Chapter 32 #3
And that is what I hated. Not the change itself.
The loss of control. The sensation of a future I had meticulously planned being rearranged by forces I could not negotiate with.
My designation arriving late and uninvited, rewriting the rules of what I was allowed to pursue.
My parents retreating behind a door that closed on everything I thought was permanent.
The skating career that shifted from certainty to impossibility in the span of a single biological presentation.
I was not embracing the change. I was fleeing from it. Pushing it away. Wishing it would vanish so I could return to the life that existed before my body decided to betray my ambitions.
And that was my enemy. Not the designation. Not the world. My own refusal to adapt. My fear that accepting change meant accepting loss, when in reality, change was offering me a different path, not a lesser one.
The realization opens like a fissure in my chest, and the emotion spills into the final sequence with a force that I channel into speed.
I skate ahead. Raphael slides back, giving me the ice, his body retreating to provide the runway I need for what my muscles remember even if my conscious mind has not authorized it.
I accelerate.
The wind tears at my hair. The ice blurs beneath my blades. The music climbs toward its apex, and I launch.
A quad spin. Four rotations in the air, my body tight, my arms pulled to my chest, the world spinning in a white and silver blur that lasts two seconds and feels like eternity.
I land on one blade. Clean. The steel biting the ice with a sharp hiss that resonates through the empty rink, my knee absorbing the impact with a flexibility that my body has been rehearsing in its sleep for years.
Then the jump.
I leap from the landing edge, propelling myself upward and backward into Raphael's waiting grasp. His hands catch my waist with a precision that steals my breath, the grip firm and sure, and in one motion he lifts me above his head.
We spin.
His feet carve a tight circle on the ice while I extend above him, my legs rising into a split that stretches toward the arena ceiling, my arms reaching outward with the wingspan of a bird that has remembered, after years of walking, that it was built to fly.
The centrifugal force pulls at my core, demanding strength I did not know my exhausted body still possessed, and I arch my back further, bending into the shape that every figure skater knows but few execute at full extension.
The swan.
My spine curves into a crescent, my head tipping backward until my hair sweeps the air inches above his face, my body forming the signature silhouette of a woman suspended between flight and fall, held aloft by the strength of the man beneath her and the trust she has placed in his hands.
My arms extend behind me like folded wings, my fingers reaching toward the ice below, the entire pose balanced on the axis of his grip and the centripetal force of the spin.
The music fades.
The spin slows.
He comes to a stop.
And looks up.
My face is inches from his. Inverted. My hair hanging in a dark curtain that brushes his forehead, my hazel eyes meeting his gray ones from an angle that makes the world feel rotated, as though the rink has tilted on its side and we are the only two people standing on the new horizon.
I am breathless.
Not from the exertion. From the realization that is still expanding in my chest like a balloon that has not yet found its limit.
From the tears that are building behind my eyes with a pressure I cannot contain.
From the look in his gray gaze that tells me this moment was not accidental.
That every element of this routine, every musical choice, every sequence, was designed to bring me here.
"You know the swan move," I whisper.
He smirks. Upside down, from my inverted perspective, the expression looks like a smile that has been flipped, the warmth of it reaching his eyes with a softness that his composure rarely permits.
"You realize I did not start in hockey, right?"
I blink.
He begins to lower me, his arms guiding my descent with a controlled strength that lets me unfold from the swan without rushing, my posture correcting as gravity reclaims my body and my blades find the ice again.
He sets me down facing him, his hands remaining on my waist, his gray eyes holding mine with the quiet intensity of a man who is about to rewrite my understanding of who he is.
"Wait," I breathe. "You were a figure skater?"
He chuckles, the sound low and carrying a vulnerability I have never heard from him.
"Even Rafe does not know." He pauses, letting the significance of that confession register.
"I did not join hockey until later. My first love was figure skating.
I wanted to pursue it professionally. Competitively.
With the same intensity I eventually brought to hockey, except the dream came first and the compromise came second. "
His thumb traces an idle arc against my hip through the neon pink fabric.
"My father knew it would not be accepted here.
In America, where hockey is the established sport for Alphas and anything involving sequins and musical interpretation is treated as evidence of deficiency rather than discipline.
He understood that if I stayed, people would bully me.
Question my masculinity. Assume my orientation based on my choice of sport, because apparently the ability to execute a triple axel while maintaining artistic expression is incompatible with being attracted to women. "
The bitterness in his voice is faint but present. The residue of a wound that healed cleanly but left a scar he can still feel when the weather changes.
"So he sent me abroad. France. Italy. Germany.
Countries where figure skating is respected for Alphas.
Where the artistry is embraced and the athleticism is recognized without the caveat of cultural judgment.
I trained professionally in Paris for years.
Competed. Medaled. Built a career on the ice that had nothing to do with pucks or body checks or the suffocating expectation that Alphas express their strength through collision rather than grace. "
He meets my gaze.
"Meanwhile, everyone back home assumed I was on a hockey scholarship. The narrative was convenient. Easier to explain. Less ammunition for the people who would have used the truth as a weapon against a boy who just wanted to skate beautifully and be left alone."
My eyes are burning.
"It worked out," he continues, his voice softening.
"I do love hockey. Genuinely. The speed.
The strategy. The team dynamics that figure skating, for all its beauty, cannot replicate.
