8. Jamie #2
I watch the stop. Note the weight distribution, the position of his hips, the small recovery he makes before settling. Then I answer.
“Honestly?”
He nods.
“You look like somebody who hasn’t skated regularly in a few years.”
Relief moves across his face so visibly that I am briefly taken aback. He exhales, shoulders dropping a fraction. “I thought you were about to tell me I looked terrible.” He blows out a slow, calming breath.
A laugh escapes me before I have a chance to consider whether it should.
“You don’t look terrible,” I say, waving one hand in a gesture that probably communicates precisely nothing reassuring.
“That sounds encouraging,” he says slowly, a careful, self-aware smile appearing.
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
His grin widens at the speed of the reply, quick and unfiltered, and the expression is so close to the one I remember from the night we met that something inconvenient shifts in my chest.
I clear my throat and point toward center ice. “Let’s start with something simple.”
Cyaire pushes off and falls in beside me as we skate toward the red line. He is quiet for a moment, finding the rhythm.
“I like simple,” he says, more to himself than to me.
“You say that now.”
He shoots me a sideways look. I ignore it and pull to a stop near center ice, turning to face him.
“The first thing you need to understand is that you are not playing a hockey player,” I say.
He nods immediately. “I’m playing a coach.”
“Exactly.” I point the blade of my stick briefly in his direction to confirm it, then tap it lightly against the ice.
“Players and coaches move differently. A player is constantly in a state of preparation, protecting the puck, reading space, managing contact, reacting to pressure. Everything about how a player carries himself on the ice is built around being ready to act. A coach spends most of his time watching everyone else. The attention flows outward. The movement is different because the relationship to the game is different.”
Cyaire listens without once appearing to prepare his response. His eyes stay on me, steady and attentive. It is one of the more disarming things about him, and I noticed it the first time we met.
Most people hear instructions and spend the duration composing their reply.
Cyaire actually listens. The distinction is larger than people tend to appreciate.
“Daniel Mercer was not the kind of coach who stood behind the bench and directed,” I continue. “He was involved. He demonstrated drills. He skated with the team. He corrected things while they were happening, in real time, at ice level. That is the version of him you need to carry in your body.”
Cyaire nods slowly, thoughtfully, the kind of nod that means something is being genuinely considered rather than simply received.
“So, I am not trying to look athletic,” he says.
“No.” I shake my head.
I watch his brow furrow, watch him turn the idea carefully. That is the thing, I can see him actually working, not performing comprehension but reaching for it.
“You are trying to look comfortable,” I say.
Understanding moves across his face like everything has fallen into place.
“There it is,” he says quietly.
I blink. “There what is?”
Cyaire gestures loosely between us. “Everybody keeps talking about hockey. The drills. The mechanics. The terminology and the culture and the history. Everybody keeps explaining what he did.” He pauses and points toward himself. “You’re explaining how he existed.”
For a moment I simply look at him. Then I shake my head slowly. “That is a very actor answer.”
His laugh echoes out through the empty arena, the sound bouncing off the boards and disappearing into the high ceiling above us.
“I will take that as a compliment.”
“That depends,” I say, unable to help myself.
His chin lifts. “On what?”
“On whether you can stay upright long enough to make it matter.” I gesture pointedly down toward his skates.
The challenge lands exactly the way I intended. His eyes narrow, amused and a little competitive, a combination that I find immediately inadvisable.
“Oh, now you’re definitely enjoying this,” he says.
I push backward and begin skating toward the far blue line. “Keep up.”
“I’m starting to regret thanking you,” he calls after me.
“Good,” I shoot back over my shoulder.
“What exactly does that mean?”
“It means you’re learning.”
His groan carries easily across the ice while I fight back something I categorize as professionalism and refuse to examine further.
For the first time since he walked through the arena doors, the situation begins to feel natural. That particular realization is probably more dangerous than either of us is ready to acknowledge yet.
For the next forty-five minutes, I put him through exactly the sort of work I would put any returning skater through.
