Page 21 of Knottingley Ever After
“We’re short on ice today,” he says. “Figure skating’s running tryout rotations,and they’re at double capacity, so we share thesheet, and we don’t waste a second of it. Sloppy gets you nothing but a shorter session.”
“They forgot one more,” somebody calls from the far knot.
The laughter starts up again, shorter this time, testing the new ice, and a few fingers swing toward my crease, and the snickering threads through the cold looking for a place to land.
I notice who does not join in.
Jude. Santori. The enormous quiet one whose name I still do not have.
All three stand silent through the entire performance, faces unreadable, and the realization arrives slowly and certain, settling into me like a held note. They are not laughing because they are timing it.
They are watching how long the rink lets the joke run, the way you watch how long a man holds a cheap shot before the referee decides who he is.
Declan lets the laughter spend itself.
Then he kills it with eleven words.
“O’Shea is here on special invitation.” A pause, deliberate, a man placing a puck exactly where he wants it. “Which was approved by me.”
The rink goes airless.
My eyes widen behind the cage before I can stop them, and I am abruptly, furiously grateful for the mask all over again, because my face has lost the plot entirely.
Approved by him?
He approved it. He read the regulations, looked at the unbonded, packless, pink-haired catastrophe of me, and signed his name to the bottom of the invitation that dragged me across an ocean, and the question rises up so fast and so loud it nearly knocks me off my edges.
Why.
Why would the man who walked out of my life five years ago without a note, without a call, without so much as a backward glance, the man who left a Declan-shaped hole where my whole future used to stand, why in God’s name would that man reach back across half a decade of silence and personally open this door for me?
I do not have an answer.
I have the opposite of an answer.
And I am not the only one ambushed by the sentence.
The two staff coaches flanking him have gone visibly, satisfyingly still, the clipboard one’s head turning a slow degree toward Declan as though the news has only just reached him too. Whatever Declan approved, he did not appear to consult the men beside him before he approved it.
He does not give any of us a moment to recover.
He simply walks straight into the open space, his own announcement made.
“So you can keep talking,” he says, and the wordtalkingcomes out scrubbed clean of any patience. “You can chirp her, point at her, run your mouths all morning. But I approved her attendance, and I approved the possibility of her being on this roster, and if any one of you has a genuine problem with that, here is your invitation to settle it the only honest way there is. Prove to me on the ice that I made the wrong call.”
He lets that hang.
“Three full game rounds,” he goes on. “Don’t get cocky. Before any of you decides she’s a charity case the building took pity on, get this through your helmets. O’Shea was the only female Omega in her town ever scouted out of it. She is sitting on a full-ride scholarship to this college.” His gaze tracks the bench, unhurried, landing on faces. “A scholarship. Which I’d wager a fair number of you have never had the displeasure of needing, because you either signed up for a decade of debt to be here oryou sweet-talked a trust fund and watched generational money drop fifty grand a year like loose change. She did neither. There is no version of that scholarship that gets handed to a girl, or to an Omega, out of kindness. It gets won. With talent and with brains. So when you find yourselves being douchebags to her, and you will, I want you holding that fact while you do it.”
His eyes come to me then.
Finally.
Green and level and unreadable, finding the slit of my cage across the whole cold length of the rink, and every cell in my body wants to do something with it, flinch or soften or burn, and I refuse all three. I make myself an emotionless plank of wood.
A goalie. A locked door with a person somewhere behind it.
I give him my stance and my focus and not one molecule more, and after a moment, something I cannot read passes behind his face, and he lets me go.
