Chapter 33
ISABELLA
I crouch to check the mini fridge, then straighten with two beer bottles in hand. The small, disproportionate satisfaction of this lodges low in my chest, as if I’ve accomplished something meaningful simply by choosing not to follow the structure that usually defines everything I do.
“This feels illegal,” Cecilia says.
“It’s definitely not illegal,” I reply, grabbing a few bags of chips and tossing them across to her.
She’s leaning against the bar on the other side of the opening, forearms resting on the granite countertop we installed last year.
She is, quite literally, a dream. Standing in front of me in the dark, hair down and posture relaxed. “I have keys, remember?”
“You keep saying that like it makes it less weird, Princess.”
The nickname makes my whole body shiver. And the rest? She’s not wrong. Because being employed at this facility doesn’t actually make this feel like we’re getting away with it, and maybe that’s the point.
“It doesn’t,” I admit. “But I like it.”
She catches the third bag easily, and there’s a moment—brief and unmistakable—where her expression softens. It makes it look like she’s choosing to stay here in this version of the moment, instead of pulling back into something safer, more familiar.
We walk back towards the ice, and it feels like the building has settled into a deeper kind of quiet, one that feels almost suspended.
As if we’ve stepped outside of the version of this place that exists when people are watching, when everything has a purpose and a direction and a measurable outcome.
I grab a couple of towels from the bench near the boards, not explaining why, just bringing them with me because it feels like the right thing to do and maybe also because my choice of dress was exactly that, a choice.
I also do it because I don’t want this to be fleeting in the way most things in my life have been.
We move to the center without speaking, and when I lower myself onto the ice, the cold hits immediately, sharp and grounding, even through the rough fabric of the dirty towel.
She hesitates for a fraction of a second before following, and I’m aware of it—not in a way that feels hesitant between us, but because that reminds me she still makes choices before stepping into things. I stopped doing that a long time ago.
“You’re everywhere,” she murmurs.
I let my gaze drift upward, tracing the rafters in the same automatic way I’ve done for years. This time I don’t let them mean anything beyond markers of what I’ve already accomplished, what has already been decided and recorded and fixed in place.
“Yeah,” I say finally.
The word feels completely insufficient. Flat. Leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
“I knew, obviously,” Cecilia continues, her voice quieter, more thoughtful. “But it’s so different seeing it like this.”
“How?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.
“Louder somehow?”
I let out a breath that almost turns into a laugh but doesn’t quite make it there.
“Overwhelming,” I say with a nod.
She turns her head to look at me. “Yeah.” There’s a furrow in her brow, and my hand goes there immediately, smoothing it out with my thumb.
“I used to watch you,” she says after a pause that stretches long enough to feel deliberate.
I turn my head towards her now, studying her gorgeous face, trying to place that version of her alongside the version I know now, trying to reconcile the distance that existed between us then, in the past, with the lack of it now.
“Everyone did.” It sounds right on the edge of arrogant, but it’s not meant to be that. It’s another fact.
“That’s not what I mean.” She exhales slowly and takes a long sip of her beer, like she’s deciding whether to keep going and maybe shift the balance of the moment. “You made it look so fucking easy, Princess. Like none of it touched you.”
I hold her gaze for a second, and for once, I don’t default to deflection. “It wasn’t.”
She doesn’t look away.
“It just looked it.” That’s the part that people believed. That it was effortless, instinctive, a gift I inherited from my talented parents. I let my eyes drift back up to the ceiling, to the names that used to define everything.
“My parents made sure it looked like that,” I continue, my voice quieter now, less controlled. “That everything was perfect in its neat structure and there was never any doubt about what I was doing or where I was going.”
“And there wasn’t?” she asks.
“There was. That’s the problem.”
I shift against the floor, the cold pressing more firmly into my legs now, keeping me here.
“It meant there wasn’t space for anything else,” I add. “Everything had to have a purpose for my career and my career only. If it didn’t serve something, it couldn’t exist.”
The silence that follows feels different.
“I didn’t get to be normal,” I say finally, and even as I say it, I realize how inadequate that word feels, how much it fails to capture what I actually mean. “Not in any meaningful way.”
Cecilia lets out a quiet breath beside me. “I don’t think any of us really did.”
I glance at her, beautiful and so serious.
“I moved out when I was fourteen,” she continues, eyes fixed on the ice.
“Not because I wanted freedom or independence or any of the dramatic reasons teenagers argue about when they leave home. My mom’s cousin lived closer to Buenos Aires, and the rink that was forty-five minutes from her house had better ice time, better coaches. More access.”
Her mouth twists.
“I left my parents and my school and basically the entire life I knew because I thought maybe, if I worked extra hard, I could build a future out of it.” She huffs out a quiet laugh. “That’s not exactly normal either.”
Cecilia says it so plainly, without self-pity or performance. Pure truth.
“So maybe normal was never really an option for either of us.”
She glances sideways at me, the faintest trace of amusement returning to her expression. “You don’t seem very normal now, Princess,” she says, softer.
That pulls a small, unexpected laugh out of me. “No,” I agree. “But I’m really trying.”
I turn my head back to her, and this time she’s already looking at me. Her expression is open and steady, not trying to read me or figure me out.
“There was never any space in my life for anticipation,” I continue.
“And finally now, however many years after my retirement, I can dream. I can anticipate and be giddy about the uncertainty of it all.” My fingers press lightly into the towel beneath me.
“And even when I was winning, it didn’t feel exciting.
It felt like it was the thing I had to do; tick it off my list, then move on to the next thing. ”
“And now?” she asks.
I hesitate, because the answer feels too simple.
“Now I get butterflies in my belly when I sneak into my own rink at night with a pretty girl,” I reply, a quiet laugh threading through it. “Trying to steal a Zamboni. Lying on the ice with you, eating chips and drinking warm beer. Normal.”
She smiles. “That’s progress.”
“It feels like it,” I admit.
I study her face for a second, trying to capture the way she looks here, without the layer she usually keeps between herself and everything around her.
“And it feels different,” I add, quieter. “In a way I don’t think I expected.”
Her gaze drops briefly to my mouth, then back up.
“This feels like a date,” I say. “But also easy. Like it fits.”
The words come out before I can stop them. It feels too close to a love confession, to spilling everything I’ve been wanting to tell her since the day we kissed in the locker room. The way I want to scream at her that I want to keep her here.
She doesn’t answer, and for a second I feel the shift in the space between us, the risk in naming this thing we’ve both been avoiding.
“Yeah,” she says.
One word.
I let my hand move between us, my fingers brushing hers before I lace them together. I pull her down with me, and we lie there, under my name, under everything I’ve been told I’m supposed to be.