Chapter 6
MATEO
Calloway finds me at six fifteen.
I’m already on the ice, which he knows is where he’ll find me. He stands at the boards and talks to me. I skate a slow circle while he does it and I don’t interrupt because there’s nothing to interrupt with. He’s right about everything he says and we both know it.
First, I have to apologize to her for undermining her in front of the group.
I already planned to - I feel bad for that.
Second, I have to do a private session with her after the group session today to make up for what I missed yesterday.
The private session is non-negotiable. He doesn’t say it like a punishment, but like a fact, the way Calloway says most things.
“She’s giving up her own time,” he says. “Use it well.”
I say yes and I mean it. He nods once and that’s the end of it.
The team trickles onto the ice in stages, the way they always do - Chen first, then Mercer, then the rest of them in twos and threes, the noise level rising incrementally until the rink sounds like itself again.
Elida arrives last. She doesn’t look at me.
She sets up at the blue line and reviews her notebook. I skate a loop and come back and she’s talking to one of the assistants. I want to do it now, before the session starts and the whole team is watching.
I pull up at the boards near where she’s standing.
“Eriksson.”
Her expression is guarded, giving me nothing.
“I want to apologize. For what I said. In training yesterday.”
“Okay.”
I wait for more. There isn’t any.
“I was out of line. What I said - about your career, about why you’re here - it was personal and it was out of order and it had nothing to do with the session.”
“Didn’t it?”
“What?”
“It had nothing to do with the session,” she says, evenly. “That’s what you said.”
“That’s - yes.”
“So, what did it have to do with?”
For a second I stand there without a ready answer because I didn’t expect her to do this, to take the apology apart.
“I was frustrated,” I say carefully.
“About the loss.”
“Yes.”
“And about the drill.”
I pause. “Yes.”
“And about being corrected in front of your team.” She says it without accusation. She closes her notebook. “You were frustrated about all of it and I was the closest available target.”
“That’s not-”
“I’m not saying it to make you feel worse. I’m saying it because if you’re apologizing, I’d like to understand what you’re apologizing for.”
The rink is filling up around us, the team spreading out, the noise of it rising, and we’re standing close enough to the boards that this is private without being secret
“I heard what you think of me. After. In the corridor outside Calloway’s office. I wasn’t… I didn’t mean to listen. The door was open.”
Her expression flickers.
“How much?”
“Most of it.”
“It wasn’t personal. And all of it was true.”
“I know.”
Our eyes meet and there’s a moment where the carefully maintained distance between us gets less certain.
“I’m sorry,” I say again. Simpler this time. “For what I said. Talking about your career was a cheap shot and I knew it the second it came out.”
She looks at me for a long moment.
“Thank you.”
She opens her notebook again. “Calloway tells me you’re staying behind this morning.”
“Yes.”
“Good.” She glances up once more. “Trust me, it will be worth it. If you’re willing to try.”
She pushes off before I can respond, already calling the team into position. I stand at the boards for a second longer than I need to before I push off after her.
Behind me I hear Barrett mutter to Mercer in a low voice and then the unmistakable sound of Chen telling him to leave it, which Barrett does, because even Barrett knows when Chen means it.
I find my position.
The session starts.
I’m aware that in approximately ninety minutes it’ll be the two of us on this ice, and I have no idea what that looks like.
ELIDA
The group session ends, the team files out and the rink goes quiet. It’s just us.
I’ve done one-on-one sessions before. Hundreds of them, thousands even, if you count every hour of private coaching I’ve given and received over the years. There’s a different energy to it - no group to hide in, nowhere for either person to deflect.
I set my notebook on the boards and don’t open it.
“No stick.”
He sets his stick down without comment, which is already different from the first session. It’s a small compliance, but it speaks volumes.
“We’re going back to basics. Not because you’re bad - you know you’re not bad. But because the habits are deep and the only way to address deep habits is slowly. One thing at a time. That means this will feel frustratingly simple. I need you to trust that simple is the point.”
