Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Toni Amato
The arena is a different building without a crowd in it.
Without the noise and the smoke and the twenty thousand bodies oriented toward a single point, it reduces to what it actually is: a cold box with excellent acoustics and a lot of fluorescent light.
Sound travels differently on empty ice. A skate stop on the far end of the rink carries to the tunnel mouth in under a second.
A child’s shriek reaches the upper bowl and comes back as an echo.
The building multiplies sound the way it multiplies everything.
Takes ordinary things and makes them enormous.
The rink belongs to the kids on Saturday mornings.
I agreed to come in early and review the week’s footage with Coach Briggs.
Nobody told me that the Gold Coast Guardians open the practice ice to family skates on Saturdays from eight to ten, or that family means approximately forty children in various stages of helmet chaos and full-grown professional hockey players who apparently cannot say no to a four-year-old with a plastic stick.
As I round the corner of the tunnel, I almost collide with a small person wearing a jersey that’s four sizes too big and exuding an aura of absolute authority. She stares up at me. Maybe three years old. Possibly running the operation.
“Hi,” I say.
She considers me with the gravity of a Supreme Court justice. Then she holds out a foam puck. “You drop it,” she says.
“I — sorry?”
“You DROP it.” She thrusts the puck higher. “For the faceoff.”
I take the puck. Drop it. She slaps it with her stick and charges after it across the rubber mat with total conviction, and I watch her go, slightly stunned, before I glance up and see the rest of it.
The ice is full.
Piper is out there with two kids I recognize from her phone wallpaper.
There’s a boy, maybe two years old, who’s probably skating better than he can walk.
He’s a bit reckless, but he’s also quite agile.
Then there’s a girl who moves like she’s been on skates since she was a baby.
Chase Maddox, retired goalie and apparently still enormous even out of pads, skates backward in slow, patient circles while a toddler grips both his index fingers and takes steps the size of postage stamps.
Harper Knox is near the boards, laughing at something, her husband’s arm around her shoulders.
And then there’s Max.
He’s at center ice. No stick. No helmet, which strikes me first because every safety instinct I have fires immediately and then stops, because the context catches up.
He’s crouched down to eye level with a boy who can’t be over five, both of them studying the ice with matching expressions of deep seriousness.
Max is talking. The boy is nodding slowly.
Max then stands, skates two feet away, and demonstrates a small stop, a spray of ice, and nothing remotely resembling what I’ve witnessed him do during practice. Deliberate. Slowed down.
The boy tries it. Wobbles. Max shoots one hand out without hesitation and catches him by the back of his jacket, holds him upright, and doesn’t make a single thing of it.
Just steadies him and waits. The boy tries again.
This time he stops. A small, shaky, perfect stop.
Max doesn't grin. He just looks at the kid the way you treat something that genuinely delights you, open and unguarded, and says something that makes the boy's whole body go electric with pride.
My grip on the clipboard is so firm that its edge is digging into my palm.
I look away. I focus on my notes. The boards.
The Zamboni bay. Anything except what's happening at center ice. It doesn’t help.
Because then Piper’s daughter comes flying across the ice and hits Max at approximately the speed of a freight train and he catches her mid-air and spins her once without even shifting his weight, like she weighs nothing, like he’s been catching her his whole life, and she shrieks with a joy so pure it echoes off the rafters.
“Again, Uncle Max!”
Uncle Max.
He spins her again. She shrieks again. The boy who learned to stop comes barreling over now too, arms out, demanding his turn, and Max juggles them both in a way that should not be physically possible for a man his size and probably isn’t technically legal in terms of rink safety protocols.
I write nothing on my clipboard. I’m staring.
I can't find the part of me that should stop.
He sets them both down with the kind of care you only use with things that matter to you.
Before I can react, Piper’s daughter grabs my hand and drags me straight onto the ice toward Max.
“Show her the spin!”
“Oh no,” I say immediately.
“Oh yes,” Max says.
The child wedges our hands together as if she’s solving a diplomatic crisis.
“Now spin.”
“This feels unsafe,” I mutter.
“For who?” Max asks. His hand closes around mine.
Warm and bare. Strong enough that my knees nearly forget their structural responsibilities.
