Velvet Obsession

Chapter One

Sammie

December has a sound.

It isn’t the jingle bells and peppermint jingles they pipe through every storefront in the city, or the high, brittle laughter of people pretending the cold doesn’t make them ache.

December sounds like the rink doors slamming against their stops after a rush of boys in heavy gear.

It’s the scrape of steel biting clean lines into new ice.

It’s the way the Zamboni hum drops into your bones and smooths them over, pretending nothing rough ever happened on this surface.

December is also the quiet between whistles—the breath the crowd takes together, the hollowed-out hush where anything can happen.

I’ve been living in that hush since Halloween.

I try not to think of his name here. Not when the air already holds the taste of him.

Cold and clean and always a little dangerous, like standing too close to the boards when the rush barrels your way and common sense says move, move, move—but something darker in you wants to see if you’ll be knocked flat or left standing.

I learned what kind of girl I am in that corn maze.

Or maybe I only admitted it. The party lights were a fever, the masks were useless, and the way he followed me—no, hunted me—was an answer to a question I hadn’t had the nerve to ask.

What does it feel like to be wanted so completely that you stop belonging to yourself?

What does it cost to want that right back?

It’s December now and I still don’t have a receipt.

I stand at the top of Section 103 with my gloved hands wrapped around a paper cup that says HOT COCOA but is actually just tepid chocolate and memory.

Below me, the Storm Cats are running drills under the harsh white lights, the kind that make skin look like alabaster and sweat like ink.

Sticks crack, pucks ring the posts. Coach Michael’s whistle—my father’s whistle—slices the air into thin pieces the boys trust with their lungs.

“Reset.” He yells, and the runner in me obeys. I exhale. Inhale. Pretend the reset works.

The rink is dressed for Christmas. Garlands pinned along the glass like soft, green bruises.

Red bows my father pretended to tolerate because the team manager brought his three-year-old in to help tie them.

The little girl handed Dad the ribbon and called him “Coach Christmas” with such reverent sincerity he almost smiled.

Now there are twinkle lights draped along the upper railings and the kind of inflated snowman that always looks like it woke up hungover.

I’m supposed to be working, not watching.

The charity gala is in nine days—ninety percent of my attention begs to be on it.

There is a giant whiteboard in Dad’s office with DONORS, AUCTION ITEMS, and VOLUNTEERS written across it in my careful, bossy handwriting.

There are spreadsheets in my bag. There are vendors waiting for a yes or a no or a “tell me your best price because the Storm Cats don’t actually print money.

” And there is a velvet dress wrapped in tissue at the back of my closet like a promise no one else agreed to.

But I’m here, above the ice, pretending to drink cocoa, pretending to be invisible, and pretending I don’t feel him on the surface of my skin when I’m anywhere in this building.

Don’t look for him. Don’t.

My eyes disobey first. They betray me in small, humiliating ways—skipping past faces I’ve known my whole life, snagging on the broadest shoulders, the widest back, the one body who moves like every pivot is a threat.

The way he stops and lowers to his edges, the way he tracks the puck is the way he tracks anything that matters.

I hate him for how much I love watching him.

I love him for making that hate feel like a game I’m already losing.

Triston Knight. Captain. Number forty-eight. My brother’s best friend. My father’s headache. My favorite weakness.

He keeps his helmet on during practice—he always does—but there’s no hiding in him. Not from me. Sometimes I think the helmet helps because then I can’t see the eyes that found me through black October corn and tried to tell me I was a choice he’d already made.

He doesn’t look up at me. Of course he doesn’t. It’s better that way. My skin is safer if this stays one-sided and my father doesn’t scan the glass and find me staring like I’ve lost my will to blink.

Too late, a voice in me whispers. You lost that in the maze.

Whistle. Skate. Smash of stick against the boards. The dance continues, violent and beautiful, and I wonder—not for the first time—if my body is the rink and his desire is the Zamboni and that’s why everything in me keeps asking to be made smooth and reflective and marked again.

“Working hard, Samantha?”

I startle too hard and the cocoa sloshes onto my glove.

