7. Cyaire #3
“Cyaire.” Jasper says it with a click of his tongue that manages to convey an impressive amount of gentle exasperation in a single syllable.
“I’m fairly certain there was a muffin involved at some point,” I add, waving my sandwich vaguely in the air as I speak, which probably undermines the credibility of the claim.
Jasper closes his eyes for a moment and presses two fingers to the bridge of his nose. “That was six hours ago.”
“Then technically I did eat,” I say, and take another deliberate bite of my sandwich.
He opens one eye.
I smile pleasantly as I chew. He doesn’t return it.
“You’re impossible,” he finally says, once he’s watched me finish the rest of the sandwich and apparently confirmed that I am, in fact, capable of feeding myself.
“You say that like it’s new information,” I reply, folding the wrapper neatly and pressing it into my palm.
Jasper shakes his head, knowing he’s not going to win this particular exchange, and hands me the schedule.
“Good news,” he says, with the brisk efficiency of a man eager to return to his natural territory, which is logistics.
I narrow my eyes at him immediately.
“Nobody leads with good news unless they’re about to ruin somebody’s afternoon,” I tell him, making sure my tone conveys appropriate skepticism.
That earns me another reluctant laugh. “Your optimism remains genuinely inspiring.”
“Thank you.”
He taps the highlighted section somewhere in the middle of the page, and I drop my gaze to follow his finger.
“The training schedule is finalized.”
At first, all I see is a dense wall of commitments. Production meetings, table reads, fittings, rehearsals, individual training sessions, all stacked against each other in the tight, unforgiving way that pre-production schedules tend to look in the final days before filming actually begins.
Then one name catches my attention and holds it.
Jamie Maxwell. Vipers Hockey Liaison.
My grip tightens slightly on the paper. Just slightly. Just enough to register as a physical reaction, which I immediately decide to attribute to the surprising amount of information today has deposited into my brain. Jasper, naturally, notices anyway, because he notices everything.
“There he is.”
I look up, briefly thrown. “There who is?”
“The person who has actually been present for this conversation.” He gestures at me with mild satisfaction. “You needed calories. I’ve been talking to the wall for the last ten minutes.”
I look back down at the schedule and say nothing particularly useful. “So soon?”
Jasper nods. “We don’t have the luxury of time, Cy. Filming starts next week. The production schedule is already tight, and everyone wants you on the ice as quickly as possible. The sooner you start building muscle memory, the better it reads on camera.”
I study the highlighted block again. Tomorrow morning. Nine o’clock. Two hours on the ice with Jamie Maxwell.
For some reason, seeing it written down like that feels entirely different from hearing it mentioned in a conference room a week ago.
Back then it had existed as a concept, a line item on an already overwhelming list of things to prepare for.
Abstract. Manageable. Something I could hold at a comfortable distance while I dealt with the more immediate demands in front of me.
Now it is real. Now it is scheduled in black ink under a yellow highlighter, and no amount of strategic inattention is going to change the fact that in less than twenty-four hours I’ll be standing on a sheet of ice beside him.
“You’ll be fine,” Jasper says, clearly reading something in my silence that he has decided to misinterpret as skating anxiety.
“That’s easy for you to say,” I shrug, and offer him something that probably reads as a wry smile. “Nobody expects you to look competent out there.”
A laugh escapes him properly this time. “You’ll have one of the best players in the league making sure you don’t embarrass yourself.”
I lean back in my folding chair and look up at the ceiling for a moment.
“That genuinely does not make me feel better,” I say, allowing a small amount of honest feeling into my voice, though Jasper receives it as skating nerves and files it accordingly.
“It should.”
Maybe it should. Objectively, he’s not wrong. As far as technical preparation goes, having Jamie Maxwell standing on the ice ten feet away, demonstrating exactly what the character I’m playing would know instinctively, is an advantage most actors preparing for this kind of role don’t get.
Instead, all I can think about is the fact that tomorrow will be the first time either of us has been forced to actually exist in the same space together, with purpose and proximity and nowhere else to be, since that night at Climate Pledge Arena two months ago.
There won’t be a crowded hallway full of people providing natural cover.
There won’t be family members standing nearby to redirect the conversation at inconvenient moments.
There won’t be an easy exit if the atmosphere between us becomes something neither of us knows what to do with.
Unlike the hallway outside the arena, neither of us will be able to simply walk away.