he’d made me say, which was the first time I laughed that day, breaking through the thick ice of anxiety.
“You stayed with me,” I said, the words coming out softer than I’d intended.
“Of course I did. You were a mess.”
But he’d stayed. While other kids were warming up or psyching themselves out, Griffin had planted himself outside a bathroom door and talked me through the worst of my nerves.
He’d made jokes about the coach’s mustache and speculated about what the older players ate for breakfast and told me stories about his summer job at the hardware store until I’d stopped shaking.
That was Griffin. That had always been Griffin. The person who stayed when you needed him.
We’d ended up near center ice, close enough that I could see the way his breath clouded in the cold air, close enough to count the freckles that summer had left scattered across his nose. The rink felt enormous around us, but the space between us had shrunk to something intimate and charged.
“I’ve been thinking,” Griffin said, his voice quieter now, more serious. “About all this camera stuff, and the social media, and people analyzing everything we do.”
My pulse quickened. “What about it?”
“It’s weird, right? Having strangers dissect your friendships like they’re experts on your life?”
I nodded, not trusting my voice to stay steady.
“Because the thing is,” he continued, leaning against his stick, “they can film us and edit us and make us into whatever characters they want, but they can’t capture this.
” He gestured between us, encompassing the empty rink and the comfortable silence and the shared history that stretched back to childhood.
“They can’t capture what it’s like to have someone who knows you well enough to talk you through a panic attack or remember every stupid thing you’ve ever done and still want to spend time with you. ”
Griffin, unknowingly eloquent about the exact reasons I couldn’t risk losing him, described our friendship with the kind of reverence that made my throat close up.
“They’ll try to make it into something it’s not,” he went on.
“Turn it into drama or competition or whatever sells episodes. But this is ours, you know? This friendship, these memories, the fact that you’re the first person I want to tell when something good happens and the only person I want around when everything goes to hell. ”
I stared at him, at the earnest expression on his face and the way the emergency lighting turned his eyes gold-flecked hazel, and felt something crack open in my chest. He was talking about friendship with the passion most people reserved for love declarations, and he had no idea what he was doing to me.
“Griffin,” I started, his name coming out rough and unsteady.
“Yeah?”
The moment stretched between us, heavy with possibility and terror.
I could tell him. Right here, right now, in this place that belonged to us.
I could explain that everything he’d just said about friendship was true, but incomplete.
That knowing someone well enough to talk them through panic attacks could also mean loving them enough to want to be the cause of their joy instead of just a witness to it.
I could tell him that I’d been in love with him since we were teenagers, that every moment of the past eight or nine years had been an exercise in wanting something I couldn’t have, that the cameras weren’t the only thing turning our friendship into performance art.
I could tell him that I’d loved him for so long that I didn’t even know precisely how long.
The words were there, crowding behind my teeth, demanding release after years of restraint.
But then Griffin smiled, that easy, trusting expression that meant he felt safe here with me, and I remembered why I’d kept this secret for so long.
Griffin Shaw trusted me. He came to me with his fears and his victories and his midnight confessions about feeling lost in the spotlight.
He saved space for me in his life, prioritized our friendship over romantic escapades, chose my company over solitude or parties or the hundred other ways he could spend his time.
He did all of this because he believed our friendship was simple, uncomplicated, free from the messy dynamics of desire and jealousy and unspoken want. He trusted me to be his safe harbor, the person who wanted nothing from him except his presence.
Telling him the truth would destroy that trust. It would turn every shared moment retroactively complicated, make him question whether my care came with conditions, whether my loyalty was actually just extended courtship.
It would steal his safe harbor and leave him nowhere to dock when the storms hit.
“Nothing,” I said, swallowing the confession whole. “Just tired, I guess.”
Griffin’s expression shifted, concern creeping across his features. “You sure? You looked like you were about to say something important.”
“Just that you’re right. About the cameras not being able to capture this.”
He nodded, satisfied with my deflection, and pushed off toward the goal. “Race you to the blue line?”
“You’re on.”
We spent the next hour skating, racing, and practicing moves we hadn’t attempted since high school.
Griffin tried to recreate his infamous puck-juggling routine and nearly took us both out when he lost control near the boards.
I attempted a backward crossover sequence that had been giving me trouble since last year and finally, finally nailed it on the fourth try.
“There it is!” Griffin shouted, throwing his arms up in celebration. “I knew you still had it in you.”
His pride in my success was immediate and genuine. This was why I couldn’t risk losing him. These moments of pure connection, of shared achievement, of being seen and celebrated by someone who genuinely wanted good things for me.
By the time we left the rink, my legs were burning and my lungs were sharp with cold, but I felt more like myself than I had in weeks. Griffin was quiet as we walked back across campus, the kind of peaceful silence that came after physical exertion and emotional honesty.
Well, emotional honesty on his part.
“Thanks,” I said as we approached the team house.
“For what?”
“For this. For letting me be nostalgic and sentimental without making fun of me for it.”
“I always make fun of you.”
“Yeah, but not really.”
He bumped my shoulder with his, a casual gesture that sent warmth spreading through my chest. Such a small thing, that brief contact, but it carried the weight of a million unspoken words.
“Besides,” Griffin added, grinning as he opened the front door, “someone has to keep you humble. Can’t have you getting too confident about those backward crossovers.”
We climbed the stairs to our room, still trading insults and memories, and I let myself savor the easy rhythm of our language. Tomorrow, there would be cameras again, microphones taped to our chests, producers looking for drama and conflict and whatever else the crowds wanted.
But tonight had been ours. Tonight had been Griffin laughing in emergency lighting, talking about friendship like it was sacred, trusting me with his fears about fame and performance and losing the things that mattered most.
Tonight had been another thousand reasons to keep loving him quietly, carefully, invisibly.
As I watched him get ready for bed, humming some song under his breath while he dug through his dresser for clean clothes, I made the same promise I’d made to myself countless times before: I would rather have Griffin as a friend than risk losing him entirely.
I would rather swallow my feelings than watch his expression change from trust to discomfort to polite distance.
Some secrets were worth keeping, even when they felt like they might kill you, like they might cut you up just to get out.
Especially then.
Because Griffin Shaw, laughing in an empty hockey rink at midnight, talking about friendship like it was the most important thing in the world, was worth protecting. Even from myself.
Even from the truth.