Chapter 2 - Still Waters

The apartment door clicks shut behind her, and Mia exhales for what feels like the first time all day.

Lemon cleaner, fresh wood, afternoon light pooling across pale oak floors—clean, quiet, nothing like the chaos she'd been bracing for.

Then her gaze lands on the suitcase wheel, bent at a grotesque angle, the metal axle fully exposed. She crouches down and prods it with two fingers.

Hopeless.

The front door opens.

A girl backs through the entrance carrying a tower of textbooks and a coffee cup balanced on top, blonde ponytail swinging. She freezes when she spots Mia, and the coffee sloshes dark across her sleeve that she doesn't even notice.

"Oh my God, you must be my new roommate!" She dumps the books on the entryway shelf and spins around, bright-eyed and completely unfiltered. "I'm Ellie Carter. Comm School. So happy you're finally here."

"Mia Conti." She stands, smiling despite herself. "Medical exchange student. Nice to meet you, Ellie."

Ellie's eyes land on the broken suitcase. "What happened to that?"

Before Mia can answer, she's already crouching beside it, tilting the case, examining the axle. "Okay. This is bad. Repair shop or just replace it?"

"I was thinking repair shop—"

"Okay." Ellie is already heading to the kitchen, pulling open drawers. "My dad's a mechanical engineer. I grew up in his garage. Give me ten minutes."

She reappears with a multi-tool kit and drops to one knee, working fast and clean.

"Campus tour this weekend?" she asks, not looking up. "I can show you around before orientation Monday."

"I'd love that." Mia watches her work, genuinely impressed. "You're incredibly capable, you know that?"

Ellie grins. "Years of trauma and a very hands-on dad."

Mia's eyes catch the red wristband on Ellie's wrist—Raiders printed clearly across it. "You're a hockey fan?"

"I work at a bar called The Blade. Raiders players come in after games." Ellie twists the band with a casual shrug.

"Honestly, the rules still confuse me. But Elias Weston?" She lets out a low whistle. "I don't need to understand the rules for that."

Mia hesitates. "Funny timing—I'm starting a placement at the Raiders' medical center in October. Injury monitoring, muscle recovery. Short rotation, but still."

The screwdriver hits the floor.

Ellie stares at her. Fully. Completely. "The Toronto Raiders."

"Just an internship—"

"Mia." Ellie grabs her arm with both hands.

"They won the Cup last year and this entire city lost its mind. Their arena is downtown. People sleep outside for playoff tickets."

She stops. Breathes. Then, "I will be the most supportive roommate you have ever had."

Mia laughs—a real one, surprised out of her.

Ellie beams, picks up her screwdriver, and clicks the new wheel into place. One firm press. Done.

"Good as new."

The apartment tour is quick and warm.

Ellie saves Mia's bedroom for last, pushing the door open so afternoon light spills across a single bed, a writing desk, and a window framing a maple tree just beginning to turn orange at the edges.

"Perfect," Mia says quietly. And means it.

Outside, Toronto's skyline burns gold in the early evening. Nothing like home.

Ellie appears with two mugs. "Green or black?"

"Green, please."

"Excellent." She sets the mug on the desk and leans against the doorframe, voice gentler now. "It hits weird at first—being this far from home. Took me two weeks in Montreal before I stopped feeling like a tourist in my own life."

Mia wraps both hands around the warm mug. "How'd you get past it?"

Ellie raises her cup with a small smile. "Found someone to drink tea with." A beat. "Welcome to Toronto, Mia."

Ellie leaves for her shift an hour later, pressing a spare key into Mia's palm on her way out.

The apartment settles into evening quiet.

Mia showers, unpacks the last of her things, and opens her laptop to review Monday's orientation schedule.

She should be focused on the itinerary. She is, mostly. But her mind keeps drifting sideways—back to the escalator, the suitcase wheel locking, and a hand appearing at her shoulder. She hadn't even seen his face at first. Just the breadth of his shoulders, the Raiders logo on the equipment bag, and then those eyes when she turned.

Gray-blue. Like lake water before a storm.

She checks her calendar. October 2—Raiders Medical Center placement begins.

She'd looked it up after unpacking—the Raiders logo on his equipment bag at the airport, her October placement, the connection too neat to leave unexamined. Just professional curiosity. Mostly.

