8. Jamie
Jamie
You would think that after nine months of practices, games, travel, and everything else that comes with a professional hockey season, I would welcome the chance to stay away from a rink for a few weeks.
You would think I would be sleeping late, sprawled out by my parents’ pool at their new home, and soaking up every second of the off-season with the kind of deliberate laziness that a body genuinely earns after nine months of punishment.
Instead, I find myself stepping onto the ice before nine o’clock on a summer morning.
The arena is silent around me as I push away from the boards and glide through a slow, unhurried turn near center ice.
Empty seats climb in long symmetrical rows toward the rafters.
The overhead lights reflect in long pale strips against the fresh sheet beneath my skates, the surface unmarked and smooth in the way it only ever is this early.
Every sound feels sharper without eighteen thousand fans filling the building, amplified by all that empty space until even the smallest thing carries.
The scrape of my blades follows me across the ice, echoing off concrete and steel before fading back into stillness again.
I draw in a deep breath and let it out slowly. There is nothing quite like this.
The games are what people see. The goals make the highlights.
The championships make the headlines. The replays and the post-game coverage and the commentary that fills up every sports broadcast during the season, that is what the world outside understands as hockey.
What people rarely grasp is that most of us who play this game professionally spend the majority of our lives chasing this feeling instead.
The ice becomes part of you after enough years.
You stop thinking consciously about where your feet are going or how your weight is shifting or what your edges are doing beneath you.
Your body simply knows, and the knowing feels like the closest thing to peace I have ever found.
I cut across the neutral zone and pick up speed.
The movement soothes something restless inside me almost immediately, the way it always has, the way I came to rely on it in the first place. I check my watch when I finally slow near the boards. Eight fifty-three.
A quiet laugh escapes me, because nobody told me to be here this early.
No coach sent a schedule. No team obligation required it.
It is the off-season, and I am here by choice, on the ice before nine in the morning, on a day that belonged entirely to me until I agreed to give the first half of it away.
The realization should probably tell me something.
I choose to ignore it.
The excuse waiting at the front of my mind is straightforward enough.
I wanted to be on the ice. I wanted a proper skate, an hour to myself with nothing required of me and nothing expected.
I wanted to settle into my own head before spending the morning teaching an actor how to survive on blades without embarrassing himself or breaking something important.
The explanation is clean and entirely reasonable and I am absolutely committed to it.
I shake my head and push away from the boards again.
The truth is less convenient.
Two months ago, I walked out of Climate Pledge Arena thinking I had finally managed to put Cyaire Reed somewhere behind me, filed away with the other things I carry quietly and don’t revisit.
A week ago, I sat across a conference table and discovered that the universe apparently found that particular idea quite hilarious.
Now I am standing in the middle of an empty arena after nearly an hour of skating, waiting for him to arrive, and I refuse to spend another second examining what that says about me.
The sound of a door opening somewhere near the main tunnel interrupts the thought before it can go any further.
I turn toward the entrance automatically.
A large figure steps through first, pausing just inside the doorway to let his eyes sweep the length of the arena with the calm, practiced efficiency of someone whose job is to notice everything before anything has the chance to become a problem.
I recognize the man almost immediately, even at this distance.
I have never met Cameron Givens in person, but anyone who has paid even casual attention to Cyaire Reed over the past year knows exactly who he is.
The bodyguard is a fixture in the background of photographs, visible in the margins of red-carpet coverage, present in the kind of quiet, steady way that only becomes remarkable when you start looking.
Cameron’s gaze lands on me where I stand at center ice.
He gives me a brief, measured nod. I return it without much thought.
Then he steps aside and holds the door for Cyaire.
My stomach tightens, flips, and does something that I refuse to describe in any more detail than that.
Cyaire walks into the arena carrying a pair of skates over one shoulder, his free hand tucked into the pocket of what looks like a dark grey henley. He’s casual and relaxed. Nothing like the polished, tailored version of him that sat next to me that at the bar in New York.
For a moment I simply watch him.
The expensive suit is gone. The careful, composed movie-star image that follows him through magazine spreads and red carpets and award season coverage has disappeared with it, traded in for something quieter and considerably more difficult to look at directly.
This version of Cyaire looks more comfortable in his own skin than the man I met all those years ago, as though he finally found whatever it was he was looking for the night we first crossed paths.
The uncertainty that lived behind his eyes back then, that particular restlessness, that quality of standing at the edge of something enormous and not yet knowing whether to jump, has been replaced by something steadier. Something that fits him better.
He looks up, catches me watching, and offers a polished professional smile.
The expression reaches his eyes just enough to register as genuine without revealing a thing.
The message comes through with perfect clarity.
We are not here to talk about the past. We are here to work.
He is an actor preparing for a role. I am the person helping him prepare for it.
That is the arrangement, and he has arrived knowing exactly where the lines are.
Honestly, that suits me fine. I would rather not crack open the particular box of memories that belongs to my one night with Cyaire Reed.
Not here. Not standing in the middle of an arena where sound carries and Cameron Givens is watching from somewhere near the entrance with that quiet professional calm.
I skate toward the gate and stop a few feet short of it as he reaches the boards.
“Morning.” I keep my voice even, offering back the same controlled and professionally courteous smile.
“Morning,” Cyaire replies. Something flickers briefly in his expression as his eyes travel up toward the rafters and back down again, taking in the scale of the empty building the way people always do the first time they experience an arena without the crowd inside it.
He shifts his skates from one shoulder to the other. “Thank you for agreeing to this.”
I reach for the gate and pull it open, gesturing him through ahead of me, then fall into step beside him as we move toward the ramp that leads to the locker rooms.
“Thank me after you survive the next two hours,” I say, keeping the edge off the words just enough to land as dry rather than unkind.
A surprised laugh escapes him, genuine and unguarded, and the sound moves through the quiet corridor with an ease that catches me slightly off guard. “I thought you were supposed to be encouraging.”
“You haven’t earned encouragement yet,” I reply, lifting one eyebrow.
His smile grows, and this time it reaches further than the polished version he walked in with. Something warmer underneath, something that pulls his whole face into it, and my heartbeat does something I take careful note of and immediately set aside.
Something tells me this is going to be considerably more interesting than I prepared for.
Cyaire disappears into the locker room after a quick tour, leaving me to return to the ice alone.
I use the time well enough, pulling a spare stick from the rack near the bench and skating slow, unhurried circles through the offensive zone, letting my body settle back into the rhythm while my head runs through what the next two hours are supposed to look like.
By the time he makes his way out to the ice, I have already decided where we are going to start.
Cyaire steps onto the surface carefully, one hand resting lightly on the boards as he finds his footing on the blades.
The caution does not surprise me. Anyone returning to the ice after a significant gap would take a moment to locate their balance, to remind their body of the particular physics involved. That part I expected entirely.
What I did not quite expect is that he makes no attempt to hide it.
That distinction matters more than it might seem.
Most people arrive at situations like this with their pride already engaged, determined to appear more capable than they are before common sense has any opportunity to weigh in.
I have spent enough years working with sponsors and media appearances and the occasional celebrity charity event to understand exactly how that particular process unfolds.
The bravado arrives first, followed closely by the wobble, followed by the wounded dignity.
Cyaire pushes away from the boards and glides toward me with the deliberate, attentive concentration of someone who is paying close attention to what their body is doing rather than performing for an audience.
“How bad is it?” he asks, coming to a careful stop a few feet away.