But it doesn’t matter because Maxwell Stevens literally lifts me off my feet and spins me around before I can stop him.
Then he lets me slide down his hard body until we are face to face.
“Seems pretty safe to me. You don’t need skates to have fun on the ice with me. ” He winks.
The little girl laughs and yells over to Piper. “Did I do good, Mommy?” I should’ve known.
Max makes a startling remark that sends them racing across the ice.
His fingers remain locked around my waist, and he gazes directly at me.
I don’t break away fast enough. That’s my first mistake.
The second mistake is the half-second I don't arrange my expression in time.
He sees it before I can pull it back. I watch him see it.
My head drops, and I scurry away as fast as I can without skates on the ice. Too little, too late.
He skates over slowly. Fluid and unhurried. No performance in it. He stops at the boards a few feet away. His cheeks are red from the cold air, hair is wrecked. He looks nothing like the locker room version. And nothing like anything I have a professional category for.
“Surprised?” he asks. The question is reserved.
No grin attached to it. He’s not using it to score a point.
He actually wants to know. That's what I can't prepare for. I could handle the grin. I’ve been handling the grin all week.
But this is Max Stevens standing in front of me without a single layer of performance, asking an honest question with genuine eyes.
This version of him isn't in any file I've built. I don’t answer. Because yes. The answer is yes. I have spent a week building a working model of this man from penalties and film clips and the deliberate, maddening charm he runs like a defense mechanism. I knew the enforcer. I knew the provocateur. The guy from Rockford, I knew, pulled me into a hot tub beneath the pines and, for one reckless night, made me feel as though I didn’t have to be careful.
Most men perform confidence. Max weaponizes honesty, and somehow that’s worse. I did not know this.
That he slows his demonstrations down for small children was unknown to me.
He catches people. Steadies them. Doesn't make a thing of it.
Genuine delight renders him utterly unguarded; a state I haven't seen all week, not even in the sauna when he uttered words that came with a price.
He is more than I built him to be. That is the problem.
My brain is registering this as a structural problem.
“You’re good with them,” I say finally. My voice comes out steady. Another personal achievement.
He glances back at the ice. The two kids have pulled Chase into some kind of game that involves him falling dramatically every time they hit him with the foam puck, which Chase is doing with what I can only describe as professional commitment.
Max watches it, and tenderness moves through his expression.
“Piper’s kids are easy,” he says. “They already know what they want. You just have to not get in the way.” He says it as if it were nothing.
Like the philosophy he just handed me, the words are obvious and small.
I record it in the part of myself I was supposed to stop adding things to.
“The boy,” I say. “The stop you were teaching him. You shortened your knee bend by half.” He blinks. Stares back at me. “So he could replicate it,” I continue. “You calibrated the demonstration to his body, not yours.”
A pause. “Yeah.”
“You do that in the film sessions too.” I keep my voice clinical. Informational. A woman discussing techniques. “When I run a clip back, you watch the feet first. You always read body mechanics before you read the play.”
He’s very still. “I never thought about it that way.”
“I know.” And that’s the thing. That’s what’s been sitting under this all week. The thing I’ve been trying to avoid observing directly. “Your instincts for this game are stronger than your penalty record indicates. You’re not just an enforcer who reads the ice. You read people. You always have.”
The words land somewhere. I watch it happen.
They absorb and stay. He stares at me the way you look at someone who just said the thing you’d stopped expecting anyone to say.
I know that expression. I’ve worn it. This time, I’ll avert my gaze first. Back to my clipboard.
Back to the footage notes I’m no longer seeing.
“Coach Briggs is waiting,” I say. “Enjoy the skate.” I walk back toward the tunnel before my voice does what my face already did.
Behind me, I hear the kids shriek his name again.
I hear the sound of skates on ice, weight shifting, someone being caught.
I don’t turn around. Reaching the tunnel, I make it to the hallway.
I make it twelve steps toward the film room before I stop, stand still in the fluorescent solitude, and breathe.
He reads people. He always has. Including, apparently, me. The worst part is that I meant it as an observation. It landed as something else. In the acoustics of an empty rink, uncomfortably close to: I see you too.
