Again.
And again.
I lost track of how many times. I stopped counting attempts the way you stop counting when the number stops being useful information. I was sweating through my training jacket, my hair damp at the temples, the cold air burning in my lungs in a way that felt correct, at least.
At some point I registered that the stands were empty. Derek had gone without my noticing, slipped out as suddenly as he had appeared.
In his absence, Avery had materialized on the bench.
He was sitting with his elbows on his knees and a water bottle in his hand, watching me with the patient expression of someone who had been there long enough to have formed an opinion but was waiting to be asked for it. He held the water bottle out when I skated up to the boards.
I sat down. Pulled off a glove and took the water. My hands were shaking slightly, the fine tremor of overworked muscles, and I tucked the glove between my knee and the boards so he wouldn’t see it.
“How are you feeling, Théo?”
I drank. Let the cold settle in my chest. “Rusty. But taking four months off will do that.”
“You’re being hard on yourself.”
“I’m being accurate.” I looked out at the ice. The marks I’d left in it—the spray patterns of bad landings, the evidence of the morning written into the surface. “The triple should be automatic. It’s been automatic since I was 14.”
“You haven’t skated in months.”
“I literally just said that.”
Avery absorbed my tone without reacting to it, which was either patience or wisdom or both. He had gotten better at that lately. The Avery I remembered from childhood would have pushed back, would have turned it into an argument out of sheer reflex. Something about maturity and distance had sanded certain edges down.
“There’s no rush,” he said.
I looked at him. “I’m 21, Avery. If I don’t get back into shape—actual shape, competition shape—this is it. This is where it ends.” I turned the water bottle in my hands. “The Olympic qualification window doesn’t care about my timeline.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“You could call Coach Miller,” he said.
I didn’t answer.
“Théo.”
“I heard you.”
“He’s good. He’s not going to—he’s not Renaud. He’s not going to push you the way—”
“I said I heard you.”
The ice was quiet around us. From somewhere deeper in the facility came the distant sound of the building beginning to wake up—equipment being moved, voices down a corridor.
I looked at the marks I’d left in the surface. The evidence of the morning, written in ice.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
Avery looked at me for a long moment with those dark eyes that were the same as mine and saw things I preferred they didn’t.
“Okay,” he said finally. “You want to get breakfast?”
I looked down at my skates. The familiar weight of them on my feet. It felt both normal and strange.
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”
