“Can I-” I gesture.
He nods.
I put my hand on his left hip, the same correction as before, but slower this time, deliberate. No audience, no point being made.
He doesn’t go rigid.
He leans into it - just a fraction, enough weight shifting toward my hand that I feel it through my palm - and I keep my voice completely even and say “there, that position, do you feel the difference?” and he says “yes” in a voice that’s gruffer than his normal voice. I take my hand away.
“Run the sequence.”
He does.
It’s better. Noticeably, genuinely better, and I watch it with the part of my brain that’s always purely technical. That part is satisfied with the progress.
“Good,” I say. “Again.”
We work through different elements and the session has a quality I haven’t felt with him before. He’s almost collaborative. He asks a question at one point, a real one, about weight distribution on the backward crossover, and I answer it properly and he listens properly. We run it and he gets it faster than I expected. I tell him so.
“Don’t sound so surprised,” he says, the corner of his mouth going up in the start of a smile - and I look back at the ice before my face does anything I don’t intend.
“One more. Full sequence. Your pace this time, not mine.”
He pushes off.
I watch him - the technique is cleaner than it was an hour ago. He can do this. I let myself watch him because there’s no-one here to see me do it.
The way he moves when he’s not fighting it. The line of his shoulders, the grace that’s been there underneath the force the whole time, starting to come through now that he’s stopped burying it.
I write something in my notebook and don’t examine why my handwriting is less neat than usual.
MATEO
An hour and fifteen minutes and I don’t hate it.
That’s the thing I’m sitting with as I tape my stick in the locker room afterward, alone, everyone else long gone. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t hate any of it - the slowness of it, the repetition, the way she moved around me with that precise economy andput her hands where they needed to go without making anything of it, and I didn’t resist it.
That’s new.
The crossover sequence is sitting differently in my body now. I can still feel it - the memory of the right position, the way it clicked into place when I stopped adding force and just found it. She saidefficientlike it was simple and obvious and the annoying thing is that on the ice it was. Simple and obvious and right there waiting for me to stop getting in the way of it.
I press the tape down and stare at the blade.
I’m trying not to think about Jake Skelly.
I’ve been carrying it around since after that game like something stuck in my skate. I want to say something about it but I can’t say anything without looking unhinged. So they chatted. I think they swapped numbers but that could be about anything - they’re both coaches. Yeah, I don’t think she should be flirting with the opposition, but I stayed quiet about it mainly because I don’t want her to know I noticed it. Noticed her. It would mean admitting I was looking.
So I say nothing.
I said nothing during the whole session and I’ll keep saying nothing and it’ll stop bothering me eventually because it has to. I have a team to captain and scouts to worry about. We have another game on Friday and that needs my full attention.
I stand up and grab my bag.
She was right about the crossovers.
That’s the only thing I’m taking out of this morning.
That’s it.
