My phone buzzed in my pocket. Once, twice, three times in quick rhythm—Hannah’s signature panic Morse code. I pulled it out, thumb shaking a little from the cold.
Well??
Are you alive or kidnapped?
Tell me everything.
Three dots pulsed at the bottom of the screen, like she was still typing, still unable to stop herself from filling every silence I left hanging. A grin tugged at my face before I could stop it. Hannah didn’t do quiet. The girl could talk through a fire alarm if she thought it mattered.
Alive,I started typing, then erased it. Sounded too flat.
Long story. I’ll call after practice
Hit send.
No emojis. No hearts. Just enough to keep her from showing up at my door with emergency pancakes and tequila at ten in the morning.
The message sent, I stared at the faint ghost of my reflection in the cracked screen. Eyes a little puffy, hair a lost cause. I didn’t look like someone who’d just had the kind of night people bragged about. I looked steady. Level. Like I’d stepped out from under a heavy thing and was still relearning how to stand upright.
Hannah’s reply came almost instantly: a string of exclamation marks and a threat disguised as affection.
Fine, but if you ghost me, I’m breaking down your door.
I slipped the phone back into my pocket, warmth from the battery spreading against my thigh. The grin stayed a momentlonger, then faded. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell her. It was that I couldn’t. Not yet. The words for it hadn’t taken shape.
What I’d felt last night—whatever had cracked open inside me—didn’t fit into Hannah’s kind of language. She’d want names, details, a rating out of ten like it was a bad rom-com. This wasn’t that. It wasn’t anything I knew how to fold into speech without it shrinking in the process.
The street turned toward the rink, the air sharper here, cleaner. Down the block the Crestwood logo flashed against the glass doors, bright and unforgiving in morning light. I pulled my hood tighter and walked faster, pocketed hands brushing against the outline of my phone, three unread messages beneath my reply.
I’d call her later—after the ice, after the noise, after I figured out what part of me I’d left behind in that bedroom.
The door stuck halfway before giving, same as it always did. My shoulder hit it with a thud, and I stumbled into the tiny space that somehow passed as my dorm room. Familiar mess everywhere—hoodies in a heap, two pairs of skates leaning like arguments against the wall, textbooks open to pages I never finished. It smelled faintly of laundry detergent and coffee gone stale.
I dropped my bag by the bed and stood there for a second, just breathing. The room looked exactly the same, but everything felt tilted, as if the floor had shifted when I wasn’t looking. I should’ve slept, should’ve cleaned, should’ve done anything normal. Instead, I untied my boots and kicked them off, then started pulling together my gear.
No shower. No pause. The idea of steam and closed doors felt too heavy, too quiet. Movement was better. Cold laces between fingers, the scrape of Velcro, the loud zipper of my gear bag—it grounded me.
A notebook slid from the table when I brushed past, landing face-down on the floor. Nate’s handwriting on the cover in one corner—shooting stats.I stared at it too long before shoving it under the bed with my foot. The sound it made disappeared under the next one: my stick clattering against the desk. I cursed low under my breath and tried not to look at the dent in the wall behind it, the one from the night we broke up for the first time.
I grabbed my Crestwood hoodie from the back of the chair. The logo cracked down the middle from too many washes. I used to think it made me look like a wannabe. Now it looked earned.
The mirror caught me as I passed. Not much to see—a pale face, hair tangled, last night’s mascara like a bruise under one eye. But the eyes themselves stopped me cold. Same color, same shape, but brighter somehow. Like someone finally flipped a switch behind them.
The sight pulled a quiet breath out of me. It wasn’t joy exactly. More like relief threaded with disbelief.
“You’re still here,” I muttered. My voice came rough, half a laugh, half a dare.
I tied my hair up, pulling it tight until my scalp tingled. A small ritual before every game, like armor. My hands shook when I picked up my gloves, not from nerves but from the energy building under my skin.
There’d been so many months where I felt like I was running after Nate’s shadow—press events, team dinners, pretending to smile while he soaked up spotlight. The game had become something I talked about, not something I lived. But now, standing in front of my own reflection, smelling of sweat and motel soap, I felt the edge of that old fire stirring again.
The memory of last night tried to push back in—the dim light, the weight of his hand, the stillness after—but I let it pass. What mattered wasn’t what happened. It was what it woke.
I slung the strap of my gear bag over one shoulder. The weight landed solid against my back, familiar, honest. The kind that didn’t lie about what it demanded from you.
When I reached the door, my fingers hovered on the handle. The room looked smaller now, like it couldn’t contain the version of me standing there. My pulse beat fast, quick little sparks of something that felt suspiciously like excitement.
Practice. New team. New coach. Calder Shaw. Whoever he turned out to be, I’d meet him on my feet, not behind someone else’s shadow.
