Chapter 4 Mira
Living with three hockey players meant navigating three different schedules, three different morning routines, and presumably three different levels of bathroom cleanliness.
I'd already started mentally preparing a color-coded schedule, because apparently I handled trauma through organizational systems.
The house was silent, which meant I might actually have time to shower in peace before the hockey players began their morning routines. I grabbed my toiletry bag and opened my bedroom door with the stealth of someone sneaking through enemy territory.
The bathroom door was closed. Light glowed from underneath.
I stood in the hallway, debating the merits of just waiting it out, when the door swung open and Blake walked out wearing absolutely nothing but water droplets and an expression of pure horror.
For one frozen moment, my brain completely short-circuited. I'd known Blake was big. I'd seen him on the ice, watched him body-check opponents into next week, observed how he had to duck slightly through doorways. But the sheer scale of him without clothes was something else entirely.
He was enormous. Not just tall, but built—like someone had carved him from granite and then decided to make him even bigger just for fun.
His body was a map of hockey violence: scars on his shoulders, his ribs, his arms. Old injuries telling stories of games past. He was built like the kind of person who could bench press a car but would apologize to the car afterward.
My training kicked in despite the mortification, cataloging everything with clinical detachment: the perfect balance of power and agility, the muscle structure that suggested both explosive force and surprising flexibility, the way his—
Blake made a sound between a squeak and a whimper.
His face turned the color of the Northbridge jerseys—a deep, mortified red that started at his neck and spread upward.
He reached blindly for a towel on the rack, wrapping it around his waist with movements that were somehow both frantic and careful, as if he was afraid of making the situation worse.
The towel was comically inadequate for his size. We both realized this simultaneously.
My mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. I managed something that might have been words but sounded more like a dying computer trying to boot up.
"I'm sorry," Blake stammered, backing into the bathroom like he might be able to rewind time if he just retreated fast enough. "I forgot to lock—I'm not usually—"
"It's fine," I squeaked. "This is fine. Everything is completely fine."
Nothing was fine. Everything was actively terrible.
"I didn't expect anyone up this early," Blake continued, his eyes fixed somewhere over my left shoulder like eye contact might actually kill him. "Nobody's usually—I'm so sorry—"
"Really, it's okay," I said, my voice climbing octaves I didn't know existed. "These things happen. In houses with shared bathrooms. Which this is. A shared bathroom in a house. Where we all live."
I was speaking in sentence fragments. This was not helping.
"Maybe we should establish a schedule," I managed, forcing my voice back to something resembling normal. "For the bathroom. With color-coded time slots. And possibly a lock system. With multiple locks. Industrial locks. Bank vault locks."
"Yes," Blake said, nodding so enthusiastically he nearly lost his towel again, which caused a new wave of mortification for both of us. "A schedule. That's good. I like schedules. Schedules are great. I'm a big fan of schedules."
We established a complex bathroom schedule through the door—Blake still refused to come out—involving color-coded time slots that I immediately began planning on graph paper because apparently I handled fresh trauma through even more organizational systems.
When Blake finally emerged, fully clothed in hockey warm-ups and still refusing eye contact, we navigated around each other in the hallway with the awkward choreography of people who'd seen way too much of each other way too soon.
"So," I said. "We're never speaking of this again."
"Never," he agreed fervently.
We stood there for another awkward moment before both fleeing to our respective rooms.
I got ready for the day in a haze of mortification, pulling on athletic wear and yanking my hair back into a ponytail with probably more force than necessary. Today was the day I proved my worth to the team, the day I made them take me seriously.
Today was the day I tried very hard not to think about Blake's cock.
At the rink that morning, I channeled my embarrassment into professional competence. I'd prepared a training session that would either prove my worth or get me laughed off the ice. Probably both.
The team gathered on the ice, looking at me with varying expressions of skepticism, amusement, and outright dismissal. I recognized several faces from years of shared rink time—the ones who'd called me "princess" and made kissing noises during my practices.
Time to make them eat their words.
"Good morning," I said, my voice carrying across the rink with more confidence than I felt. "I'm Mira Torres, your new performance enhancement specialist. Today we're going to work on edge work and balance using figure skating techniques."
A ripple of laughter went through the team.
"Are we auditioning for Ice Capades?" one of the sophomore players called out.
"Will we be wearing sequins?" Logan added, smirking.
Even Nolan looked skeptical in that politely restrained way that was somehow worse than open mockery.
"Figure skating," I continued, ignoring them, "requires levels of edge control, balance, and agility that translate directly to improved hockey performance.
The techniques I'm going to teach you will improve your tight turns, increase your speed through transitions, and enhance your overall ice awareness. "
More skeptical looks.
"But first," I said, "let me demonstrate."
I laced up a pair of borrowed hockey skates—I refused to risk my custom figure skating boots on this disaster—and stepped onto the ice.
The rink went quiet. I started with basic spirals, moving across the ice with the kind of precision that came from fifteen years of practice.
Then I transitioned into edge work that made hockey skates—which felt like skating in cardboard boxes compared to my usual equipment—look like they were made for figures.
I could feel their attention now. The mockery had faded into something that looked like surprise. Then I landed a double axel, in hockey skates. The sound of the landing echoed through the silent rink.
I stopped and looked at the team. Several players had their mouths open. Logan looked personally offended that I'd made that look easy. Nolan had the expression of someone recalculating every assumption he'd ever made.
"So," I said sweetly. "Anyone want to try now?"
The exercises that looked graceful when I performed them turned into a comedy of errors when hockey players attempted them. It was like watching baby giraffes try to ice skate. If the baby giraffes were over six feet tall, weighed over two hundred pounds, and had the balance of a couple of drunks.
