Chapter Two: Things I'm Not Supposed to Notice

Kai's POV

The locker room empties out slow, guys peeling off in twos and threes toward the parking lot, and I take my time because I don't actually want to go back to my dorm yet. My roommate's the kind of guy who asks a hundred questions before you've even got your shoes off, and tonight I don't have answers for any of them.

I sit on the bench and unlace my skates and replay the practice in my head, every drill, every rep, cataloguing what I did right and what I need to fix, because that's the only way I know how to survive a place like this. You don't get to relax. You don't get to coast. Every single day here is an audition for the privilege of staying.

"You're still here."

I look up. Whitemore's standing by the doorway, gear bag over his shoulder, hair still damp from the showers. He looks different out of his Captain voice, quieter, like someone took the volume down on him.

"Yeah." I go back to my laces. "Figured I'd let the crowd thin out."

"Smart." He doesn't leave. I can feel him standing there, can feel the weight of him not leaving, and it makes the back of my neck prickle. "You played well today."

"You don't have to say that."

"I'm not saying it because I have to."

I look up again. He's watching me with an expression I genuinely cannot read, something careful, something that looks almost like he's deciding whether to say more. For a second the room feels very small and very quiet, just the drip of the vent above my old locker and the hum of the lights.

"Whitemore." Some other guy's voice, calling from the hallway. "Bridget's looking for you. Says you were supposed to walk her to the car."

Something shifts across his face, fast, there and gone. "Yeah. Coming."

He goes. I sit there for a second longer, lacing my shoes back up slower than I need to, telling myself the tightness in my chest is just nerves about being new, just the pressure of trying to prove myself, nothing else, definitely nothing else.

I find out things about Liam Whitemore the way you find out things about anyone here, which is to say everyone talks about him constantly and almost none of it tells you anything real.

His dad played Pro. Won a championship. Liam's supposed to be even better, supposed to break records, supposed to be the kind of player schools build entire programs around. He's dating Bridget Calloway, head of the cheer squad, the kind of girl who looks like she was built in a lab to be exactly what everyone expects a hockey Captain's girlfriend to look like. He's got the grades, the scholarship offers already lining up even though he's only a senior, the easy laugh, the perfect everything.

He's also, I'm starting to notice, very good at disappearing in plain sight.

I see it the next morning at breakfast, across the cafeteria. Bridget's got her hand on his arm, laughing at something, and he's smiling back at her, and it's a good smile, a real-looking smile, except his eyes aren't doing what smiling eyes do. His eyes are somewhere else completely. I only notice because I've spent my whole life learning to read rooms, learning which adults are actually listening and which ones are just waiting for you to stop talking, and Liam Whitemore right now has the exact same look my old coach used to get when he was doing the bare minimum to keep a sponsor happy.

Nobody else seems to notice. Why would they? He's golden. He's got everything.

I tell myself it's none of my business. I tell myself I have enough to worry about, scholarship conditions and academic probation if my grades slip and a roommate who already thinks I'm too quiet, and the absolute last thing I need is to start paying attention to Liam Whitemore's eyes.

I tell myself that, and then practice starts, and within ten minutes I'm doing it again anyway.

It happens during a battle drill along the boards, two-on-one, and I'm fighting for the puck when someone slams into me from the side hard enough that my skates go out from under me. I hit the ice and someone else hits the ice right on top of me, an elbow catching my ribs, a knee against my thigh, and for one disorienting second it's just a tangle of limbs and the cold burn of ice against my cheek.

"You good?"

It's Whitemore. He's the one on top of me, one hand braced against the ice by my head, close enough that I can feel his breath, can see the individual flecks of gray in his eyes, can feel his heartbeat through his jersey where his chest presses against mine for one full second before he pushes himself up.

"Fine," I manage. My voice comes out wrong. Rougher than I mean it to.

He offers me a hand up. I take it. His grip is warm and sure and lasts about half a second too long, or maybe that's just me, maybe I'm the one holding on too long, and when our eyes meet again there's something there, something that wasn't there yesterday, something that makes my whole chest feel like it's been plugged into a live wire.

"Sorry about that," he says, already skating backward, already pulling the Captain mask back into place. "Got tunnel vision on the puck."

"Sure," I reply.

But I saw his face for that one second before he looked away. And tunnel vision doesn't make your hands shake.