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Chapter 70: Fifteen Years

作者: Kai
last update publish date: 2026-07-15 04:32:35

POV: Ray

Riley arrived at the library at eight-twelve.

I watched her come through the door from the north window table where Naomi had her laptop open and three browser tabs running simultaneously and the particular focused stillness of someone who had found something significant and was being patient about how she delivered it. Riley sat down, dropped her bag, looked at both of us.

"Talk," she said.

"You first," I said. "The athletics director."

She told us what Farrow had said. All of it, qui
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  • The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits    Chapter 81: The Call

    POV: RileyPractice was the best it had been all semester.Not because anything technical changed. My edges were the same edges. My double axel was the same jump I had been working on since before I arrived on this campus. The showcase sequence had the same entry and the same transition problem we had been fixing for three weeks. None of the mechanics were different.What was different was that I was entirely inside it.No part of my attention was in the compliance office or the oversight board's record or the fourteen emails in Reidy's folder or the provost's resignation or my father's voicemail or my mother's phone number in my contacts under a name I had not yet decided how to list. All of that existed. None of it was in the rink.Just the ice. The edges. The particular cold of a contained space designed to keep things frozen.Coach Farrow noticed. She noticed everything.At the water break she skated over to where I was catching my breath at the boards and stood beside me without

  • The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits    Chapter 80: Voicemail

    POV: RileyHe called at two in the afternoon.I was at the library. Not the north window table, which had become associated with operational urgency in a way I needed a break from. A different table, near the east stacks, quieter, where I had been working on the seminar paper that was due tomorrow and had been existing in the background of the last two weeks like a small patient obligation waiting for the emergency to pass.The paper was on identity formation under conditions of extended stress. Aldine had assigned it before any of this semester became what it became, and sitting with it now felt like reading a map of terrain I had just crossed.My phone lit up on the table beside my notebook. My father's number.I looked at it for three rings. Not deciding. Just looking.Then I let it go to voicemail.He called again four minutes later. I let that one go too. Not because I was refusing the conversation. Because I was not ready for the real-time version of it. I needed to hear what he

  • The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits    Chapter 79: The Next Morning

    POV: RileyI slept for nine hours.No alarm. No three in the morning reckoning. No phone buzzing with messages from numbers I had to learn to recognize. Just nine hours of sleep so complete and so ordinary that when I woke at seven-fifteen and lay still for a moment taking inventory, the first thing I noticed was the absence of the specific tension that had been living between my shoulder blades since September.Not gone entirely. Just quieter. Settl ed into something that was not emergency anymore.I lay there for a few minutes. The room was the same room it had always been. My desk with my camera on it. My skating bag by the door. The window with the east path visible below, the same path where someone had stood with a long lens three days ago, which already felt like a different chapter of a different semester.I got up. Made tea. Sat at my desk.Then I opened my laptop and read the national piece.Twenty-two thousand words. I had expected it to feel large. It was large in the way

  • The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits    Chapter 78: Evening

    POV: RileyWe stayed at the rink until six-thirty.Not because anything required us to be there. Because leaving meant walking back into whatever the campus had become in the last twelve hours and the rink with its full lights and clean ice and penalty box bench was the only space on campus that felt like it belonged entirely to the person I was rather than the situation I was inside. I was not ready to give that up yet.At six-twenty Ray said: "Are you hungry.""Yes," I said."Real food," he said. "Not dining hall.""There is a place on Garfield," I said. "Two blocks past where Amara and I met.""Not Lena's," he said."No," I said. Not Lena's, where he had followed Declan and Riley to dinner and sat alone with untouched coffee watching her laugh in a mirror. "The Greek place. I have walked past it eight times and never gone in.""Tonight we go in," he said.We went in.It was small and warm and smelled like garlic and something baking and had exactly four tables, all of them occupied

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    POV: RileyThe rink with the lights fully on was different from every other version of it.Not worse. Just different. The blue-grey emergency quiet was gone and in its place was the clean bright fact of the space, the overhead panels casting even white light across the ice surface, the boards showing their true colours, the penalty box bench worn and ordinary rather than mysteriously shadowed. It looked like a place where people worked. Where people practiced and fell and got up and practiced again. It looked like exactly what it was.I liked it better this way. I had not expected that.Ray sat beside me on the penalty box bench, close enough that our shoulders touched, and we both looked at the ice in the full light and said nothing for a few minutes."This is better," he said eventually."Yes," I said."You can see the whole surface," he said."Yes.""No surprises," he said."Fewer," I said. "There are always some."He almost smiled.I took my phone out of my bag. Not to read the no

  • The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits    Chapter 76: Four O'clock

    POV: RileyI slept for thirty-seven minutes.Not the sleep of someone who has resolved anything. The sleep of a body that had been running since three in the morning on bad coffee and adrenaline and had reached the point where it simply stopped negotiating. I lay on my bed in my clothes with my shoes still on and closed my eyes and the next thing I knew my phone alarm was going off and the light in the room had changed from pale noon to the slightly warmer tone of mid-afternoon.I sat up. My head was clear in the specific way it gets after unplanned sleep, not refreshed exactly but reset, the fog of the last several hours lifted enough to see the shape of things again.I checked my phone.Forty-seven notifications. I looked at none of them. I went to the bathroom, washed my face, changed into my practice gear, laced my shoes in the correct order, and picked up my skating bag.Then I texted Ray.Awake. Going to practice. You don't have to come.His response arrived in eleven seconds.I

  • The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits    Chapter 1: To Baby Sit Her?

    Ray's PovI should have said no.The second Professor Hartwell asked me to babysit his daughter, I should have walked out. But I didn’t. I just sat there, in the worn leather chair across from his desk, trying to figure out what game we were playing.I’d been in his office plenty of times. Usually,

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    POV: RayMonday came like a punishment. I stood outside the athletics media room with my hands in my jacket pockets, telling myself I was calm. I was not calm. I'd barely slept. Every time I closed my eyes I saw the photograph on Hartwell's desk, the girl with the laughing eyes and the swinging hai

  • The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits    Chapter Three: I Need To Find Her

    Riley's Pov Marvel,” I said, the word coming out as a relieved sigh.He didn’t smile. His eyes, usually so warm when they landed on me, were hard. “What’s going on?”“I was looking for you. I came down to… I saw the end of the game.” I took a step toward him, wanting to bridge the gap, to get us a

  • The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits    Chapter Two: You Were Saying?

    RileyI had done exactly one thing in my entire life without my father’s approval, and I was determined not to mess it up.Figure skating.It was my secret rebellion, planned and saved for in silence. While my father graded papers and muttered about “frivolous pursuits,” I watched old Olympic routi

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