040— THE RETREAT.

Morning arrived too fast.

The driver took me and Elena to the rink where the team bus was waiting — large, white, already half full. 

No Kai. No Niko. No Luka. Just the team and their noise and their bags being loaded and Coach Petrov with his clipboard looking like a man who had organized things for difficult people his whole life and had made peace with it.

Elena was quiet beside me.

Too quiet.

"He'll be here," I said.

She looked at me. "I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

"I was looking at the bus."

"You were looking for a silver Porsche."

She picked up her bag with great dignity and walked toward the bus.

I followed and found a window seat and Elena sat beside me and immediately looked out the window and I looked out mine and we were two people very committedly not talking about the things we weren't talking about.

Mari appeared in the aisle. "Anyone know if Niko's coming separately? He's not answering his—"

"He'll be there," Elena said. Without looking up. Without moving. Like she was choosing to believe it completely.

Mari nodded and moved on.

I gave Elena a side-eye.

She smirked at the window.

                    …

Anya got on the bus, saw me, and sat four rows forward.

I watched her do it. Watched her choose the seat, arrange her bag, start a conversation with Mari — all without once looking in my direction. 

Four rows was a statement. Four rows on a bus that size was a whole paragraph.

I looked out my window.

The drive was an hour and a half through the city and then hills and then trees getting taller and the air changing quality even through the glass. 

Elena fell asleep on my shoulder twenty minutes in. I didn't move. Just sat there with her weight against me and watched the landscape change and thought about nothing with varying degrees of success.

                 …

The building at the mountain was large and old and beautiful. Stone walls. Big windows. A long front drive with trees on both sides dropping the temperature by several degrees.

Everyone piled off the bus in various states of enthusiasm.

Coach started directing people inside. Someone dropped a bag. Someone else argued about room assignments. The general organized chaos of fourteen hockey players arriving somewhere new.

Elena stretched beside me and looked at the building and breathed in the mountain air and something relaxed in her face that I hadn't seen relax in a long time.

I picked up my bag.

She looked at me. "You've been sighing all morning."

"Mountain air is thin."

"You miss him."

"I'm going to leave you here."

"You literally cannot." She looped her arm through mine. "You miss him."

"I don't even — I didn't even — I haven't—" The words tangled. "I don't know what you're—"

A car engine. Close.

We both looked.

Black. Flashy in the way that stopped just short of absurd. 

The windshield rolled down and Niko behind it in sunglasses so dark they were basically decorative with a smirk that suggested he knew exactly how late he was and had timed it precisely.

Elena made a sound that was not a word and ran.

"NIKOOOO—"

He got out of the car and she crashed into him and he caught her like he'd been expecting it and I stood there watching them and felt something warm and something else I pressed down quickly.

I picked up my bag and went inside.

                      

                      …

By evening the mountain had gone gold and cold and the team had settled into whatever rhythm four days away from real life produced — louder, easier, the looseness of people who had temporarily misplaced their daily problems.

I had not misplaced mine.

Anya had managed to be in every room I wasn't in for six hours. Not accidentally. 

I had watched it happen and felt every instance of it land somewhere it hurt and said nothing and smiled at people and ate dinner and told myself fine. Fine. I would fix it. I just needed the right moment.

The right moment hadn't arrived.

I went outside.

Just air. Just the dark and the cold and the sound of trees doing whatever trees did at this altitude. 

The team noise was muffled behind the walls and I stood on the grass a little way from the building and breathed.

I looked at the mountain ridge against the sky and told myself to stop thinking about his eyes in the doorway.

His voice. *You taste good.*

I screamed.

Not a small scream. It came from the bottom of the lungs, that scraped on the way up, that I aimed at the mountain and the dark and nobody in particular. The kind that cleared something.

It cleared approximately nothing.

I stood there breathing.

The mountain answered with silence.

Cold air burned the back of my throat. Somewhere behind the lodge someone laughed, muffled by the trees, and the sound felt impossibly far away from me.

"Rough day?"

I spun around.

A figure. 

Coming out of the dark from the treeline, hands in pockets, moving with the easy unhurried walk of someone who had been out here a while and wasn't concerned about being caught.

The light from the building caught his face as he got closer.

My mouth opened. The human from the hockey party.

"Daniel?"