All Chapters of The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits : Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

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

POV: RileyThe rink at nine on a Saturday was different from the rink at any other hour.Not the emergency lighting quiet of three in the morning. Not the focused purposeful energy of a scheduled practice. Just the particular stillness of a building that was technically open but not yet fully inhabited, the ice resurfaced and waiting, the overhead lights on their weekend dimmer setting, the cold pressing in from the surface with the specific patience of something that had nowhere to be.Ray was already there when I arrived. He was sitting on the penalty box bench with two coffees from the place on Garfield, not the vending machine, actual coffee, and he looked up when I came through the gate and handed one over without a word.I sat beside him. Took the coffee. Drank some of it."Good," I said."I know what you like," he said.We sat for a few minutes without talking. The ice in front of us. The Saturday morning quiet. The particular peace of a space that was not requiring anything fr

POV: RileyThe showcase was on a Thursday.I woke at five-thirty without an alarm, which had been true every morning for two weeks, my body still running on the emergency schedule even though the emergency was over. I lay in the dark for a few minutes and let the day arrive in its own order. Not urgency. Just the specific focused attention of someone who had something real to do today and wanted to meet it properly.I made tea. Laced my shoes in the correct order. Packed my skating bag with the particular care I brought to competition days, everything in its place, nothing left to chance that did not need to be.The skates went in last. Clara. I held them for a moment before I put them in the bag. The boots worn soft from two years of early mornings and one semester that had required everything. The blades recently sharpened, Naomi had insisted, taking them to the athletics equipment room two days ago and standing over the technician while he worked."You do not leave the blades to ch

POV: RayI knew it was coming.I had known since the morning the first article published that the locker room was going to be a specific kind of loud. Not because my teammates were cruel. Because they were twenty-two year old hockey players who read things on their phones and talked about what they read and had opinions about everything that moved through the team's orbit. My name had moved through their orbit in a significant way and I had been mentally preparing for the Tuesday morning practice since Thursday evening.Preparation helped. Not as much as I hoped.I came through the locker room door at six forty-five and the room went through a specific sequence. The first person to see me was Derek, who did the thing where his expression moved through four things quickly and settled on carefully neutral. Then Liam, who had been there since six-thirty and had already done whatever Liam did before difficult mornings, which usually involved being exactly where he needed to be and saying

POV: RayWe walked after dinner.Not the Greek place. A different restaurant, quieter, on a street two blocks further from campus that neither of us had been to before, which had been Riley's suggestion and which turned out to serve very good soup and have exactly four tables and a owner who brought bread without being asked.We had been walking for ten minutes through the cold Tuesday evening when I said it.Not planned. Not assembled. Just arrived, the way honest things arrived now that I had stopped constructing them first."I am scared," I said.Riley looked at me sideways. Not with alarm. With the specific attention she brought to things that mattered."Of what," she said."The graduate program," I said. "The life after this semester." I kept walking. "All of it." I paused. "I have been inside an emergency for four months. There was always something urgent. Always a next move. Always a clear direction that the situation required." I looked at the path ahead of us. "Now there is n