Chapter 3 — Practice & The First Glance

SKY’S POV

Morning practice was supposed to be the one place that still made sense.

I got there early, the way I always did, lacing up in an empty locker room before the rest of the guys showed up with their coffee and their noise. I liked that hour. Quiet building, nobody around yet, just the hum of the ice machine somewhere behind the walls.

By the time Coach Petrov ran us through rebound drills, that quiet had turned into something else.

I squared up for a wrist shot from the circle. Read the angle right. Tracked it clean the whole way. And still, at the last half-second, a familiar voice in the back of my head asked what if you freeze again — and that was enough. My glove came down a beat late.

The puck slid through my legs, a shot I hadn’t missed since my rookie year. It clacked off the boards behind me loud enough that a couple guys turned their heads.

“You good?” Marchetti called out from the blue line.

“Fine,” I said, and got back into my stance.

I wasn’t. It wasn’t Amira in my head. It wasn’t anything outside me at all. It was the freeze itself, still living somewhere under my skin, whispering that my body might just stop listening to me again, any second, for no reason.

That kind of doubt doesn’t miss one save and let you move on. It sits there, waiting to see if you’ll flinch at the next one too.

I flinched at the next one too.

A high glove shot I usually ate up went in clean. Then a rebound I should have smothered instead of kicking back into traffic.

Three mistakes in twenty minutes, all because some part of me was half a second behind my own instincts, checking first instead of trusting what I already knew.

Petrov skated over. I knew that look. Not angry. Just watching me close, the way he watched guys who were one bad week away from becoming a problem somebody had to deal with.

A couple of the defensemen traded a glance behind him. Quick. Nobody said anything. Nobody had to.

“Head’s somewhere else today,” Petrov said. It wasn’t a question.

“Working through some stuff,” I said, which was as close to true as I planned on getting.

He nodded and skated off toward the other end. I figured that was the end of it.

Then Coach Reyes told me, off to the side, low enough that only I could hear it: “Dr. Frank is going to sit in on practice today. Just observation. Don’t let it throw you.”

It threw me a little anyway.

I looked toward the tunnel and there she was, standing near the boards with a coffee in one hand, studying the ice with the same easy attention she’d had in her office two days before. She wasn’t watching the drills. She was watching me — how I reset between shots, how my shoulders sat, whatever it was underneath all of it that she seemed to be able to read better than the guys who’d played beside me for years.

Our eyes met across the ice.

I braced for it to make things worse. That’s what I expected — one more thing to check, one more pair of eyes expecting me to fail.

It didn’t happen that way.

Something in my chest went quiet instead. Not the good kind of quiet I used to have before all this started. A different kind. Steadier. Like for one second, standing in my crease with her looking back at me, I didn’t have to prove anything to her, because she wasn’t waiting for me to fail. I couldn’t explain it, and I wasn’t ready to trust it either.

I looked away first and reset for the next rep. The next shot came in hard. I caught it clean.

I told myself it was only coincidence.

She watches me like she’s trying to figure me out, I thought, sliding back into my crease. Not like she’s judging me.

I’d spent six years getting watched by scouts and cameras and forty thousand people a night, every one of them waiting to see if I’d fail. I knew what that felt like. This wasn’t that. There was no waiting in the way she looked at me. No scoreboard running behind her eyes. I didn’t know where to put that, and not knowing bothered me more than being judged ever had.

Near the end of practice, I caught Damian Baron up in the executive box, alone, focused on the ice. He wasn’t there for long. He leaned over and said something to Reyes, who’d come up to the glass level to talk to him — I couldn’t hear what, too far off, too much noise from the ice machines and the last few guys still shooting pucks.

Whatever it was, Reyes’s face changed. Just for a second. Something tight around his jaw that hadn’t been there a minute before.

Damian didn’t stay after that. He was gone before I even got off the ice.

I filed it away anyway, the same way I filed away every detail on every shooter I’d ever faced. Habit, maybe. The part of me that’s always paying attention to who’s watching, and why.

The final whistle ended practice, and the guys drifted toward the tunnel. I followed, pulling off my helmet before my skates hit the rubber mats. My legs felt heavier than they should have after an ordinary session. Maybe it was the missed saves.

Maybe it was the feeling that Amira had seen more than I’d wanted anyone to see.

In the locker room after, Marchetti threw a towel at my head, grinning. “So. You and the shrink. She any good?”

“She’s fine,” I said, too fast.

“Relax, man, I’m not saying anything.” He laughed, pulling his jersey over his head. “Just asking if it’s helping.”

“They’re sessions. That’s it.”

“Sure.” He kept grinning. “You’ve said her name twice in ten seconds and I only asked one question.”

I opened my mouth to correct him and realized I couldn’t actually remember if that was true.

“Forget it,” I said, and shoved my skates in my bag harder than I needed to.

That night, lying in bed with the city lights coming through the blinds, I caught myself doing something I hadn’t done in years. Checking the time. Doing the math. Working out how many days it was until Thursday.

I didn’t ask myself why.

I already knew I didn’t want the answer.

Because once I admitted I was looking forward to Thursday, there’d be no pretending she was just another therapist.