Then another.
Vanessa: Also can you please wear the black jacket, not the navy one. The navy photographs weird under warm light.
I stared at the screen.
Black jacket.
Seats.
Photographs.
A normal message from my normal girlfriend about a normal event in my normal life.
Guilt hit so hard I had to sit down.
Not because Vanessa had sent anything wrong. That made it worse. She wasn’t screaming. She wasn’t accusing me of anything. She was trying to plan a dinner she cared about and probably thought I cared about because I had pretended enough times that I did.
My mouth still felt raw from Declan.
I could still feel the echo of his hand on my neck.
Vanessa wanted me in the black jacket.
I typed, deleted, typed again.
Me: Practice running long. I’ll let you know.
It was cowardly. It was also true. That combination made me hate it more.
Her reply came fast.
Vanessa: Okay. I’ll tell them maybe.
Same words from this morning. Different knife.
I locked my phone and put it facedown.
When I looked up, Declan was watching me from across the ice.
Not obviously. Anyone else would have seen a coach scanning the bench during a water break. I saw the way his attention lingered on my hand, on the phone, on my face. Saw him put pieces together he had no right to want and every reason to understand.
For one second, his control cracked.
It wasn’t visible enough for the room. It was visible enough for me.
His mouth pressed into a hard line. His fingers flexed once around the whistle. Then he turned away and called the next drill like nothing in the world had changed.
I stood too quickly and nearly tripped over my own stick.
The rest of practice became an exercise in not looking.
I failed constantly.
Every time Declan spoke, my body sorted the tone before the words. Instruction. Correction. Warning. Approval. I responded before my brain could argue, and that made panic crawl up the back of my throat because this wasn’t theoretical anymore. The authority wasn’t just something charged and weird happening under the surface. I knew exactly what his hand felt like when it went from coach to man. I knew what happened to me when he stopped asking and started directing.
I knew I would listen.
Not because I was weak. Not because he forced me.
