Derek ate the way he did most things—easy, unhurried. He told me about the road trip. Detroit, which he described with a specific, cheerful contempt that suggested a long institutional history between the Frost and the Vipers. They’d still won—tight, grinding, the kind of road win you earned with bruises and patience.
He complained about a bad call in the third that cost them a power play. About Petrov getting into it with a Detroit defenseman after a hit Derek called “objectively dirty,” which somehow still ended in offsetting penalties.
I found myself hanging onto his every word.
It wasn’t the hockey. I couldn’t have cared less about the hockey. It was his voice—a warm rumble, with that slight morning rasp still clinging to the edges. The kind of voice youcould fall asleep to. Or wake up to. Or just sit in a sun drenched kitchen and listen to while pretending you cared about power play opportunities.
Avery constantly jabbered because silence made him uncomfortable. I could hardly recall a single thing he had told me about his team in the last few weeks. But Derek made me want to lean in.
I realized I had been quiet for too long.
“How’s the training going?” he asked, in the careful tone of someone who had been waiting for a gap in the conversation to ask.
I took a sip of coffee. “Fine.”
“Yeah?”
“Getting back into the rhythm of it.”
He looked at me over his sandwich with those honest, earnest eyes. He had a piece of egg on his lower lip that he hadn’t noticed yet. I looked away.
“The triple was giving you trouble the other morning,” he said. Not judgmental. Just—he had been watching, apparently, more closely than I had registered.
I felt my spine stiffen. “It’s a calibration issue. It’ll resolve.”
“Sure.” A beat. “What kind of triple is it? Axel?”
“What do you know about triples?” The words came out sharp. Sharper than I intended, maybe. Or maybe I didn’t need hockey players weighing in on my technique.
He didn’t flinch or back down, just responded in that earnest Derek way of his. “I know a triple axel is three and a half rotations and the only jump that takes off from a forward edge. I’ve been researching it.”
“Congratulations, you can Google. You and every backseat figure skating judge.”
“YouTube, actually. There’s a channel—this former skater who does technical analysis.” He picked up his coffee,unbothered by my tone. “He went through all the jump classifications. Axel, lutz, flip, loop, toe loop, salchow.” He said the last one carefully, like he had rehearsed the pronunciation. “The quad axel is the hardest because of the forward takeoff. More rotations to fit into less air time.”
I stared at him.
He knew the jump classifications. He knew about forward takeoffs. He’d watched technical analysis videos—plural—about a sport that had nothing to do with his career, his team, or his life.
I set my cup down harder than necessary. “Derek.”
“Hmm?”
“You looked up figure skating jump classifications? For fun?”
“I was curious.” He shrugged, like this was normal. Like he hadn’t just admitted to researching my entire sport because—what? He’d watched me skate a few times? “You landed a quad in competition. I wanted to understand what I was actually watching.”
I opened my mouth to say something cutting—something about hockey players and their limited understanding of actual skating, something about how watching a YouTube video didn’t make him an expert—but the words died in my throat.
He wasn’t being condescending. He wasn’t trying to coach me or fix me or prove something. He had just... wanted to understand. Like it mattered to him.
I didn’t know what to do with that.
“What does a hockey player know about edge work anyway?” I said finally. Still dry but the venom had leaked out of it somewhere.
He pointed at me with his mug. “Actually, that part I do know. I’ve been skating since I was four. Edges are edges.”
“Figure skating edges are not hockey edges.”
