She pushed it down. She was good at pushing things down. Had spent years perfecting it, packing away every inconvenient attraction and filing it under things that aren't for you. Her mother had taught her that, without ever saying it directly. Discipline. Focus. The quiet, iron-clad expectation that feelings were private and inconvenient and best managed alone. Siennahad absorbed that lesson so thoroughly it was indistinguishable from her own personality now. She didn't even know where the teaching ended and she began.
Elise Moreno could have anyone in this city. She was thirty, beautiful, a professional athlete at the top of her game, funny in a way Sienna only caught after the moment had passed. Half the queer women in Phoenix Ridge probably knew her name.
Sienna was forty-one. She wore rectangular glasses and cut too much kinesiology tape when she was nervous and couldn't take a compliment without blushing like a teenager. She was the team physician. She was supposed to keep distance. She'd built her whole career, her whole life, on keeping distance. And it had worked. For years, it had worked perfectly.
Until this team. Until this woman.
She crossed her arms and dug her fingers into her biceps, pressing the thought back down where it belonged. The arena smelled of cold air and popcorn and the faint chemical sweetness of the ice surface. Below, the players gathered in a final huddle near the bench, gloves touching, helmets low. Elise was at the centre of it, one arm slung around Lou's shoulders, the other around Lex's. Talking to them.
The buzzer sounded. The arena lights dimmed, and the Jumbotron blazed to life with the player introductions. The crowd surged to their feet, a wave of noise that pressed against Sienna's chest.
Helen leaned over. "You're blushing, by the way."
"It's warm in here."
"It's an ice rink."
Sienna said nothing. The Valkyries skated out into the spotlight, red jerseys blazing under white lights, and the crowd erupted.
Her eyes tracked them all, every single player on the ice.
The puck dropped. Ninety minutes of watching Elise Moreno skate, and the problem wasn't going anywhere.
2
ELISE
The first shift was a battle.
Elise won the opening faceoff clean, timing the drop perfectly, sweeping the puck back to Lou before the Toronto centre had finished bending. The Valkyries surged forward, three red jerseys moving up the ice in a tight formation, and the crowd rose with them, twenty thousand voices building into a wall of sound that pressed against the glass and vibrated through the boards.
Elise cut across the blue line and called for the puck. The cold air bit at her cheeks, sharp and clean, and her legs churned underneath her, muscles warm from the pre-game skate. She loved this part. The opening minutes, when the ice was fresh and the energy was pure and everything felt possible. Five years she'd been playing centre for the Valkyries, and the first shift of every game still made her pulse quicken.
The pass from Camille was deflected by a Toronto defender who'd read it a half-second early. The play reversed before Elise could adjust, and she pivoted hard, digging her inside edge into the ice, and back-checked toward her own zone. The burn in her thighs was familiar. Welcome, even. She slotted into herdefensive position and watched Toronto cycle the puck along the boards.
Beside her, Lex Landry was already pressing the puck carrier, quick and aggressive, her skates carving the ice with that explosive first step that made her so dangerous. She stripped the puck loose, kicked it to her stick, and fed it to Camille in a single fluid motion. The arena erupted.
Lex was having one of those games. The kind where everything she touched turned to gold.
Elise watched her partner skate past, all raw power and fearless angles, and the hot knot in her stomach tightened. Lex had scored four goals in the last three matches. The sports media couldn't stop talking about her. Landry's emergence as a franchise centre. A dynamic playmaker who could reshape the PWHL. The future of the Valkyries' offence.
Nobody had written anything like that about Elise in years. Maybe ever. She didn't have a nickname. She didn't have a fan account. She had consistency and a good work ethic and the quiet knowledge that without her, the team's structure would collapse, even if nobody noticed she was holding it up.
Her game was different. Disciplined. Consistent. She was the player coaches trusted in tight situations, the one who did the unglamorous work that didn't make highlight reels but held the structure of a team together. She'd always been proud of that. But pride was a cold comfort when the woman beside her was burning brighter every week.
The whistle blew for an offside and Elise skated to the bench for a line change, her lungs working. Mara was standing behind the boards, arms crossed, her sharp blue eyes tracking the play even during the stoppage. As Lex came off the ice, Mara gave her a nod. Small. Quick. An acknowledgment that could have meant anything.
There it was. She always saw it.
Mara had never been obvious about favouritism. Too smart for that, too controlled. But the ground was shifting. Lex was younger, faster, more explosive. She played with an intensity that lit up stat sheets and sold tickets. And she was dating Mara, which wasn't supposed to matter professionally but was impossible to ignore entirely, even for a coach as disciplined as Mara Ellison.
The thought was unfair, and Elise knew it. Mara evaluated players on performance. If Lex was getting more ice time, it was because Lex was earning it. That was how competition worked. That was how Elise had earned her own place years ago, by being better than the woman in front of her, by showing up every day and proving she deserved the jersey.
She knew that. It didn't help. The fear had roots deeper than hockey, roots that went all the way back to a working-class house in Southern California where her mother worked double shifts and her father rewired strangers' houses and nobody ever said I'm proud of you because there wasn't time and showing love meant showing up. Elise had been showing up for this team for five years. What happened when that stopped being enough?
She sat on the bench, elbows on her knees, and watched Lex skate circles around a Toronto defender. The younger woman's acceleration was absurd, zero to full speed in three strides, and the arena gasped with collective admiration as she deked past a second defender and fired a shot that clanged off the post.
"Close," Frankie said from beside Elise, banging her stick against the boards. "She's having a night."