Elias Weston, twenty-six, center, two-time MVP. The face on the screen had stopped her for a moment. That was him—the man from the escalator, composed and certain in a championship photo, looking nothing like someone who spent his spare time helping strangers with broken suitcase wheels.

She closed the tab. Opened it again. Closed it.

So he was one of hers. Or she was one of his, depending on how you looked at it.

She closes the laptop. She is a sports medicine professional. She is here to do a job, and the job happens to involve treating athletes—one of whom she apparently met today without knowing it. It is simply coincidence, and geography, and nothing worth examining further.

The fact that he was unexpectedly good-looking is also not worth examining further.

She turns off the light and tells herself this firmly.

***

Across the city, long before dawn, Elias Weston is already awake.

His internal clock doesn't negotiate. 5 AM, eyes open, no transition.

Outside his apartment windows, Toronto is still ink-dark, the city quiet in a way it never quite manages during daylight.

He drops to the floor and moves through three brutal sets, push-ups until his arms burn, core work until his vision edges white, and doesn't slow down once.

Sweat cuts a path down the defined ridge of his abdomen, disappearing beneath the waistband of his training sweats, the V-lines of his hips catching the faint glow from the hallway.

He showers, pulls on his training jacket, grabs his bag.

At the facility's side entrance, old Jack the security guard gives him the usual approving nod. "First one in again, son."

Elias checks his watch. Still dark enough that it barely counts as morning.

He runs the outdoor track first—not because he has to, but because he needs the biting cold air in his lungs. By the time the massive automated lights blink on above the rink, he's already loosened, already dangerously sharp. He laces his skates methodically, wraps his right knee and his left ankle with heavy elastic support, and steps onto the ice.

The blades catch. Hold. Sing.

Fifty crossover sets. A full shooting sequence. The numbers are flawless, the mechanics machine-like. There is absolutely no reason for his concentration to slip.

But it slips.

In the fraction of a second between releasing the puck and watching it fly, an image surfaces entirely without his permission.

Clang.

The puck hits the iron post. Elias doesn't miss. He never misses a stationary shot.

He slowly lowers his stick, his chest rising and falling in deep, controlled pulls. The echo of the puck rattling against the glass fades, leaving only the sound of his skates carving the ice. He stares at the net, but what he sees is a woman on an escalator.

She turns to look up at him, her expression neither impressed nor flustered, but simply, devastatingly calm.

It's an image that has followed him from the airport right onto his home ice like an unresolved variable. A strange, phantom gravity pulling at the back of his mind.

Elias closes his eyes for a split second, his jaw tightening. He doesn't want to analyze it. He refuses to delve into why a stranger's fleeting gaze feels like a quiet collision he was always meant to have.

He doesn't do this. He has never done this.

He skates forward, aggressively retrieving a new puck. He repositions at the blue line.

She's just a face in a crowd, he tells himself fiercely.

He shoots. Top shelf. Clean and terrifyingly fast.

He lines up another. And another. He works until his temples are soaked dark, a few damp strands of hair sticking to his forehead, punishing his own body to bury the thought. Until the ice beneath him is brutally scarred with the evidence of how hard he's working not to think about it.

"You're genuinely insane."

The sound of skates carving a sharp halt breaks the silence. Lucas Moreno glides to a stop near the face-off circle, leaning heavily on his stick as he stares at Elias like he's looking at a madman.

Elias lines up another puck and doesn't answer.

"Hey," Lucas drops his voice, gliding a few feet closer, entirely unaware of the dangerous mood radiating from his captain. "Heard the new medical rotation starts soon. Some outside specialist. Young. Apparently, she's an absolute prodigy, too—"

Elias's fingers freeze on his stick. The timing. The placement. The sudden, uninvited memory of calm, dark eyes flashing in his mind again.

"Lucas Moreno." Elias's voice is low, carrying a glacial warning that instantly cuts Lucas off.

"I'm just saying—"

"Are you skating today, or are you just here to gossip?"

Lucas raises his hands in surrender, slowly backing away and muttering rapid French under his breath.

Elias turns back to the net. He pulls his stick back and buries the puck top shelf with a violent crack that echoes like a gunshot off the rafters.

He always buries it.

That's the only thing he knows how to do.