Chapter 3
MATEO
The locker room after Elida Eriksson’s first session is louder than usual, which means everyone has an opinion and no one is waiting to be asked for it.
I sit at my stall and unlace my skates.
“I mean,” Barrett says, from two stalls down, “she’s not wrong about the crossovers.”
“Thank you, Barrett,” I say flatly.
“I’m just saying.”
“I know what you’re saying.”
“The hip thing was-”
“Barrett.”
He grins, because he’s Barrett and this is exactly what he wanted, and goes back to pulling off his gear. Mercer hasn’t said anything yet, which means he probably has a lot to say but he’s saving it.
Chen appears beside me, already changed, leaning against the stall with his water bottle and the expression he gets when he’s choosing his words carefully.
“You good?”
“Fine.”
He nods like he definitely does not believe me but will not be pushing it further, which is why he’s my closest friend on this team now. One of the best things about Chen is that he knows exactly when to leave things alone.
Mercer, unfortunately, does not operate this way.
“I don’t see why we need her,” he says, addressing the room generally. “We already do skating drills. We have a strength program. We’ve been doing fine.”
“We still haven’t officially won a league yet,” I say, before I can stop myself. “Yeah, we’re closer than we were this time last year. But close isn’t enough.”
“So you’re on board with her?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Sounded like-”
“I said close isn’t enough. That’s true.” I stand, grabbing my jacket. “Doesn’t mean I think the solution is a figure skater running drills without sticks.”
“She seemed like she knew what she was doing,” Chen says.
No one responds to that directly because Chen is the kind of person who thinks the best about everybody - before others are ready to.
“The demonstration was good,” Ward admits, from the corner. “I’ll give her that.”
“The demonstration was showing off,” I say.
“Little bit,” Barrett agrees cheerfully. “But like, impressive showing off. Plus, she’s crazy hot.”
I pull my jacket on and grab my bag and head for the door before this becomes a longer conversation than I have the patience for.
“Drinks tonight,” Chen says behind me. “Tierney’s. Eight o’clock.”
“Maybe.”
“Russo.”
“Yeah. Fine. Eight o’clock.”
I push through the door and walk the corridor alone. I don’t want to admit that the correction was right.
I felt it the moment she adjusted the position. The difference was small but undeniable.
She was right.
And she knew she was right, and she held me there in front of my team until everyone else knew it too.
I push open the exit door. Zane would have had a lot to say about this.
But Zane’s gone, signed to a development deal, and the thought of it sits somewhere below my sternum. Pressure.
He made it out.
I’m still here.
ELIDA
I am absolutely not going out.
I’m tired. I’m still adjusting to the time difference. I have session plans to write up and notes from this morning to organize and a million things I’d rather do than sit in a bar making conversation with people I’ve only met. I hate the small talk phase of getting to know new people.
Someone knocks on my door.
I open it and Tara Lorimer is standing in the corridor in a red coat with a bottle of wine under one arm and an expression of such uncomplicated warmth that it’s almost disarming.
“I’m not taking no for an answer,” she says. “It’s the leads from the women’s program. Low key, I promise.”
I glance back at my notes spread across the desk.
“Give me ten minutes.”
She beams.
The bar is called Tierney’s - dark wood, low lights.
The kind of place that takes no particular pride in its décor and is better for it.
Tara introduces me to the women’s team leadership as we settle into a booth near the back: two coaches, the team manager, a physio assistant whose name I immediately lose in the noise.
They’re nice. Genuinely nice, not professionally nice, and they’re excited about the program which is infectious even through my tiredness. They ask questions about figure skating and about Sweden and fill me in on the Blackwood gossip until I find myself getting caught up in the conversation.
Tara refills my glass.
“Okay,” she says, after the second round, leaning forward on her elbows. “How was this morning? Honestly.”
“Interesting.”
“I heard you corrected Russo,” the team manager says, with barely concealed delight.
I take a sip of wine. “I corrected several players.”
“But especially Russo.”
“He’s the captain. The standard has to come from somewhere.”
Tara is grinning. “He’s not going to like that.”
“No,” I agree. “He didn’t.”
I’m in the middle of a conversation with the assistant physio when movement at the bar catches my eye.
Mateo Russo is standing at the bar with Chen and a couple of others I recognize from the ice.
He’s in a grey Henley and dark jeans and looks entirely different without the gear.
He hasn’t seen me. He’s talking to Chen, relaxed in a way he wasn’t this morning, and he’s laughing - it changes his face completely.