Nothing flashy or complicated. Edge work first, then balance drills and tight controlled turns around cones placed at intervals across the ice.
Forward skating, backward skating, and then the transitions between them.
Clean starts and controlled stops. The fundamentals, because the fundamentals are always where the truth lives.
Cyaire attacks every drill with the kind of focused, unrelenting concentration I usually only see from rookies trying to prove they belong on a roster.
He is not performing effort. He is genuinely there, present in every repetition, testing each correction immediately rather than waiting to see whether I will notice.
Most people in his position would angle toward praise, or else look for the shortcut that gets them to something more impressive-looking before the work has been properly done. Cyaire wants information.
“What did I do wrong?” he asks, after overshooting a turn and having to correct mid-stride to avoid losing the edge entirely.
I skate a slow circle around him, watching the angle of his hips and where his eyes have been going.
“You looked at where you were instead of where you wanted to be.”
His brow furrows and I point toward the far face-off circle before he can ask.
“Your body follows your eyes. Every hockey player learns this young, usually the hard way. The moment you start looking down at your feet or the blade or the ice directly beneath you, you are already a second behind the play. You have to look ahead of yourself. Your body will follow if you trust it.”
He absorbs it without argument. No deflection, no ego stepping in to complicate the correction. He simply takes it in and tries again, quietly and without ceremony.
Five minutes later the turn is cleaner, the edge held through the curve without the scramble at the end. I bring my stick down against the ice once, a sharp approving crack that carries well in an empty building.
“Better,” I tell him.
The grin that crosses his face is immediate, bright and entirely too pleased with itself, and before I can think about it clearly I hear myself say, “You really do like being told you did something right,” with a warmth in my voice that I had not exactly planned for.
“Everybody likes being told they did a good job,” he replies, passing me with an easy, deliberate look that communicates more than the words do.
“Not that much,” I say, unrepentant. Let us talk about the amount of sex we had without actually talking about it. I’m down.
“That felt judgmental.” He tilts his head with a look I recognize as theatrical suspicion.
“Observational.” I raise my eyebrows once with what I will charitably describe as complete innocence.
He shakes his head and pushes away from me. “You know, your public image is entirely wrong.”
I blink. The shift in subject is so abrupt that I take a second to follow it. “My what?”
“Your public image,” he says, gliding backward a comfortable distance before turning cleanly onto his forehand with a fluency that has noticeably improved over the last hour.
“Every interview I have ever come across describes you as quiet.” He says it with the particular careful tone of someone who has, in fact, come across more than a few such interviews, and is choosing not to draw attention to that detail.
“I am quiet,” I say honestly.
“You’re sarcastic,” he replies, with the measured certainty of a man updating a file.
I consider this. “Those things are not mutually exclusive.”
His smile widens and it moves across his face so freely that I feel that damn pull again.
“My, my, my, Mr. Reed,” I say, pointing my stick at him. “You want to be careful. You’re getting comfortable.”
“I’ve been comfortable,” he says with a shrug and a small pursing of his lips that I recognize as a lie.
The transparency of it makes me laugh before I can manage not to, and Cyaire points at me the second it happens.
“There. That. Right there.”
“What?” I ask, assembling an expression of perfect innocence.
“Your laugh,” he says in wonder.
I look at him. He looks back at me. Neither of us says anything for a moment.
The silence stretches longer than it should.
Long enough for something to shift in the quality of it.
Long enough for the particular stillness of an empty arena to become noticeable in a way it was not a moment ago.
Long enough for the image of another version of this man to surface, younger and uncertain and looking at me across the rim of a whiskey glass in a bar.
I clear my throat, the sound coming out slightly rougher than I intended.
“Let’s grab a puck.”
Cyaire lets me have the redirect without comment, the understanding behind his eyes quiet and entirely unhelpful. He simply nods and follows me toward the bench, and I tell myself that I am grateful for the generosity of that and nothing else.