My father doesn’t miss anything, to his perpetual frustration and my lingering fear.

He’s in his team jacket with the Storm Cats logo stitched over his heart, hat pulled low.

Lines at his eyes that weren’t there before Andrew died, grooves at his mouth I can sometimes hear even when he’s silent.

“I’m timing drills.” I say. I hold up my phone like proof. It’s on the stopwatch app but paused, as if the time I’m wasting could be saved.

Dad looks past me, a habit he cultivated with me and Triston both when we were idiots—him a teenage hurricane and me a girl always within his orbit. It’s an old coach trick. If he doesn’t look directly at what’s true, maybe it can’t confront him back.

“Timing drills from the stands.” He says slowly, like it could be a reasonable thing if I wanted to make it one. “Or timing your daydreams?”

“I like the view.”

“From the office you’d like it better.”

“From the office I’d see the whiteboard eat me alive.”

“Then you know what needs food.”

He isn’t wrong. He rarely is. His moral compass is a hammer, and you don’t argue with a hammer when you’re the nail.

I take a sip of lukewarm chocolate and pretend it makes me brave.

“The silent auction is almost set.” I tell him.

“We still need one showstopper. Something people will climb over each other to bid on.”

“Dinner with the captain.” He says dryly, and the world under my feet pitches. He catches the look I can’t catch back and adds, without mercy, “Kidding, Samantha.”

“I didn’t laugh.”

“It wasn’t funny.”

We stand there like two sentries who chose different sides of a war that hasn’t officially started. On the ice, twenty-three takes a pass, winds up, and buries the puck high glove side with a crack that echoes into my chest. The net ripples as if grateful to be hit by something that certain.

Dad’s jaw flexes. Maybe he heard the sound I made when the puck hit twine. Maybe he hears everything. Maybe he is trying to be gentle and it keeps coming out as control. “Keep your focus on the gala.” He says finally. “And the dress you wear to it.”

“I know how to dress.”

“You know how to provoke.”

I swallow hard. It scrapes. “If I breathe, I provoke these days.”

“If you breathe near wolves, they smell it.”

There are things he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say Andrew’s name because he knows I will break if he uses my brother as a weapon.

He doesn’t say Triston’s name because saying it would make all of this too solid to pretend around.

He doesn’t say that I’m a grown woman because then he’d have to let me be one.

He doesn’t say that he’s afraid. He doesn’t have to.

“I’ll be in the office.” I tell him.

He nods and moves away, back to his ice, back to the boys who trust him to demand enough from them that winning is the only relief.

I watch him go and then—because I’m weak, because I’m me—I let my eyes drift to the slot, to the circle, to the man who has built an entire house in my head and refuses to pay rent.

Triston pivots, shoulders rolling under navy and white, and for a split second I’m sure he’s going to look up, find me, pin me to the railing with nothing but a visor and will.

He doesn’t. He jets to the blue line instead, barking something at a rookie that makes the kid’s back straighten and his stride lengthen.

He’s good at making people want to be sharper near him.

He’s devastating at making me want to be ruined.

In the office, I put the whiteboard between us.

It’s a mess in here, but it’s my mess. There are lists and markers and two different-colored highlighters because color coding gives me the illusion of control.

There’s a half-finished sign-up sheet for volunteers to work the gala check-in table and a stack of pre-printed thank-you notes I keep meaning to send.

There’s a photo in a silver frame of Andrew and me at the lake the summer before he died, both of us sunburned and squinting, his arm around my shoulders like he could keep me still there forever.

I press my thumb to the glass over his grin and say the thing I only say to him when it’s just us. I don’t know how to do this without you. I don’t know how to stop wanting what you would have warned me about.

Guilt is a clever beast. It doesn’t come for me head-on.

It sneaks. It tells me I’m dishonoring Andrew’s memory, that I’m betraying my father, that I’m stupid to think I can keep something this wild from eating me alive.

It also tells me the only way out is through, that if I say no to this now it will carve a hollow in me nothing else can fill.

The guilt and the want, braid themselves together like garland, pretty if you squint, strangling if you don’t.

Work, Samantha.