Chapter 60: The Ice Slot

Georgia

He’s already gone by the time I get there, but the ice still feels warm.

I show up ten minutes early for my morning session, thermos in hand, still half thinking about Dominic Valentine’s name and the way it wouldn’t let me sleep last night. The letters had scrolled behind my eyelids for hours, refusing to resolve into anything I could file away and forget. I push through the rink doors expecting the usual quiet of an empty building before hours, the particular stillness I’ve come to depend on, the one place where nothing is asked of me except what I ask of myself. Instead I find the lights on, the boards still humming faintly with the sound of a recently run resurfacer, and a gear bag sitting exactly where the boys’ team always drops theirs, half unzipped, a stick leaning against the boards beside it like whoever it belongs to just stepped away for a second.

I know that bag. I’ve walked past it enough times outside the locker room to recognize the faded Rosethorne crest stitched onto the side, slightly frayed at one corner, the stitching starting to give at the edges the way things do when they’re used hard and often.

Puck’s.

I glance around the rink. Empty rows of seats, empty benches, no sign of him anywhere. Just the bag, the stick, and the ice itself, freshly cut in a way that tells me someone was out here running drills not long before I walked in. My pulse picks up before I’ve even decided to be curious, some instinct in me already leaning toward the mystery of it. I skate to the edge of the boards and look down at the surface, and something in my chest tightens at what I see there.

Figures. Tight, deliberate loops carved into the ice, the kind of pattern that comes from someone working through footwork with total focus, not just messing around before practice. They’re precise in a way that surprises me, given everything I know about him being a hockey player and not a figure skater. Whoever cut these lines wasn’t killing time. He was working at something, the same way I work at something every single morning out here, and the realization that he might understand that particular hunger, the private discipline of it, settles into me with an unexpected warmth.

"Hello?" I call out, my voice small against the rafters.

Nothing answers back except the low hum of the overhead lights.

I check the locker room hallway, just in case, but it’s quiet too. No sound of a shower running, no voices, nothing. Whoever cut those figures into the ice is already gone, vanished before I even got here, leaving nothing behind but a bag, a stick, and a surface still holding the shape of wherever he’d been standing.

I don’t know why I do what I do next. I could just go about my own warm-up, run my own drills, ignore the loops entirely and pretend I never noticed them. That would be the sensible thing, the thing that keeps my head clear and my focus where Mollie insists it belongs. Instead I step out onto the ice, lace tight, and glide slowly along the same path his blades carved, following the shape of his figures like I might learn something about him just from the geometry of where he chose to turn.

The ice feels warm.

That’s not possible. Ice doesn’t hold heat, not in an arena kept cold enough to preserve it, but some part of my body swears it feels different here, along this particular stretch of surface, like the memory of him standing here hasn’t fully faded yet. *It’s just adrenaline,* I tell myself. *It doesn’t mean anything.* I keep skating anyway, weaving his tight, careful loops into the start of my own warm-up, letting whatever he left behind fold itself quietly into my own morning. There’s something almost intimate about it, tracing a path someone else carved with such care, as if I’ve been handed a secret without being told what it means.

I don’t examine too closely why that feels important to me. I’ve gotten good, this past week, at not examining certain things too closely, at setting aside the questions that don’t have comfortable answers and trusting that they’ll wait for me.

By the time Coach Ferreira arrives twenty minutes later, I’ve run through my short program twice, and something about starting inside his warmth instead of my usual cold, blank sheet of ice made the whole routine feel looser, more alive, like my body finally had permission to stop overthinking every single element. Even my landings feel different, softer somehow, like I trust the ice to hold me instead of bracing for it to fail. Coach Ferreira watches from the boards, arms crossed, expression unreadable, the way she always looks when she’s deciding whether to be pleased or critical.

"Good," she says, clipped and approving, "keep that."

I skate over to the boards during my water break, reaching for my thermos where I left it earlier, and my fingers brush against something that isn’t the smooth plastic of the bottle. Paper. Folded twice, tucked neatly beneath the base of my water bottle like whoever left it wanted to be sure it wouldn’t blow away or get knocked to the ground by accident.

I pick it up carefully, glancing around the rink again out of habit even though I already know it’s empty. My name isn’t on it, but there’s no one else this could possibly be for. I unfold it slowly, my heart doing something complicated and fast in my chest before I’ve even read a single word, a strange mixture of dread and hope tangling together in a way I don’t have a name for.

The handwriting is unfamiliar, slanted and quick, pressed hard enough into the paper that I can almost feel the shape of each letter under my thumb. Six words, no more.

*You’re better than you think you are. - P.*

I read it once, and my breath catches somewhere in my throat. I read it a second time, slower, letting each word settle before I move to the next. A third time, checking the handwriting again like I might find some hidden detail I missed before, some clue about when he wrote it or how long he stood here deciding whether to leave it at all. I imagine him hesitating, pen hovering, unsure whether six words were too many or not nearly enough, and the thought makes something in my chest ache in a way I don’t want to name.

By the fourth read I stop trying to analyze it and just let myself feel it instead.

Some part of me wants to be angry about it. Six words don’t erase a week of hallway silences, of him walking past me like I’d become furniture, of Liam’s badly delivered excuses standing in for an actual conversation. Six words don’t explain any of it. I feel that anger rise up right alongside the warmth, both of them true at the same time, refusing to cancel each other out the way I want them to. I think of the phrase from that article, *unusual aggression inconsistent with his playing style,* and try to hold it up next to six careful words left where only I’d find them. I don’t know if this is an apology or a distraction or something else I don’t have a name for yet. It doesn’t resolve. It just sits there, next to the warmth, next to the anger, one more thing I can’t make add up.

*Better than I think I am.* After a week of him walking past me in hallways like I’ve become invisible, like whatever happened between us had never happened at all. After Liam’s four useless words and the fastest healed hit I’ve ever witnessed and an article with a name in it that’s been sitting in my chest like a stone since one in the morning. After all of that, here’s this, six words in handwriting I don’t recognize but somehow already know belongs to him, left where only I would find it, timed so precisely that he must have known exactly when I’d arrive. The care in that timing undoes me more than the words themselves.

*He was here. He watched me skate and then he disappeared.*

I fold the note back along its original creases, careful not to smudge the ink, and tuck it into the zippered pocket of my bag where nothing will crush it, where it will stay safe against whatever else this day decides to throw at me.

I don’t let myself smile until I’m sure Coach Ferreira isn’t looking. But I do let myself smile, wide and unguarded, the kind of smile I haven’t let myself wear in longer than I can remember.