Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
TOLREK
My evenings belonged to Beau.
The rest of the day revolved around practice schedules, team meetings, and conditioning sessions that left my legs feeling heavy.
During that time, my head remained somewhere between sequences I needed to memorize and the awareness that I was still learning this team’s patterns.
Evenings were different. After I left the rink, went home, and changed into regular clothes, I took Beau to the park.
It was nonnegotiable. Beau needed the routine. The structure of it. Dogs behave better when they knew what to expect, and this one had been through enough disruption without me adding to it.
That I needed the routine too was something I wasn’t examining.
On Tuesday, like always, we left my apartment and walked the few blocks to the park, him straining on the leash, pulling me toward a vendor with a cart near the path’s entrance.
Four pounds of Yorkie who moved through the world like he weighed two hundred.
People noticed the size contrast between us.
I’d caught the looks and double takes at a seven-foot orc with a dog small enough to fit in his pocket.
A few laughed, though kindly.
I didn’t care.
Beau had belonged to someone who’d died in a construction accident so random and pointless that my brain still couldn’t process it as real.
One day they were there. The next they weren’t.
And Beau had been left standing in the apartment, looking at the door, waiting for someone who wasn’t coming home.
I could’ve put the dog down or given him away, but how could I do something like that?
So now I had a Yorkie who thought he was my size and a hole in my heart that didn’t get smaller no matter how much time passed.
The park absorbed us into its early evening rhythm like always.
I was beginning to understand Boston in small ways.
Which vendors packed up early. Which paths stayed quiet even when the weather was good.
How the light slants through the trees and makes everything look softer than it was during the day.
Beau stopped to investigate a patch of grass with the focus of someone conducting important research. I came to a stop and let him work. Nobody bothered us. People gave us space. My size ensured it, and the fact that I didn’t make small talk.
This was the one part of my day with no performance required. No positioning reads to make or linemates to learn. Coaches weren’t watching to see if I was integrating. If the trade had been a mistake.
Just me and a dog who didn’t know someone was gone.
The path curved ahead, opening into a wider section with benches scattered along the edge, overlooking the river. Most were empty.
Haley sat on a bench with a sketchpad open on her knee, her pencil moving in small strokes I could see even from a distance.
She hadn’t noticed me yet. Her attention was down, completely absorbed in whatever she was drawing.
This was the same type of focus she brought to footage.
The rest of the world had gone quiet and this was the only thing that mattered.
I could take another path and loop back the way I’d come to avoid this entirely.
Beau had already decided. He pulled toward her with the determination of someone who’d spotted exactly where he wanted to be. The leash went taut. I let him lead, a choice I made without analyzing why I was making it.
She looked up when we were a few feet away and saw me first. Then she saw Beau. Her gaze remained on the dog.
Beau reached her shins and jumped, his front paws only reaching halfway to her knees. He made the small yipping sound he did when he wanted something and believed he was entitled to get it.
“Oh my god,” she said. “He’s so cute.”
“He doesn’t know that.”
She looked up at me, smiling. “Can I pet him?”
I nodded.
She set the sketchpad aside and leaned forward, her hands out. Beau launched himself onto the bench and clambered directly into her lap, circling twice before settling.
He looked up at her with complete adoration.
Traitor.
I stood with the leash in my hand and watched my dog choose someone other than me.
She scratched behind his ears, talking to him in the voice people used with animals when they actually liked them. “What’s your name, little guy? Are you ferocious? You look ferocious.”
“Beau.”
“That’s a good name.” She was still talking to the dog, not me. “What kind of dog are you?”
“Yorkie. He’s small for the breed. He was the runt of the litter.”
“He’s perfect.” She looked up. “Does he travel with you during the season?”
“No.”
“That must be hard.”
“I have someone reliable who stays with him. Beau knows the routine.”
She ran her hand down the dog’s back. He stretched into it, shameless, before rolling onto his back and sticking his tiny feet up into the air, waiting for belly rubs. “This little guy would be hard to leave.”
“He has no idea he’s so little. He thinks he’s my size. I imagine he thinks he guards my apartment while I’m away, ready to rip open a throat if someone dares enter.”
She laughed, and my heart flipped over in my chest.
Beau wiggled, adjusting his position to maximize the attention he was receiving. Her sketch pad had slid partially under him, but she didn’t move to retrieve it.
“He was my brother’s,” I said.
She went still, though not in the way people did when they were uncomfortable. No, this was the way someone did when they were giving you space to say more or to stop.
I stared at the trees past her shoulder. “Renkar’s dead.”
He’d been the only person who’d ever known me completely, in the way twins did, that specific understanding that came from sharing space before either of you had language for it.
“I’m sorry.” She sat with my brother’s dog in her lap and didn’t try to fill the silence with anything. She just let it be there. This was someone who’d learned how to deal with loss.
Beau sniffed the edge of her sketchpad, nosing at the corner. She shifted it away gently, flipped to a new page. She picked up her pencil and started drawing.
“My mother’s been gone a long time,” she said.
“You learn to carry it differently over time. It doesn’t get lighter.
Just differently shaped. Dad was coaching already, though only college back then.