Hockey became my second passion, and it is the vehicle that brought me here, to this university, to this team, to this ice with you standing on it.
But figure skating is my first love. My foundation.
The thing I built everything else on top of, and the thing I never stopped practicing in private even when the public version of myself wore a hockey jersey. "
A tear escapes down my cheek.
I cannot stop it. Cannot redirect it. It falls with the inevitability of a truth that has been building for years and has finally found the exit.
"I wanted you to discover that the best way I knew how," he says gently. "Not by telling you. By showing you. By performing what you love with someone who loves it for the same reasons you do."
My lower lip trembles.
"I was running," I whisper, the words catching on the thickness in my throat.
"Running from the change I did not want to accept.
Because it was terrifying. One day I was a figure skater with a future, and the next I was an Omega with a deadline.
Forced to find a pack that only valued my body and the advantage of having me in their ranks rather than supporting the dreams that made me who I am.
That is why I lost hope. Because it felt like everything I worked toward was pointless.
Wasted. A foundation built for a house that was never going to be constructed. "
I press my palm flat against my sternum, the gesture instinctive, holding myself together from the outside because the inside is cracking open.
"It broke me. The realization that no one would see me as a skater first and an Omega second. That no group of Alphas would look at me and think her dreams matter, her passion matters, we will build our pack around her ambitions instead of asking her to abandon them for ours."
Raphael's hands tighten on my waist. Not possessively. Protectively. The grip of a man who is holding the woman in front of him together while she lets herself fall apart.
He smiles.
Not the smirk. Not the grin. A real, unguarded, luminous smile that transforms his composed features into a face I want to memorize in this exact configuration.
"I did not want you to think I was interested simply because we are scent matched," he admits.
"The biological compatibility matters. I will not pretend it does not.
But it is not the foundation I want to build on.
I pursued you because I saw you on the ice during that first match with the rookies, and the fire in your eyes was the most honest thing I had witnessed in years.
You skated like you were reclaiming a part of yourself that the world tried to take, and I recognized that fire because I carry the same one. "
He pauses.
"I also know that Alphas pursue Omegas like objects.
Like acquisitions. Like trophies to display rather than partners to cherish.
I did not want to give that impression. I wanted time.
Time for you to know me beyond the captain and the coach and the brother of the man who made your life difficult.
Time for you to see that my intentions are rooted in respect, not possession. "
His gray eyes hold mine with a sincerity that makes the rink feel smaller, more intimate, the vast arena contracting until it contains only this patch of ice and the two people standing on it.
"Etienne and Cal feel the same," he says.
"I have spoken with both of them. We want to court you officially.
Properly. Not the rushed, pressure-driven pack formation that the deadline demands, but a genuine courtship.
Taking things slow. Allowing ourselves to truly fall in love at our own pace and not the pace the world dictates. "
He lifts one hand from my waist and brushes the tear from my cheek with his thumb.
"If you would like that."
My heart is so full it is painful. A sweet, aching pressure that fills my chest and my throat and the space behind my eyes with a warmth that I have spent my entire adult life believing I did not deserve.
"This feels like a proposal," I whisper, a wet laugh escaping between the words.
He chuckles, the sound reverberating through the still air of the rink.
"It is more like a question," he says. "Would you be our pucking Valentine, Mabeline Mae Rose?"
The question is absurd. Perfectly, beautifully, ridiculously absurd.
A hockey pun embedded in a declaration of romantic intent, delivered on an ice rink by a former figure skater disguised as a hockey captain, while I stand in neon pink leggings with tears on my cheeks and a heart that is beating so hard I can hear it echoing off the boards.
I beam.
The smile splits my face with a force that aches in my cheeks and burns in my eyes and radiates outward from a center that has been dark for so long I forgot what it felt like to be lit from within.
"Fuck yes!" I blurt.
The words explode from me with zero refinement.
No poise. No elegance. No carefully curated response that a well-mannered Omega might offer in a moment of romantic significance.
Just the raw, unfiltered, joyful profanity of a woman who has been asked the best question of her life and is answering it with her whole chest.
I pause.
"Oh wait. That is not ladylike, is it?"
He laughs. Full and warm and resonant, the sound filling the rink with an echo that bounces off the glass and the boards and the ceiling and comes back to wrap around us like an acoustic embrace.
"Fuck no," he says. "But I like that response infinitely more than a squealing mess. It is honest. Aggressive. Very you. I would not have it any other way."
I giggle, the sound bright and watery, caught between the tears that are still falling and the happiness that is producing them.
"But I do want a kiss, Sir," I say, tilting my chin upward with a playfulness that my tear-streaked face undermines entirely.
"A proper one. On ice. With the dramatic lighting and the empty rink and the whole cinematic moment that we have accidentally constructed.
It would be criminal to waste the atmosphere. "
He chuckles, his hand sliding from my cheek to the nape of my neck, his fingers threading into my hair with the gentle deliberation of a man who is memorizing the gesture as he performs it.
"I would kiss you," he murmurs, his voice dropping to the low, intimate register that makes my spine liquify. "But the judges are watching."
I tilt my head.
The confusion registers before the words fully process, my brain attempting to reconcile the romantic momentum of the moment with a reference that makes no contextual sense.
"Judges?!"