Chapter 3 #4
Not a gradual deceleration—a stall. A full, immediate cessation of motion that read less like a skating maneuver and more like a circuit breaker tripping.
Her arms crossed over her chest, pressing the thin, sweat-damp fabric of her top against her body in a way that simultaneously shielded the very prominent evidence of the rink’s temperature and amplified it, because the compression only made the contours more visible, and I was going to need to invest in a thicker cup if this conversation continued for another thirty seconds.
Don’t look at her chest. Don’t look at her chest. Maintain eye contact like a civilized human being who respects women and values consent and isn’t currently losing a battle with his own peripheral vision—
“Garrison isn’t my partner anymore.”
Her voice was level. Flat. The emotional equivalent of a whiteout on a blank page—no inflection, no tremor, no crack in the foundation to suggest that the sentence carried any weight at all.
Which meant it carried enormous weight. I’d known her long enough to understand that Octavia Moreau’s emotional landscape operated on an inverse scale: the flatter the delivery, the deeper the wound beneath it.
My frown was immediate. Instinctive. “Good riddance,” I said, and meant every syllable.
“He was an asshole.” A pause. The analytical sector of my brain—the part that hadn’t been hijacked by her scent and her legs and the catastrophic nostalgia of standing on the same ice as her—caught up.
“But don’t you need a partner for the pairs division you’re applying in? ”
Silence.
The kind of silence that wasn’t empty but full—pressurized, loaded, containing everything she wasn’t saying in a container that was visibly straining at the seams. Her jaw tightened. Her eyes, those storm-gray weapons, held mine for a beat that lasted approximately seven centuries.
Then she skated backward. A smooth, controlled, backwards glide that was both a departure and a statement—because Octavia Moreau did not retreat. She chose her exits.
“None of your business, Petrov.” The words arrived over her shoulder as she increased the distance between us with the unhurried confidence of a woman who understood that walking away from someone was its own form of power. “Go focus on what matters to you and leave me out of it.”
You matter to me. That’s the problem. You’ve always been the thing that matters, and I’ve been too much of a coward to act like it.
The words stayed behind my teeth where they belonged—because saying them now, in this rink, after five years of earned distrust, would have been the verbal equivalent of throwing a Hail Mary with no receivers on the field. Ambitious. Doomed. Slightly pathetic.
She reached the backboard. Stepped off the ice.
And then—with the kind of tactical precision that suggested she’d mapped this maneuver in her head before executing it—she turned her body so that she was facing me as she bent to collect her bag from the bench, denying me the view with the deliberate, surgical cruelty of a woman who knew exactly what she was withholding and derived genuine satisfaction from the deprivation.
She grabbed her gear. Straightened. Bag on shoulder. Eyes forward.
I groaned. Loudly. The acoustics of the empty rink carried the sound with humiliating fidelity.
“That’s fucking cruel, Moreau.”
She didn’t turn around. “Good.” Her voice echoed off the boards, sharp and clear and carrying the faintest undercurrent of satisfaction that I felt in my molars. “Now you’ll learn to appreciate what’s yours next time you score lucky.”
Yours.
She said yours. As in—past tense. As in, I had her, and I fumbled the possession with both hands.
I bit my lip. Harder this time. Hard enough to taste the faint, coppery edge of consequence.
“So no second dibs?” I called out, my voice carrying across the rink with the reckless bravado of a man who knew he was losing but hadn’t yet located the grace to stop trying.
She paused at the tunnel entrance. Looked over her shoulder—one final, devastating glance from those storm-gray eyes—and raised her hand.
Middle finger. Extended with the elegance of a woman who had been trained to express emotion through the precise positioning of her fingers and had decided that this particular emotion required only one.
Then she was gone.
I stood on the ice in the silence she’d left behind, her scent still hanging in the cold air like a haunting, and laughed.
A real laugh. Full and rough and startled out of me by the sheer, magnificent audacity of a woman who’d just flipped me off with the poise of a prima ballerina.
Because that move—the middle finger, the over-the-shoulder delivery, the exit without a backward glance—was mine.
I’d perfected that exact gesture during a playoff series three years ago when a ref had blown a call so egregiously that I’d expressed my professional opinion from the crease with a single raised digit and a smile.
The clip had gone viral. And she’d clearly taken notes.
She copied me. She saw that, cataloged it, and deployed it back at me with better execution than the original.
That’s my girl.
Except she’s not my girl. She’s not my anything.
She’s a woman I once had the privilege of holding, and I opened my hands and let her fall through—the same way everyone else in her life has let her fall—and she walked out of this rink with her middle finger in the air and her chin up and her scent clinging to every surface like a promise I don’t deserve a second chance at keeping.
I scraped the ice with the edge of my blade. A slow, absent drag that carved a single line into the surface—a mark among the hundreds she’d already left. Hers were elegant. Looping. Precise. Mine was a straight, blunt slash that cut through her patterns without matching them.
Story of my life.
The rink hummed around me. Empty, cold, still fragrant with the ghost of her presence.
I could feel the outline of a plan forming in the analytical sector of my brain—the goaltender’s mind, always two plays ahead, always reading the angles and anticipating the trajectory before the puck left the shooter’s blade.
She was at Olympia. I was at Olympia. The tryouts ran six weeks. The rinks were shared. The campus was three hundred acres of unavoidable proximity, and if there was one thing I’d learned in fifteen years of guarding a net, it was that patience and positioning won more games than speed.
She was furious. Rightfully. She’d earned every ounce of that anger, and I’d handed her the kindling and the match.
But she’d also laughed. For two seconds, in the middle of her fury, she’d laughed.
And she’d looked at me. Really looked—with those cataloging, evaluating, choosing eyes that didn’t waste their attention on anything that didn’t matter.
I still matter.
Somewhere, beneath the damage and the distance, I still register.
I inhaled one final breath of her lingering scent, let it burn through my lungs and settle into the marrow of my resolve, and tapped my stick against the ice twice.
A goaltender’s habit. The reset. The centering motion performed before every face-off, every penalty kill, every moment that demanded absolute clarity of purpose.
Fucking hell.
I need to win her back.