Dean didn’t seem interested in containing anything.
He attacked the ice. Every movement looked larger than necessary, as though he had never learned the instinct to make himself smaller for other people’s comfort.
That was what caught me. Or at least, that was what I told myself afterward.
The truth was harder to pin down.
I remembered the way he grinned after a landing. The way heshoved damp hair off his forehead. How he laughed at something one of his teammates shouted from the boards.
Tiny, meaningless details, the sort of things I had absolutely no reason to notice, yet somehow I still remembered them.
“You’re staring.” Mila’s voice had drifted through my thoughts.
“I am not.”
“Oh, but you are.”
I hadn’t answered, mostly because I was no longer entirely certain she was wrong.
Dean skated like the ice belonged to him.
Watching him had felt dangerous.
At the time, I refused to examine the reason too closely. I only knew that my pulse didn’t behave around him. I noticed things I shouldn’t have, like the shape of his mouth when he laughed, the flex of muscle beneath a training shirt. The warmth that settled low in my stomach whenever he wandered too close.
I’d treated all of it like a problem to be solved.
That should have told me something.
Now, standing in Milan less than a year later, I understood the danger. It had never been about curiosity, or admiration, or even desire on its own. What unsettled me was how quickly my attention became invested in him. How easily he occupied space in my thoughts. How often I’d found myself looking for him before I was even aware of doing it.
That hadn’t felt safe then, and it felt worse now.
Dean turned into a jump and landed cleanly before flowing straight into the next sequence without losing momentum. His body absorbed impact differently than mine did. Even his mistakes looked temporary instead of catastrophic.
He missed the edge on a turn and laughed under his breath as he corrected it.
Mila slowed beside me. “You remember him.”
“Yes.”
An inadequate answer, concealing months of denial. It was like describing a blizzard as weather.
Dean accelerated again, carving across center ice with enough force that spray lifted behind his blades. He skated aggressively without ever looking tense, and the contrast between us unsettled me more than I wanted to examine closely.
Stop staring at him.
Another jump. Another clean landing.
Then Dean glanced toward the boards and our eyes met across the rink.
My next breath stalled in my throat.
For one suspended second the noise of the arena seemed to recede beneath the sharp awareness locking through my body. I saw recognition register in his expression before curiosity followed close behind it, focused enough that heat flared in my chest.
I broke eye contact first.
I drove into the next edge and gathered speed, letting the familiar rhythm of movement take over while my pulse hammered. The instinct to regain control arrived immediately—faster edges, sharper turns, cleaner lines—because movement had always been the quickest way to force my thoughts back into order.
