Chapter 4
MATEO
The locker room is at the end of the east corridor, which means I walk past the coach’s offices every time, which means I always have to walk past the small room they’ve given Elida Eriksson every time.
The door is open.
I’m not looking inside. I’m walking past with my kit bag and my mind on the afternoon practice and I’m absolutely not slowing down, except that I am, slightly, because there’s a sound coming from inside that stops me without my permission.
She’s humming.
It’s a low, absent sound while she’s doing something at her desk. It sounds vaguely classical and completely out of place in this corridor that smells like rubber matting.
I stop.
I don’t know why I stop. I should keep walking.
She looks up. The humming stops abruptly.
For a second our eyes lock across the threshold.
“Russo,” she says.
“Your door was open,” I say, which is not a sentence that needed to be said.
She glances at the open door and then back at me with an expression that says she is aware her door was open, yes, thank you for that.
“Did you need something?” she asks.
The honest answer is no. The honest answer is that I was walking past and heard her and stopped like an idiot and now I’m standing in a doorway with no reason to be here.
“Schedule,” I say. “For the sessions. You said you’d have it to Calloway by end of day yesterday.”
“I sent it yesterday. Calloway has it. You could ask him.”
“Right.”
“Was there anything else?”
She’s watching me with that same quality she had on the ice - attentive and measuring. It’s uncomfortable in a way I don’t have a ready category for.
“No.”
“Okay.” She holds my gaze for a second and then looks back down at her desk. Back to work. Conversation over, door still open, unbothered.
I walk away.
I get to the end of the corridor before I realize I’m annoyed, and then I’m annoyed about being annoyed, and by the time I make it onto the ice I’m still feeling unsettled.
Chen is already there.
“You’re late.”
“I’m one minute late.”
“For you, that’s late.” He studies my face. “What happened?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
He nods and drops it, and I’m grateful enough that I don’t even bug him about his backward crossovers during the warm-up.
Much.
ELIDA
I wait until I hear his footsteps disappear down the corridor before I put my pen down.
My heart is doing something mildly irritating.
I pick my pen back up, and I stare at the notes in front of me and read the same line four times without taking it in.
I press the heel of my hand briefly to my forehead.
Fine, I think. He’s attractive. That’s all this is. It’s biology.
I go back to my notes.
It takes a while.
I run the second session differently.
No demonstration this time - I made my point last time and I’m not here to perform, I’m here to coach. I take them through edge progressions, one drill building on the next, and I move through the group the way I did before, one correction at a time.
Barrett doesn’t engage. He does the drills with the minimum required effort and looks through me when I address him, not rudely exactly, just with a pointed absence of acknowledgment that makes his position very clear.
I note it and move on. I’ve dealt with harder rooms. Mercer, too, is clearly not on board.
He pushes back verbally, little comments, nothing aggressive, but testing, and I meet every single one of them so calmly and so directly that by the halfway point he’s actually doing the drills properly, which I suspect surprises him more than anyone.
Russo, however, does everything I ask.
He’s not obstructive. He runs every drill, takes every correction with his expression blank, and his technique is already marginally better than it was two days ago which means he’s been practicing. And it means my correction landed even if he’d rather it hadn’t.
He doesn’t look at me if he can help it.
Which is fine. Completely fine.
After the main session I set them a free skating exercise - work on whatever felt hardest today, no structure, ten minutes - and I move to the boards to make notes while they spread across the ice.
MATEO
The ten minutes of free skating is the most useful thing she’s done so far, which I won’t be saying out loud.
I work the edge progression she ran earlier, the exact sequence that felt wrong, and I do it without making it obvious that’s what I’m doing because the last thing I need is her coming over and adjusting my hip again in front of everyone.
I run it four times, five, and by the sixth it starts to feel like a change my body is considering accepting.
It’s small, but I know it’ll make a difference.
Around me the team has spread out, doing their own thing, the noise level has risen back to normal now that the structure is off.
Barrett is doing the absolute bare minimum at the far end, which I’ll deal with later.
Mercer is actually working, which surprised me, though I won’t tell him that either.
Calloway blows the whistle from the bench.
“Good,” he calls. “That’s time.”
We have weights in twenty minutes, so everyone is already drifting toward the gate. Elida is making a note in her book at the boards, and somehow the ice has emptied in a way that leaves the two of us out here which is - fine. Incidental. Means nothing.
I skate toward the boards.
She looks up as I reach her, and there’s a moment where we’re standing on opposite sides of the boards and neither of us says anything. The rink is quiet enough that I can hear the scratch of her pen stopping.
“No demonstration today?”
“Decided to save it,” she says evenly. “Didn’t want to embarrass anyone twice in one week.”
It’s so perfectly calibrated - pleasant but with the faintest edge underneath - that for a second I almost laugh.
“Big of you.”
“I thought so.” She goes back to her notebook, pen moving again, and I get the very clear impression that as far as she’s concerned, this conversation is over and she’s the one who ended it.