He nods. No sarcastic comments. The apology is still in the air between us.
I push off. “Follow me. Same pace, same line. Watch what I do with my weight on the turns.”
We skate.
It’s slower than any session I’ve run with him, slower than anything I’ve seen him do voluntarily, and I can feel the effort it costs him to dial it back - this is not a person who does anything at half speed, and restraint doesn’t come naturally to him the way force does.
But he does it. He matches my pace and he watches and when I talk through what I’m doing with my edges he listens differently than how he did before.
Actual listening, not waiting to push back.
“Again,” I say. “This time I want you to feel the outside edge on the crossover. Don’t force it. Notice where the weight is.”
We go again.
“There,” I say, pulling up beside him at the blue line. “You felt that?”
“Yeah,” he sounds surprised. “Yeah, I did.”
“That’s what efficient feels like. It’s less, not more. You’ve been adding force where you need to be adding precision.”
He looks at the ice, processing it, and I move around to his left side.
“Can I-” I gesture.
He nods.
I put my hand on his left hip, the same correction as before, but slower this time, deliberate. No audience, no point being made.
He doesn’t go rigid.
He leans into it - just a fraction, enough weight shifting toward my hand that I feel it through my palm - and I keep my voice completely even and say “there, that position, do you feel the difference?” and he says “yes” in a voice that’s gruffer than his normal voice. I take my hand away.
“Run the sequence.”
He does.
It’s better. Noticeably, genuinely better, and I watch it with the part of my brain that’s always purely technical. That part is satisfied with the progress.
“Good,” I say. “Again.”
We work through different elements and the session has a quality I haven’t felt with him before.
He’s almost collaborative. He asks a question at one point, a real one, about weight distribution on the backward crossover, and I answer it properly and he listens properly.
We run it and he gets it faster than I expected. I tell him so.
“Don’t sound so surprised,” he says, the corner of his mouth going up in the start of a smile - and I look back at the ice before my face does anything I don’t intend.
“One more. Full sequence. Your pace this time, not mine.”
He pushes off.
I watch him - the technique is cleaner than it was an hour ago. He can do this. I let myself watch him because there’s no-one here to see me do it.
The way he moves when he’s not fighting it. The line of his shoulders, the grace that’s been there underneath the force the whole time, starting to come through now that he’s stopped burying it.
I write something in my notebook and don’t examine why my handwriting is less neat than usual.
MATEO
An hour and fifteen minutes and I don’t hate it.
That’s the thing I’m sitting with as I tape my stick in the locker room afterward, alone, everyone else long gone.
I didn’t hate it. I didn’t hate any of it - the slowness of it, the repetition, the way she moved around me with that precise economy and put her hands where they needed to go without making anything of it, and I didn’t resist it.
That’s new.
The crossover sequence is sitting differently in my body now.
I can still feel it - the memory of the right position, the way it clicked into place when I stopped adding force and just found it.
She said efficient like it was simple and obvious and the annoying thing is that on the ice it was.
Simple and obvious and right there waiting for me to stop getting in the way of it.
I press the tape down and stare at the blade.
I’m trying not to think about Jake Skelly.
I’ve been carrying it around since after that game like something stuck in my skate.
I want to say something about it but I can’t say anything without looking unhinged.
So they chatted. I think they swapped numbers but that could be about anything - they’re both coaches.
Yeah, I don’t think she should be flirting with the opposition, but I stayed quiet about it mainly because I don’t want her to know I noticed it.
Noticed her. It would mean admitting I was looking.
So I say nothing.
I said nothing during the whole session and I’ll keep saying nothing and it’ll stop bothering me eventually because it has to. I have a team to captain and scouts to worry about. We have another game on Friday and that needs my full attention.
I stand up and grab my bag.
She was right about the crossovers.
That’s the only thing I’m taking out of this morning.
That’s it.