"Raphaël?"
"He is a coach abroad," Etienne reasons, his tone measured and logical in that way that reminds me he processes the world through careful analysis before speaking. "International programs want coaches who bring diversity in skill sets. The more you can offer outside of just hockey, the more valuable you become. He has probably expanded his expertise beyond just coaching hockey players at this point. It would not hurt to ask him."
I chew my bottom lip, considering this.
Raphaël. The man whose vanilla ice cream and sandalwood scent still makes my pulse stutter every time he enters a room. My scent match who kissed me in a nurse's office and turned my biology inside out and upside down within seven minutes of our first meeting. Asking him for figure skating help feels intimate in a way I cannot fully articulate, like inviting someone into a part of my life that I have kept guarded for years.
"That, or you could train with Sage and Archie," Etienne adds, reading my hesitation with the quiet perceptiveness that defines him.
"Yeah." I nod, latching onto the alternative. "I need to catch up with them anyway. I have been meaning to, but they arerooming together now since their room got flooded or some wild situation, and honestly..."
I trail off.
Etienne waits. Patient. He never rushes me when I am working through my thoughts, never fills the silences with noise the way most people do when quiet makes them uncomfortable. He just holds the space open and trusts that I will fill it when I am ready.
"I have been wanting them to have some time together, honestly," I admit.
"Why?" His head tilts. "Are they dating?"
"I am not sure." I wrinkle my nose, the uncertainty playing across my face. "But it looks that way. The energy between them is different from how it was before. Charged. Careful. Like two people circling something they both want but are too scared to name out loud." I shrug. "We are all here for some reason or another when it comes to our relationship status, right? I want to get a pack by Valentine's Day. That is my goal, my reason for being at this university, the entire gamble I took when I agreed to this arrangement. And Sage, she probably wants her shot in the hockey industry, but she needs a pack for that too. The connections, the stability, the credibility that comes with belonging to one."
I squeeze his hand without thinking, grounding myself in the contact.
"I do not want to interfere with whatever is growing between them. I do not want to be clingy or demanding or the friend who inserts herself into every space because she is terrified of being left out. They deserve room to figure their thing out without me hovering."
We keep walking. The lamplight stretches our shadows long across the frosty pavement, two dark shapes merged at the hand, shifting with each step.
"But there is more," Etienne says quietly. Not a question. An observation.
I stop.
He stops with me, turning so we are facing each other beneath the amber glow of a streetlamp that casts his features in gold and shadow. His expression is open. Attentive. The kind of focused attention that makes you feel like the only person on the planet, which is both comforting and terrifying because being the center of someone's attention means they can see every crack in your armor.
I look at him for a long moment.
The cold air carries his scent to me in waves. Cedar. Pine. That ink-and-parchment note that always makes me think of late nights and handwritten stories and the quiet corners of a man who creates entire worlds on paper because the real one has not always been kind to him. The familiarity of it loosens a knot in my chest that I did not realize I had been carrying.
"Sage disappeared," I say.
The words come out flat. Matter of fact. Stripped of the emotion that I have packed so tightly around this particular wound that it has compressed into a hard, smooth stone sitting at the base of my ribs.
"A few years ago. We were best friends. The kind of best friends who knew everything about each other, who finished each other's sentences and shared clothes and had a specific booth at our favorite diner that the waitstaff stopped offering menus because they already knew our orders. She was my ride or die. My person. The one constant in a life that kept pulling the rug out from under me."
I swallow hard.
"And then poof." I snap my fingers, the sound sharp in the quiet night. "She was gone. No warning. No explanation that made sense. One day she was there and the next she was not,and the space she left behind was so massive I did not know how to fill it. I tried. I tried filling it with skating and studying and keeping busy enough that I would not notice the gap. But gaps like that do not close just because you ignore them. They just freeze over, and you walk on the ice and pretend the water underneath is not deep enough to drown in."
Etienne listens.
He does not offer platitudes. Does not rush to fix it with reassurance or redirect the conversation to lighter terrain. He stands there, solid and steady, holding my hand, and lets me bleed.
"I know it was not her fault," I add, because it is important to say that, because I have spent years untangling the blame from the grief and I need him to understand the difference. "Whatever happened, whatever pulled her away, I know she did not choose to leave me. But knowing that does not change how it felt. Knowing the fire was an accident does not make the burn scar heal faster."
He tilts my chin up with his free hand.
Gentle. The pad of his thumb resting beneath my jaw, angling my face so I am looking directly into his eyes instead of at the frost-covered ground where it is safer.
"Are you afraid to get close to us because we will just disappear?" he asks.
