Then, quieter— “Seriously,” he sighed, not looking at me this time. “I appreciate it.”
We shook hands. I offered a nod. We turned back to the matter at hand—hockey practice.
A whistle blew sharp across the rink.
“All right, kids!” Harris barked suddenly, voice cutting clean through the noise. He clapped his hands once, already turning away. “Line up!”
I stepped back from the boards, giving them space without making a show of it.
The rink swallowed the moment almost instantly. A whistle cracked sharp across the ice. Skates bit hard into the surface. Someone missed a pass and swore under their breath,the word echoing off the glass. Harris barked a correction that no one fully listened to.
I felt it before I turned—Bea’s attention, steady and quiet, sitting between my shoulder blades like something physical. Not heavy. Not intrusive.
She wasn’t watching the ice.
She was watching me. Not the way she had before—sharp, dissecting, pulling things apart to understand them.
This was different. Still. Focused.
Her head tilted just slightly, like she was lining something up in her mind, testing it against what she’d already decided about me and finding it… off.
Her eyes moved once—quick, precise—over my hands, my stance, the way I’d positioned myself without thinking.
Then back to my face.
The sound of a puck hitting the boards cracked between us, loud enough to break the space if either of us had wanted it to.
I held her gaze for half a second longer than necessary. Long enough to feel it shift. Uncomfortable in a way I didn’t have a clean label for.
My attention dropped without permission. Her mouth. The line of her throat disappearing into the collar of her coat. The way her hair had shifted when she’d stepped closer earlier, one side falling just slightly out of place.
I dragged my focus back up immediately.
“Ready?” I asked, already reaching for the empty box before she could answer, giving myself something to do with my hands that wasn’t… that.
I could hear Bobby’s skates cut hard behind me, sharper now, cleaner. Someone chirped at him. He chirped back. Harris snapped something about edge control.
We moved toward the exit without a word, the sound ofthe rink following us—loud, alive, completely uninterested in what had just shifted a few feet away from it.
The door slammed shut behind us, and the cold hit immediately. It cut through everything the rink had softened, biting into skin, dragging breath out sharp and visible.
Bea pulled her coat tighter. No complaint. No commentary. That, more than anything else tonight, caught my attention.
She took a few steps ahead of me, boots crunching over packed snow, then stopped. Turned.
“I don’t get you, Alois.” Her breath curled between us, visible in the cold, her voice cutting through the quiet without needing to be raised.
I didn’t answer right away. Didn’t move. Just watched her.
She huffed a short breath, shaking her head once like that might organize whatever she’d just seen. “You’re—” she started, then stopped, visibly recalibrating mid-thought. “You’re a problem. You know that, right?”
That pulled something close to a smile out of me. “Been told.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly, tracking it. Not missing the shift. Not missing anything.
“But then you do…” She gestured vaguely back toward the rink, frustration threading through the motion. “That.”
I tilted my head. “Buy skates?”