Page 28 of Knottingley Ever After
Coach Declan himself stalls.
Whatever instruction was loaded behind his teeth visibly loses its footing, and for one rare unguarded second, the most controlled man in the building just looks at me, recalibrating.
Rémi’s eyebrow climbs.
He turns his head, slow and deliberate, and aims the question of it at Jude instead of me, because Rémi has always understood that I am a lost cause and Jude is the better address for sense.
And Jude.
Jude is giving me a look I have been on the receiving end of for the better part of two decades, the one that says he does not understand one single thing I am currently doing, that I am behaving like a lovesick fool in front of the worst possible audience, and that I had better have a reason.
So I give him the other look.
The only one that matters.
It is a look we built somewhere around the fifth grade and have never once had to explain to each other, a whole sealed language compressed into a single steady meeting of the eyes, and it says, plainly, with no room left for debate:trust me.
He holds it. Long, hard, and searching, the captain in him running every angle while the friend in him decides whetherthe friendship is worth the gamble. The rink hangs there in the balance with him, every man waiting, the cold pressing in close.
Then Jude lifts his chin.
That small, certain, authoritative tilt of his that I have watched settle a hundred arguments before they were finished being arguments.
“O’Shea will be on our sector team,” he says, and his voice does not invite a response. “No discussion.”
And that is the gavel coming down.
Nobody says a word. There is no appeal to make, because the captain has spoken, and the captain does not waste breath on things he intends to lose.
The decision registers over the whole rink and sets, hard and final, like water turning to ice.
I look back at her.
Iris is not even trying to hide it now.
The shock is written plain across her flushed, sweat-damp face, her lips parted, her storm-grey eyes finding mine and holding, asking a hundred questions she has too much pride to say aloud.
The swagger has slipped clean off her.
For one unguarded breath, she is just a girl who crossed an ocean alone and got told, on her first brutal day, that she has a team.
I smile at her.
A real one. Not the showroom model.
“Welcome to the team, Pinky.” I let it land, and then I let the grin tip back toward trouble, because I am still me. “Now go shower up for our date.”
CHAPTER 5
Cold Water
~IRIS~
The girls’ locker room at North Star Elite has the specific, museum-quiet stillness of a place nobody uses.
It is enormous, which is the joke of it. Three full walls of cherrywood stalls, brass hooks polished to a shine, a bench that runs the length of the room like a church pew.
Built for a roster of women who do not exist here, maintained on a budget for a ghost, and currently occupied by exactly one damp, unraveling Omega who is, against every plan she made on the plane, beginning to lose it.
