"Yeah." Lou stood too, feeling the stiffness in her legs from the extra training. "Me too."
They walked toward the door together, their shoulders nearly brushing in the narrow corridor. At the threshold, Camille paused.
"Lou?"
"Yeah?"
"Thank you. For listening." Her blue eyes were soft in the dim light of the hallway. "It's been a while since anyone wanted to hear the truth instead of the story."
She was gone before Lou could respond, her footsteps fading down the corridor toward the parking lot. Lou stood in the doorway for a long moment, the cold arena air washing over her heated skin, listening to the silence settle around her like a familiar weight. Her heart was still racing. Her hands were still unsteady. And somewhere in her chest, something that had been locked away for years was starting to crack open.
She let herself feel the full weight of what had just happened.
Camille Laurent-Dubois wasn't what she'd expected.
And that was far more dangerous than anything Lou had been afraid of.
7
Camille couldn't stop thinking about Lou.
The thought ambushed her during practice, disrupting her focus at the worst possible moments. When she should have been reading the play, anticipating passes, calculating angles—instead she was watching Lou's movements across the ice. The powerful stride of her skating. The controlled aggression of her defensive positioning. The way her dark hair stuck to her forehead when she pushed herself through particularly brutal drills.
It was distracting in ways Camille didn't know how to process.
"Laurent-Dubois!" Mara's voice cut through her wandering attention. "Your head's somewhere else today. Find it, or I'll bench you."
Camille forced herself to focus, channeling her scattered thoughts into the clean precision of the drill. Pass. Receive. Shoot. The mechanics were automatic after years of elite training, but the satisfaction felt hollow somehow. Like shewas going through motions while the real action happened somewhere else.
Somewhere involving green eyes and scarred knuckles and a conversation that had kept her awake for hours.
The scrimmage came as a relief—a chance to burn off the restless energy building beneath her skin. Camille threw herself into the play with an intensity that surprised even her, weaving through the defense with sharp crossovers and explosive acceleration. She wasn't just playing to win. She was playing to forget, to exhaust the part of her brain that kept circling back to that locker room, to Lou's unexpected honesty, to the way the air between them had crackled with something she couldn't name.
And then she was playing with Lou.
They'd been put on the same line for the final fifteen minutes of practice—Camille at forward, Lou dropping back to defense. The combination shouldn't have worked as seamlessly as it did. They'd barely exchanged words since their conversation, had circled each other with the careful distance of two people pretending nothing had changed.
But on the ice, none of that mattered.
Lou read Camille's movements like she could see into her mind. A pass arrived exactly where Camille needed it, spinning perfectly onto her tape. A defensive screen opened space for Camille to cut through. Everything clicked into a rhythm that felt effortless, instinctive—the kind of chemistry that usually took months to develop happening in real-time.
They scored three goals in minutes. Each one felt like a shared victory, a conversation conducted through stick and puck and ice.
By the time Mara called an end to practice, Camille's legs were shaking and her lungs burned. But she wasgrinning—a real grin, not the camera-ready smile she'd learned to deploy for audiences. For the first time since arriving in Phoenix Ridge, she was a hockey player rather than a celebrity playing hockey.
Most of the team filtered out quickly, eager for showers and rest. Camille lingered, stretching out on the bench while she watched the arena empty. The familiar sounds of a team dispersing filled the space—gear bags zipping, lockers slamming, voices fading down corridors toward the parking lot.
She wasn't sure why she was waiting. Or maybe she was.
Lou was the last one on the ice, running through stick handling drills with the focused intensity Camille was beginning to recognize as her default state. The arena lights caught the sweat on her skin, turning it to silver. Her movements were economical, powerful—nothing wasted, nothing performed for anyone's benefit but her own.
Watching her made something twist in Camille's chest. Something warm and wanting and completely unfamiliar.
Eventually, Lou skated toward the bench. Her eyes found Camille's across the empty arena, held for a beat longer than necessary.
"Still here?"
"Still here." Camille stood, gathering her gear. "Good practice."
