Outside the window, the clouds are flat, white, and endless. The team fills the rows around me — noise, headphones, someone's music bleeding through badly fitted earbuds, the specific dense restlessness of twenty athletes in a confined space with nowhere to put their energy.
I feel none of it.
I think about her in the library, the last time I actually saw her. The way she didn't look up when she heard my footsteps. The way she kept her eyes on her screen and her shoulders did that thing — the awareness moving through her before she acknowledged it — that told me she knew it was me before she could have known it was me.
She knows what I sound like approaching.
That's not nothing.
I close the book.
Put it in the seat pocket.
Take it back out.
Silas, without removing his headphones or opening his eyes: "Put the book away, Theo."
I put the book away.
I lean back, close my eyes, and build the game in my head instead — the Denver lineup, their defensive pairings, the left winger who telegraphs his shot with his shoulder, the gap in their penalty kill I identified while watching film from Tuesday.
The Pepsi Center smells like every arena — cold rubber and steel and the sharp clean of freshly resurfaced ice. I stand at theboards during warmups and let it move through me. A body that knows exactly what it's here for, even when the mind has been elsewhere.
On the ice, everything simplifies.
That's why I've always loved it.
I push off hard and find my stride within two laps, the rhythm coming back clean and automatic. My edges are sharp. My shoulder holds. I do a full lap at speed and feel the last of whatever has been sitting in my chest since the library loosen and drop away.
She wasn’t there.
Cody woke up, and the tables have turned.
Beckett skates up beside me on the third lap. We run a passing drill without talking, the puck moving between us in easy rhythm. Back and forth. The kind of repetition that doesn't require thought.
After the fourth exchange, I say, "We need to talk. After."
He catches the pass and sends it back. "We do."
That's all. We separate into the warmup, and I don't look at him again until we're in the locker room.
I look around at everyone’s faces.
Silas is tapping his stick. Owen is quieter than usual, jaw set. Beckett is on the right, standing with his arms crossed and his eyes down. Caleb has his helmet in his lap and is staring at the floor. Isaac is in full gear already, blocker resting on his knee, doing that slow breathing thing he does before every game.
The first years are easy to identify — the ones whose hands aren't quite still, who keep checking their laces, who laugh a half-second too late at something someone says because their nervous system is running slightly ahead of the room.
The veterans don't do any of that.
Beckett, across the room, looks at me.
I nod once.
He nods back.
Whatever the last several weeks have made complicated between us, we are still this. Two people who know how to communicate across a room without words. That doesn't disappear because the wrong girl walked onto campus and shifted everything.
Coach finishes, so I stand.