Logan nearly face-planted trying a basic spiral. One of the defensemen actually did face-plant, taking two other players down with him like hockey dominoes.
The rink filled with the sounds of cursing, scraping ice, and bodies hitting frozen ground. It was beautiful.
"Engage your core!" I called out. "You're relying too much on upper body strength. Balance comes from your center."
"My center is telling me this is a bad idea," someone groaned from the ice.
"Your center is wrong. Try again."
I worked with them individually, adjusting stances and providing encouragement laced with just enough sarcasm to keep them engaged. Most of them were actually trying now, the mockery replaced by determination.
I spent extra time with Blake, who struggled more than the others because his size worked against the kind of balance these moves required.
"You're fighting your own body," I said, skating up beside him. "You're trying to muscle through it instead of finding your center of gravity."
"I don't think I have a center of gravity," Blake muttered. "I think I have a center of mass that's slowly pulling me toward the earth's core."
I laughed. "Let me help."
I placed my hands on his hips, adjusting his posture, demonstrating how to distribute his weight differently. We were both acutely aware of the contact. Blake's body went rigid under my hands, his breath catching slightly.
Professional, I reminded myself. This is professional. This is no different than when your coach adjusted your positions.
Except my coach had never been a six-foot-four hockey player with a body that felt like touching warm granite and eyes that looked at me like I was something precious and breakable.
"Feel that?" I said, pressing against his obliques. "That's where you want to engage. Think of it like anchoring yourself to the ice."
"Anchoring," Blake repeated, his voice slightly strained.
"Try the spiral again."
He did. This time, he made it almost halfway through before his balance wobbled.
"Better," I said. "Again."
By the end of practice, the team was exhausted, humbled, and notably quieter about their mockery. Coach Williams looked impressed, which seemed to be his equivalent of enthusiastic approval.
As I left the ice, I caught Nolan watching me with an expression that might have been respect, Logan with something that looked like fascination, and Blake with an intensity that made my skin prickle with awareness.
That evening, I returned to the house exhausted and starving. The smell hit me the moment I opened the door—something that made my mouth water and my stomach growl.
I found Blake in the kitchen, surrounded by ingredients that suggested he was preparing for a cooking show rather than feeding college athletes.
Classical music played from a speaker on the counter.
He was chopping vegetables with the same methodical precision I used for everything, his massive hands surprisingly delicate with the knife work.
"Is this what you do with your free time?" I asked from the doorway. "Cook elaborate meals while listening to Chopin?"
Blake jumped, nearly dropping the knife. "It's Brahms," he said automatically, then looked embarrassed. "And yes. I like cooking. It's... calming."
"Brahms. Right. Obviously." I had no idea if it was Brahms or Chopin or Beethoven. Classical music was not in my skill set.
"Are you hungry?" Blake asked, already moving to grab an extra plate. "I always make too much."
I looked at the spread of ingredients, the carefully measured spices, the simmering pots on the stove. "You cooked all of this?"
"My grandmother's recipe," he said softly. "She taught me when I was young. Before she passed."
There was something in his voice that made me step further into the kitchen. "Tell me about her."
Blake hesitated, then began talking as he cooked.
He told me about being adopted as an infant, about growing up bigger than everyone else, about how his size made him valuable for hockey but isolated him socially.
How his adoptive grandmother had taught him to cook as a creative outlet, a way to make something beautiful instead of just being the enforcer on ice.
"I want to open a restaurant someday," he admitted, stirring a pot. "After hockey, if I can."
"That's amazing," I said. "What kind?"
"I don't know yet. Maybe Italian? Or French fusion? Something where I can be creative." He glanced at me, then back at the pot. "It's stupid."
"It's not stupid," I said firmly. "It's brave. Most people don't have dreams outside of their sport."
"What about you?" Blake asked. "What do you want after skating?"
The question caught me off guard. "I don't know," I admitted. "Skating was supposed to be everything. Now it's... I don't know what it is."
We fell into an easy rhythm in the kitchen, Blake teaching me his grandmother's recipe while opening up in a way that surprised us both.
I shared my own isolation—training since age nine, homeschooled to accommodate skating schedules, never having real friends because competitors couldn't be trusted.
"I've been lonely in crowds my whole life," I said, chopping an onion with slightly less finesse than Blake. "Surrounded by people but never really connecting."
"Me too," Blake said softly. "My whole life, I've been 'the big guy' or 'the enforcer.' Never just Blake."
We looked at each other across the kitchen island, and something shifted between us—a recognition, a understanding, a connection that felt dangerously real.
The front door banged open, shattering the moment.
Nolan and Logan arrived home, their voices filling the house before they even reached the kitchen. The atmosphere shifted immediately.
"Something smells amazing," Logan said, appearing in the kitchen doorway. His eyes flicked between Blake and me, lingering on the flour somehow in my hair. "What's the occasion?"
"No occasion," Blake said, his ears turning slightly pink. "Just dinner."
"Just dinner," Nolan repeated, his sharp eyes taking in the elaborate spread, the classical music, the way Blake and I had been standing close together. "Right."
We all navigated around each other in the small kitchen, reaching for plates and utensils, accidentally brushing against one another. Every touch felt significant. Every glance felt weighted. The air between us crackled with something I wasn't sure I wanted to examine.
When we finally sat down to eat Blake's elaborate meal, the hostility from the first night had transformed into something else entirely—something warmer and infinitely more dangerous.
I found myself laughing at Logan's sarcastic commentary about our practice session, debating strategy with Nolan, catching Blake's shy smiles across the table. For the first time since Sam's betrayal, I felt something other than anger and hurt.