“You can’t possibly be thinking of joining me.”
I shrugged.
A deliberate, unhurried, full-shouldered shrug that communicated precisely the level of casual indifference I did not feel but was choosing to project, because the last thing this woman needed right now was the full, unfiltered intensity of my investment. That would scare her off faster than a slap shot to the five-hole.
“I have time.”
Her frown deepened—which I hadn’t thought anatomically possible given its already considerable depth—and her arms tightened across her chest. The posture was defensive, but the direction of her body hadn’t changed. She was still facing me. Stillhere. In the language of Octavia Moreau, remaining in the conversation was its own form of permission.
“You can’t join as my partner and then bail if we actually qualify.” Her voice was firm. Prosecutorial. The tone of a woman who had been abandoned by enough people to have developed a contractual approach to trust. “Plus—aren’t you here for the hockey team?”
I shook my head. Slowly. Let the motion carry its own weight before I filled it with words.
“I’m here to assist. A substitute. The Ironcrest line has their golden boy between the posts already—their starting goaltender’s been locked in since preseason. I’m depth. Insurance. The body they put in the crease if the starter takes a puck to the mask and needs to sit a period.” I kept my voice level. Matter-of-fact. Stripped of any self-pity that might dilute the practicality of what I was offering. “They’re not going to need me for every game. Not even most games. My schedule has gaps the size of canyons, and I’d rather fill them with this than with the soul-crushing monotony of solo drills in an empty rink while the starting goalie gets all the meaningful ice time.”
I let that settle.
“Also,” I added, pulling the next piece of information from the mental file I’d assembled at three in the morning while unable to sleep for reasons I was choosing not to examine too closely, “I already checked the competition regulations. IOF Rule 7.4.2—multi-discipline participation. Athletes may compete in more than one Winter Games discipline provided there is no scheduling conflict between events. Figure skating programs are held during daytime and afternoon blocks. Hockey matches are scheduled in evening and nighttime windows. No overlap.”
Her eyebrows rose. Not in surprise—in the specific, slightly horrified recognition of a woman realizing that the man in front of her had done the administrative homework before the sun was fully up.
“That’ll be strenuous on you,” she said. “Two disciplines. Two training regimens. Two completely different physical demand profiles—goaltending is about lateral explosivenessand reaction speed, figure skating is about endurance and rotational control. You’re asking your body to maintain two contradictory athletic vocabularies simultaneously. That’s not ambitious, Petrov—that’s reckless.”
Petrov. Still Petrov. Not Luka. The surname as a fortress wall, and I’m on the wrong side of it.
I shrugged again. “We won’t know until we try, right?”
I could see the argument forming behind her eyes. The objections stacking like blocks—logistical, physical, emotional—each one valid, each one reasonable, each one a brick in the wall she was building between herself and the possibility that someone might actually show up for her and mean it.
But the mathematics were brutally simple, and we both knew it. Angelo Reyes was not walking through that door. The audition was in less than two hours. And the only person currently offering to fill the empty space on the ice beside her was a goaltender with an obsessive attention to detail, a working knowledge of her program, and a five-year debt of abandoned trust he was desperate to begin repaying.
She sighed. The exhale was long, pressurized, carrying the specific frequency of a woman whose pragmatism had just defeated her pride in a battle that neither side had enjoyed.
“Fine.” The word landed like a gavel. “Let’s run the routine once and see how you hold up. You’ve got the program down?”
“I’ve got it.”
She tilted her head. “Don’t you want to walk through it at least once before we run it full?”
“Trust me.”
The words left my mouth and hung in the cold airbetween us, and I heard them—heard the audacity of a man who’d forfeited his right to that particular verb asking for it back with the casual confidence of someone requesting a second serving at a table he’d been asked to leave.
Her eyebrow arched. Single. Devastating. The kind of eyebrow architecture that communicated entire dissertations of skepticism without moving a single additional muscle.
“Give me a shot at your trust again,” I said, and the playfulness was gone now. The shrug energy evaporated. What was left was the raw, unarmored version—the man beneath the goalie pads and the smirk and the five years of cowardice that had brought us to this rink at this hour. “Let me try to re-earn it.”
I held her gaze. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t soften it with a grin or dilute it with charm. Let her see the earnestness sitting behind my eyes like a goaltender sitting behind his mask—still, exposed, ready to absorb whatever she launched at him.
She studied me. Three seconds that lasted a geological era.
Then she nodded.
“Let’s try it.”
We trained for an hour and twenty-six minutes.
I know this because I tracked the time the way I tracked game clocks—automatically, perpetually, the ticking metronome running in the background of my awareness while the foreground was consumed entirely by the task of learning a new physical language in real time.
