“Tell that to me again when you’ve got a thousand in the box.”
“You’d know,” she shot back, lips twitching.
I couldn’t help it—laughed once, short and real. The sound startled both of us.
Her answers came fast and clean, like snapshots from a mind that never stopped processing the game. I kept the pace, leaning forward every time she nailed another one, tossing in deeper cuts just to see if she’d slip. She hardly missed.
My pulse kept time with the rhythm of her replies.
“Damn,” I muttered after the tenth straight right answer. “You study like you skate.”
“Obsessively?”
“Efficiently.”
Color climbed her neck. She shuffled the pages, pretending to read. I could tell she’d memorized every word already.
I leaned back, chair pitching again. “So what do you win then? Ten out of eleven’s not bad.”
She tilted her head. “You tell me.”
“What do you want? More ice time?”
“What if I already earned that?”
The confidence in her tone caught me off guard. She wasn’t teasing. She believed it. I did too.
“Then name something else.”
The room breathed but neither of us did. The radiator hissed. Outside, someone laughed down the hall. Inside, there was only that small circle of space between us that felt heavier than anything I’d carried off the ice.
Her fingers rested on the open notebook, tapping once, twice, like maybe an answer was written there.
But she didn’t speak.
And I didn’t push.
The silence spread, thick and alive. Louder than any word she could’ve said.
I could still feel it against my skin when I finally forced a breath. I looked down. The notebook on her knees wasn’t about line changes or Gretzky trivia — the header readHuman Anatomy.
Of course it did. I could feel the shift before she even lifted her eyes.
“I’m sure there are a few things you can teach me about that.”
The words hung there, half-tease, half-challenge. She knew exactly what she was doing. Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe it was just honesty blinking through the wreck.
My palm flattened over the notebook, the edge biting my skin. Diagrams stared up at me: tendons, sinew, bones fitting together clean, uncomplicated. Nothing about this was clean.
“Billie—” It came out rough, nearer to a warning than I meant.
She leaned in anyway, heartbeat almost audible in the narrow room. Eyes steady. I could smell her shampoo, remember winter air on her breath.
I slid the notebook back across the bed, words catching behind my teeth. “Anatomy’s for someone your own age to teach.”
A twitch at the corner of her mouth. Not anger. Understanding. Maybe victory.
She reached for the book, knuckles brushing mine. And neither of us moved.