I walk again. Behind me, distantly, I hear his laugh. Full and real and carrying all the way down the hall, the way it does when nobody’s watching and he stops performing and it just comes out of him. I have never once, in a week of trying, managed to forget that sound.
I’m not going to start now.
I’m done with work and meetings. I need exercise to stretch out my legs.
The place is empty, and I decide to skate.
I move fast until I break a sweat and breathe heavily.
The wind in my hair and the icy breeze on my cheeks always give me fresh energy.
I stop and sit in the box, elbows on my knees, eyes on the arena.
I’ve learned quickly that the rink is never truly empty. Even long after the media clears out and the cleaning crew finishes its slow, methodical circuits. What lingers is sound, cold, memory. That’s cut short when I can sense him near.
“You’re trespassing again,” I say without turning.
Skates glide over ice. Closer.
“You left your office light on,” Max says. “Figured you were still working and I’m your number one assignment.”
“I didn’t invite you.”
“You didn’t stop me either.”
I look up. Mistake. He’s already on the ice. No helmet. Hair damp from a shower that didn’t fully tame it. Gray sweats. Black T-shirt. Casual and dangerous and too human about it. I hate that combination. “You should be resting,” I say.
“You should be home on the weekend watching rom-coms, but here we are.”
“Unlike you, I have discipline.”
He smirks faintly. “Debatable.” Silence stretches.
Cold air wraps around us. I step down onto the ice before I can talk myself out of it.
My heels click once against the rubber mat before steel replaces it.
The chill bites instantly. I don’t move closer.
He doesn’t move away. He pushes off slowly, closing the distance between us.
Close enough that I notice the cut on his lip.
So near I feel the heat off him. When I don’t step back, his breathing alters.
“You want perfect?” he says evenly. “Go watch highlight reels.”
“I want consistency.”
“You want control.”
“Yes.”
His mouth tilts. “I don’t think you do.”
My pulse spikes. “You don’t get to tell me what I want.”
“No?” he murmurs. He moves again. One slow glide. Now he’s directly in front of me. No space left.
“You didn’t walk away this morning,” he says.
My throat tightens. “That was observational.”
“You didn’t walk away last night either.”
“I’m working.”
“Bullshit.” The word hits. Certain.
I take a sharp breath in. “You’re crossing a line.”
“You drew it.” His hand lifts. Not touching. Hovering near my wrist, close enough to register heat, not enough to break the rules. “You keep putting me in a box,” he says. “Bad boy. Problem. Risk. Then you switch gears and tell me positive things too. Pick a side, An-ton-i-a.”
“You are all of those things.” I turn away, avoiding his eyes.
“And you still watch.”
I don’t answer. Because I do. He knows it. And that’s the problem.
His tone drops. “You saw me with the kids.”
“You don’t get to use that—”
“I’m not using it,” he says. “I’m telling you, you saw me.”
Small cracks. Dangerous. “I see what you allow people to see,” I say.
“No,” he replies calmly. “You don’t.” His hand finally closes around my wrist. Certain. Not forcing anything. Electricity shoots straight through me. I should pull away. I don’t. “You see more than anyone else,” he says.
“That’s your problem.”
“Yeah?” His thumb shifts slightly. Barely. Enough. “What if it’s yours too?” The arena feels smaller. His gaze drops to my mouth. Mine stays locked on his. Wrong. Every level of wrong.
My father’s voice echoes somewhere in the back of my mind. Rules. Career. Control. All of it. I step back sharply. The contact breaks. Cold rushes in where heat lived a second ago. “This is exactly why I don’t mix business with players,” I say.
His expression doesn’t change. “Two years ago wasn’t business.”
The words hit like a body check. “You don’t get to bring that up.”
“You brought it here the second you walked into that locker room.” The silence is heavy, charged. “I left for a reason,” I say.
“Yeah,” he replies. “You ran.”
“I made the right choice.”
“Did you?”
I hold his gaze. Force steel into my spine. “Yes.” A beat. He nods once. He doesn't believe it. Neither do I. “Good,” he says, restrained. Then he turns and skates away. I stand at center ice alone, pulse too fast, and for the first time since taking this job, I'm not sure I want the control back.