3AM KITCHEN

[ Scarlett POV ]

The problem with a new place is that it never belongs to you at 3am. Everything is fractionally wrong, the wrong quality of dark through the wrong curtains, the refrigerator hum at the wrong pitch, the floor creaking under your feet in the wrong sequence of boards. My body knew it wasn't home. My body kept waking up to inform me of this fact with great urgency every forty minutes, as though I might have forgotten in the interval.

I'd been awake since one. I'd read three chapters of a book I'd borrowed from Jade before the move, retaining none of it. I'd checked my phone. I'd done the breathing exercise a sports psych consultant had given me two years ago that worked approximately forty percent of the time. I'd stared at the ceiling long enough to trace the hairline crack in the plaster from the light fixture to the far corner and back.

At 3:17am I gave up and went downstairs.

He was already there.

Standing at the kitchen counter in a grey t-shirt and shorts, bowl in one hand, eating cereal with the unhurried authority of someone who owned this space entirely, which he did, technically, or at least more than I did. His hair was messed up in the way of someone who had been genuinely asleep and then wasn't. No jacket. No careful posture. No jaw set at the particular angle I'd already come to recognise as his default expression during daylight hours. Just a person in a kitchen at an unreasonable hour, eating cereal.

He looked up when I came through the door. Neither of us said anything.

I crossed to the sink, got a glass, filled it at the tap, and took up a position on the opposite side of the kitchen. Six feet between us, which felt like the appropriate diplomatic distance for two people who were professionally obligated to maintain friction and were currently both in their socks.

He kept eating. I drank my water. The refrigerator hummed. Outside, wind moved something against the siding, irregular, soft, not quite enough to place.

I counted eleven seconds of silence. Then twelve. I was about to go back upstairs.

"What do you listen to?"

He said it without looking up. Just to his cereal, or the middle distance past it.

"What?" I said.

"When you skate." He turned the bowl slightly in his hand, adjusting his grip. Still not looking at me. "I saw you in the parking lot yesterday evening, before the late session. You had headphones in. I was curious what it was."

I looked at him. Tried to find the angle in it, the tactical purpose, the way this could be used as something, and came up empty. It was just a question. The most ordinary question anyone had asked me since I'd arrived on this campus.

"Depends on what I'm working on, " I said. "Footwork drills, I want something fast. High tempo, no lyrics, words interfere with decision processing, I lose half a second on my reads if I'm tracking language at the same time. If it's conditioning, anything that keeps the pace up. Late ice, when I'm not drilling, when I'm just, " I stopped.

He looked up then. Just briefly.

"My dad had this playlist, " I said. "Old stuff. Seventies, mostly. He used to put it on when he drove me to early practice, five in the morning, both of us half asleep. I took it after he died." I hadn't planned to say that last part. "I don't listen to it very often."

He was quiet for a moment. He didn't offer condolences. I was grateful for that, condolences at 3am from someone I'd known for five days would have been worse than silence.

"What position did he play?" he said.

"Left wing. Never made it past the minors. He was good enough, I think. Just, " I turned my glass in my hands. "Bad timing. Wrong team at the wrong year."

Cade nodded. Once, short. Like he understood something about that without needing it explained further.

Then he finished his cereal, rinsed the bowl in the sink, set it in the drying rack. "Get some sleep, " he said, not unkindly. And walked back down the hall to his room.

Not goodnight. Just that. I didn't offer anything back either, because it felt like the right register, not warm, not cold, just two people existing in the same space at an hour when all the performance had burned off.

I stood in the kitchen for another ten minutes. Drank the rest of my water. Washed my glass and set it next to his bowl in the drying rack without really deciding to.

The kitchen felt different after he left. Not colder, just quieter in a specific way that had his absence in it rather than the neutral quiet of an empty room. I noticed that and filed it away in the category of things I was not going to examine closely. It was 3am. Everything felt more significant at 3am. That was a documented phenomenon. That was all this was.

***

I thought about the question the whole way back upstairs. Not because it was significant. Because it was specific, he'd asked something specific, something that had nothing to do with hockey or the team or whether I belonged here. And I couldn't figure out what to do with a question like that from a man like him, so I lay in the dark and turned it over until I finally, finally fell asleep.