“You’re always here early… hence looking terrible.”
He grins and skates off before I can say anything else, which is probably for the best.
Calloway blows the whistle and we run drills - breakouts first, then transition work, then a half-ice scrimmage that gets loud fast. I lose myself in it the way I always do, the way that’s always been the best thing about practice: everything narrows. For forty minutes I forget about scouts or contracts or the faint lag in my left edge. I’m just playing.
It’s only when Calloway calls a water break that I see her.
She’s sitting in the third row of the bleachers, slightly apart from the assistants and the equipment guys who’ve gathered at the far end. Just sitting there, watching. She has a notebook open on her knee but she isn’t writing in it. She’s watching the ice with an expression I can’t quite read from here.
My first thought is that she doesn’t look like a hockey person.
Not because of anything I could articulate. She’s dressed practically enough - dark jacket, hair pulled back. But there’s something in the way she’s sitting, in the stillness of her, that doesn’t match the loud, perpetually-in-motion energy of everyone else in this building.
My second thought is that she’s stunning - pale with pretty features, light hair scraped back under a dark headband. Even from this distance there’s a quality to the way she holds herself, straight-backed and precise, with perfect posture. She’s more like a dancer than a hockey player.
Which is - fine. Noted. Moving on.
Mercer, beside me, has also noticed.
“Who’s that?” he asks, with the subtlety of a man who has never once in his life been subtle.
“Skating coach,” I say.
“Seriously?” He stares up at her. “She doesn’t seem like-”
“She’s a professional figure skater.” I take a long drink of water. “From Sweden. Calloway told me this morning.”
“Huh. And she’s going to coachus?”
“Apparently.”
“Does she even know what hockey is?”
“I’d assume so.”
“But like-”
“Mercer.”
“What?”
I don’t answer, because I don’t have an answer that isn’t only me sayingI don’t like it eitherandyes I’ve already had this exact conversation with myself at 6am.Instead, I watch Calloway skate to the boards and lean over them, talking to one of the assistants, and then he straightens and looks up at the bleachers.
She’s already moving.
She comes down the steps without hurrying, tucking the notebook under her arm, and there’s that stillness again even in motion - unhurried and deliberate. She picks her way down to ice level and Calloway meets her at the gate. They talk quietly. I’m too far away to catch it. I can only hear the low murmur of voices. Calloway nods once or twice and she says something that makes him smile, which is a bigger deal than it seems because Calloway almost never smiles before noon.
“She’s tall,” Ward observes from my other side.
“You’re literally doing play-by-play right now,” I say.
“Just saying.”
She doesn’t look our way. Not once, during the whole conversation with Calloway, does she even glance out at us. She’s listening to Calloway, nodding occasionally, and every few seconds her eyes go back to the ice like it’s the only thing in the building that actually interests her.
I understand that, actually. I don’t want to understand it.
Calloway straightens up and turns to face the ice.
