Normal like Luka, who came inside her with the ease of a man whose body operates without interference. Normal like Maddox, whose quiet, uncomplicated strength translates to the bedroom with the same reliability it translates to the ice. Normal like Renzo, whose Playboy confidence is backed by a biology that delivers on every promise the charm makes.
But I’m not normal. I’m the rare, hyper-stimulating, double-testosterone, needs-pharmaceutical-management Alpha who can’t trust his own body in the presence of an Omega he wants, because the wanting has a tendency to override the deciding, and the line between desire and danger gets thin enough to disappear.
That’s the truth I’ve been hiding behind the sulking and the closed doors and the composure that everyone interprets as natural when it’s actually the most expensive performance I’ve ever given.
I was heading for the bed when I heard it.
The sound of a blade against ice.
Faint. Filtering through the bedroom window that I’d left cracked open—three inches of November air that I’d been using as a counterbalance to the overheated, pheromone-saturated atmosphere of the house, the cold functioning as a biological palate cleanser that my lungs desperately needed. The sound entered through that gap and crossed the room and reached my ears with the quiet, unmistakable specificity of a frequency I’d been tuned to since childhood.
Steel on frozen water. The clean, singing,shhhof a sharpened edge carving a line through a maintained surface.
I’m hallucinating.
The thought was immediate. Reasonable. Four days without proper sleep, a failed climax, pharmaceutical interference with normal cognitive function—auditory hallucinations were not outside the realm of possibility. The mind, denied the restorative processing that sleep provided, was perfectly capable of generating sensory data from archived material, and the sound of figure skates on ice was data that my memory had stored at the highest priority level because it was associated with the woman whose scent had been making my life a pharmaceutical war zone for ninety-six consecutive hours.
Then I heard it again.
The same sound. Cleaner this time. Closer to the window. Accompanied by a second, softer note—the whisper of wind generated by a body in motion, the displacement of cold air around a figure moving at speed across a frozen surface.
I went to the window.
My feet carried me the six steps from the bed to the casement before my brain had finished debating whether the investigation was advisable, and I braced my hands on the sill and looked down at the backyard rink that I’d maintained for seven years through every season of my life at this house—the rink I’d built with my own hands, resurfaced with my own Zamboni, guarded with the specific, territorial pride of a man whose relationship with ice was the most reliable relationship he’d ever had.
And there she was.
Octavia Moreau. On my ice. In my sweats. Under my moonlight.
The breath left my body in a single, silent, total evacuationthat felt less like an exhale and more like a surrender—the lungs emptying themselves of everything they’d been holding for four days and offering it up to the night air through the cracked window like a confession released through a church screen.
She was skating.
Not training. Not drilling. Not executing the regimented, element-by-element program structure that characterized her professional practice sessions.Skating. The verb stripped to its essence. Free-form. Improvisational. The loose, flowing, no-one-is-watching movement of a body that was doing the thing it loved for no other reason than the doing itself.
Her edges were deep—clean, sustained arcs that carved long, sweeping patterns into the moonlit surface. Back outside. Forward inside. The transitions fluid, effortless, the kind of edge work that didn’t require conscious thought because it had been embedded in the musculature so thoroughly that it was closer to breathing than technique. Her arms moved with the unhurried, expressive freedom of a woman who wasn’t performing for a panel but for herself—open, wide, tracing shapes in the cold air that followed the rhythm of a song only she could hear.
She was wearing Maddox’s shirt and my sweats. The gray fleece pants pooling slightly at her ankles above?—
My skates.
The recognition hit like a puck to the sternum. Full velocity. No warning. The white leather catching the moonlight as she crossed from one end of the rink to the other, the Gold Seal blades flashing silver with each stride, and the boots—her boots, the ones I’d bought for her in Burlington, the ones she’d left on the third shelf of my mudroom five years ago—laced onto her feet with the practiced, specifictension pattern that I’d watched her apply a hundred times and that I would have recognized from orbit.
She found them.
She found the skates I kept. The ones I couldn’t throw away. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t even shift to a different shelf, because changing their position would have been an acknowledgment that she wasn’t coming back for them, and some part of me—the part that had sent Maddox sprinting across campus, the part that had chosen the bedroom above hers, the part that was currently standing at a window at three in the morning with tear-blurred vision and a half-formed knot aching beneath his sweats—that part had never accepted that she was gone.
I bit my lip.
Hard enough to taste copper. The sharp, metallic bloom on my tongue grounding me against the wave of emotion that was cresting through my chest with the force of a thing that had been dammed for five years and was testing the structure for the first time. My eyes stung. Not from the cold—from the specific, pressurized, refusing-to-fall moisture that gathered at the lash line of a man who had not cried since he was nineteen and who was not going to start now, at this window, at this hour, over a woman skating in his sweats on his ice in his skates, looking like a memory he’d been trying to forget and a future he didn’t deserve.
She was beautiful.
Not in the way the word was typically deployed—not the surface-level, aesthetic, she-looks-good assessment that men applied to women they wanted to fuck and immediately forgot. Beautiful in the way that a thing was beautiful when it was doing what it wasmeantto do. When form and function converged into a single expression of purpose. Octavia on the ice was a body in its native element, and the rightnessof it—the elemental, obvious,this-is-where-she-belongsrightness—made the five years I’d spent absent from this view feel like a crime I’d committed against myself.
I turned away from the window.
My breathing was wrong. Shallow, rapid, carrying the elevated rate that the sports psychologist would have identified as an anxiety response and that I was identifying as acowardiceresponse—my nervous system producing the physiological symptoms of a man who was afraid, not of the woman on the ice, but of what going to her would require.