I followed him if he changed teams, from city to city, because he was all I had left.
” The pencil kept moving. “His life became my whole world without me fully deciding it.”
I knew what it was like to stay somewhere past the point of choosing. To wake up one day and realize you’d become the thing you’d built around yourself. Staying because leaving felt like betrayal, even when staying cost you something you couldn’t name.
I didn’t say anything, but I didn’t look away either.
Light shifted through the trees. Beau sat up in her lap, his ears forward.
He looked ridiculous, especially with the bow the doggie daycare had put around his neck that I’d left on when I picked him up at the end of the day.
He was self-important and absurd and completely convinced of his own dignity.
She was drawing him. I noticed the angle of the pad, kept deliberately away so I couldn’t see much of what she was doing.
When Beau finally leaped down and trotted to me, she tore the page carefully along the perforation at the top and held it out.
She’d caught something in the line of his posture and the tilt of his head that was pure Beau. An expression that said he was taking the world seriously and expected everyone else to do the same.
She’d drawn him the way she watched footage. As if he was worth understanding. And she’d handed it over like it wasn’t anything at all.
I suddenly couldn’t swallow.
I folded the paper carefully and put it in my pocket. “Thank you.”
“He’s a good subject.”
Beau had wrapped himself around my leg, tangling the leash. When I moved to untangle it, it caught on her ankle as well.
I had to lean across her to unhook it. The space between us narrowed to nothing. I couldn’t help noticing how close I was and how small she was. How pretty she was. That last thought arrived fully formed, and I tucked it away with everything else about her that I didn’t know what to do with.
She didn’t ease back.
I unhooked the leash and stood. Neither of us said anything. The light was going. Beau shifted his weight, ready to move.
I wrapped the leash once around my hand as she closed the sketchpad.
“Goodnight,” I said.
“Goodnight.”
I turned and walked. Beau trotted ahead of me on the path, pleased with himself.
I didn’t look back, though I wanted to. The want was a pull between my shoulder blades that I ignored through sheer stubbornness.
She would be watching Beau, not me. That was worse than if she wasn’t watching at all.
I took the long route home, the one that added fifteen minutes and passed the storefronts and the restaurant with the brick wall Beau liked to stop and sniff. He was tired by the time we reached the apartment. I was something else I didn’t have a word for.
Inside, Beau went straight to his water and food bowls. I stood in the kitchen and watched him drink. The post-walk routine was familiar enough that I could do it without thinking. Food measured out. Fresh water. The specific toy he liked to carry around for ten minutes after we got home.
I gently took the sketch from my pocket and unfolded it. Looked at it under the kitchen light.
She’d seen Beau the way I did. Not small or ridiculous. Just himself. The lines were confident, drawn the way someone did when they knew exactly what they were looking at.
I set it on the counter instead of throwing it away.
My apartment was sparse. Functional. I’d moved here with what fit in my truck and hadn’t added much since. The walls were blank, without photos or art. I didn’t want anything that required me to commit to the idea that this place could be permanent.
The sketch sat on the counter, and I couldn’t stop looking at it.
I’d need a frame. Something simple. I’d hang it where I’d see it, not keep it hidden away in a drawer or shoved in a box with the rest of the things I hadn’t figured out what to do with.
Beau finished his routine and curled up on the couch, already half asleep.
I stayed in the kitchen. The sketch was six inches by eight. Standard sketchpad size. She’d probably torn out dozens of pages like it and given them away. This wasn’t special to her, just something she’d done while sitting on a bench on a Tuesday evening.
It was wrecking me, though I didn’t examine why.
Examining it would mean acknowledging things I wasn’t ready to admit.
Like the fact that I’d walked over to her instead of taking the other path.
I’d sat on the bench beside her and told her about Renkar when I didn’t talk about Renkar with anyone.
I’d folded this drawing and put it in my pocket and brought it home and now I was standing here planning where to hang it.
Coach’s daughter. Off-limits in every way that counted.
I was beginning to understand that off-limits didn’t stop you from wanting something. It just meant you couldn’t have it.
I’d spent my whole career being a body on a spreadsheet, a piece of muscle used to fill a gap on the ice. But when she looked at me, I didn’t feel like a trade acquisition. I felt like a male lonely enough to love a four-pound dog. And somehow, she was the only one who didn’t find that pathetic.
I left the sketch on the counter and went to take a shower.
When I came back, it was still there. I picked it up. Looked at it again. Put it back down.
Thursday. Four o’clock. Tape session. I’d sit in a room with her and watch footage of myself making mistakes, and she’d point them out with the same accuracy she’d used to draw Beau. She’d see things I didn’t want her to see. She’d probably already seen them.
That should bother me more than it did.
Beau snored on the couch. The apartment was quiet but I lived alone. It wasn’t peaceful, just empty.
I stared at it one more time before turning off the kitchen light. I grabbed the sandwich from the fridge I’d picked up on my way home. I’d eat it in the living room and give Beau a few bites even though everyone said dogs shouldn’t have people—orc—food.
Tomorrow I’d find a frame.
Tonight I’d let the drawing sit on the counter where I could see it when I woke up and entered the kitchen again.