I look away before stealing another surreptitious glance.
A woman appears beside him from somewhere, slipping into the space next to him with the easy confidence of someone who knows exactly how she’ll be received. Dark-haired, pretty, and the way he turns toward her when she touches his arm -
That’s not new, whatever that is.
He dips his head when she talks to him, close to her ear. She laughs. His hand finds the small of her back. It’s casual and deliberate at the same time.
“Elida?”
I turn back to the table.
“Sorry, you were saying?”
Tara was talking about scheduling. I focus on the conversation and contribute something coherent about the women’s program timetable, and I don’t look at the bar again.
Twenty minutes later, when I do glance over - incidentally, it means nothing - they’re gone.
I pick up my wine.
“Another round?” Tara says.
“Yes,” I say. “Definitely.”
MATEO
Jess Hartley has lived in Blackwood her whole life and has no interest in hockey, which is one of the things I like most about her.
She works at the dentist on Main Street and finds the entire culture of college sports mildly baffling, which is uncomplicated. That’s the word. We established uncomplicated about four months ago over cocktails at Tierney’s and it has worked perfectly well ever since.
“You’re distracted,” she says.
We’re in her apartment, which is small and smells like the candles she buys from the place on Fourth. I’m sitting on the edge of her bed with my jacket still on, which probably proves her point.
“Sorry. Bad day.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“God, no.”
She laughs, easy, unbothered, and reaches over and pushes my jacket off my shoulder.
“Okay. So don’t.”
She kisses me first, because that’s how it works with us. Jess doesn’t wait. She leans in with her hand on my jaw and her thumb hooked behind my ear, and she tastes like the cinnamon gum she chews after work. I shut my eyes and put my hand on her waist and try to be where I am.
She pulls back long enough to get her sweater over her head. No bra underneath. That’s not new, but I still look because it seems like the thing to do. She smiles a little, not flattered exactly, but acknowledging.
“You can keep up or not,” she says. “I don’t care either way.”
I shove my shirt off and unbuckle my belt.
Her hands are steady. She pulls my jeans down and wraps her fingers around me and says, “okay, good,” in a voice like she’s checking the temperature of bathwater. Then she leans down.
She doesn’t tease. She takes me deep enough that I have to grab at the comforter and breathe through my teeth. She works her jaw and her tongue against me.
“Hey,” Jess says, pulling off. “Don’t pretend.”
I don’t know what she means by that. I don’t ask. I push her back onto the bed and pull her leggings down her legs, and she spreads her thighs without me having to ask. She’s already wet. She’s practical like that.
I push inside her in one motion. She doesn’t gasp. She closes her eyes and tilts her head back.
It’s not slow. I don’t make it slow. I fuck her with my forearm beside her head and my hips slamming into hers. The only noise is the bed frame knocking against the wall. She hooks her legs up around my waist. Her nails scratch once down my back.
Jess comes. I can tell because her thighs tighten and she makes a short sound, once, like a caught breath. Then she goes loose again and watches me with half-closed eyes while I chase mine.
Suddenly I think about the correction in front of the whole team. Her hand on my hip. Her palm flat against the bone. I come hard.
After a minute Jess gets up and goes to the bathroom. I hear the tap run. She comes back and lies down on her side of the bed and within maybe three minutes her breathing goes even.
Afterward, I lie in the dark and stare at the ceiling and think about skating.
About Zane in whatever city he’s in right now, in a development program, in a real locker room. About scouts who came once and may or may not come back.
Jess is asleep beside me, unbothered, entirely uninterested in any of this.
ELIDA
The apartment is dark and the heating has settled into a low hum and I’m almost asleep when the thought arrives, the way unwanted thoughts always do, right at the exact moment your defenses are down.
Mateo Russo, with his hand on the small of someone’s back.
I turn over and pull the duvet up.
Of course he’s like that. I could have written it without seeing it. The captain, the carefully controlled fury when someone dares to correct him in front of his team. The easy confidence that he was probably born with.
Of course there’s a girl. Probably more than one. Probably a rotating cast of them, all kept at exactly the right distance, all perfectly managed, all unbothered - or told to be unbothered, which isn’t the same thing but works well enough.
I know that type.
I’ve made the mistake of thinking that type was different.
I close my eyes.
We may be a similar age, but we’re miles apart in experience. I’ve competed on the world stage while he’s still struggling in a college team hoping to get noticed. And at the moment he’s technically my student. Not that he wants to be.
I go to sleep.
I dream about something else entirely, which is a small but definitive victory.