Ice between us

chapter 1

The email came at 7am on a Tuesday, which should have been Josh's first warning that the day was going to go sideways.

Subject: Mandatory Team Meeting — 8am, Rink A

He read it twice standing in his kitchen in his boxers, coffee going cold in his hand, trying to figure out why Coach Nolan would call a meeting the morning after a bye week. They didn't have a game until Saturday. There was no reason for this unless something had gone wrong, and in three years of being captain Josh had learned that "mandatory" meetings this early almost never meant something good.

He got to the rink twenty minutes early anyway. Old habit. He liked being the first one in, liked the quiet before the locker room filled up with noise and gear bags and somebody's terrible playlist. He sat on the bench and laced his skates slow, methodical, the way his dad taught him when he was six years old and couldn't tie a knot to save his life.

By 7:50 the room was full. Coach Nolan stood at the front with his arms crossed and a look on his face that Josh didn't like at all.

"Alright," Nolan said. "I'm not going to make this complicated. Athletics cut the budget again. Effective this season, our program's merging with Fairview."

Someone groaned. Somebody else laughed like it was a joke. Josh just sat there, running the math, because Fairview wasn't just another school. Fairview was the team they'd played twice a year for the last three seasons, the team with the reputation for chirping, for dirty hits along the boards, for a captain who used to make Josh's blood pressure spike just walking past him at center ice.

"They're bringing eight players over," Nolan continued. "Some'll start, some'll be depth. I expect everyone in this room to act like professionals about it, because frankly none of you have a choice."

Josh barely heard the rest. He was still stuck on eight players, doing the math, telling himself there was no way, there was absolutely no way, and then the door at the back of the room opened and every version of himself that had spent three years not thinking about Kai Reyes fell apart at once.

Kai hadn't changed the way Josh expected him to. He'd gotten broader, sure, filled out through the shoulders in the way guys did between seventeen and twenty. There was a scar through one eyebrow that hadn't been there before. But he still walked into a room like he already owned it, bag slung over one shoulder, not even bothering to look nervous in front of a room full of guys who used to want to fight him.

His eyes found Josh almost immediately. Of course they did.

"Callahan," Kai said, and his mouth curled into something that wasn't quite a smile. "Small world."

Josh didn't say anything. He couldn't, not with his heart doing something stupid and traitorous in his chest, not with every guy on the team turning to look at him like they expected him to have some kind of reaction.

He gave them nothing. Years of practice, keeping his face still when it mattered.

Kai dropped into an open seat two rows back like it was nothing, like walking back into Josh's life after three years of silence was just another Tuesday, and Josh spent the rest of the meeting staring straight ahead at Coach Nolan and hearing exactly none of it.

By the time the meeting broke up his jaw ached from clenching it. Guys filtered out in twos and threes, already talking over each other about who was getting cut for playing time, whether Fairview's forwards were as dirty as everyone said, whether this whole thing was going to blow up the locker room before the season even started. Josh stayed on the bench a second longer than he needed to, pretending to check something on his phone, waiting for the room to thin out.

It didn't work. Kai was still there when he looked up, leaning against the row of lockers with his arms crossed, watching him with an expression Josh couldn't quite read anymore. Three years ago he would have known exactly what that look meant. Now it was just unfamiliar territory wearing a familiar face.

"You gonna say something," Kai said, "or are we doing the whole silent treatment thing again."

"I don't know what you want me to say."

"I don't know. Hi, maybe. It's been a while."

"It's been three years."

"Yeah." Kai's jaw tightened, just barely, there and gone. "I know how long it's been, Josh."

There was a version of this conversation Josh had run through in his head more times than he'd ever admit, back when he still let himself think about it. In none of those versions had he been standing in a locker room at eight in the morning with half the team still shuffling around them, gear bags clanking, someone's phone blasting music two rows over. This wasn't how it was supposed to go. He didn't even know what "supposed to" meant anymore.

"Why didn't you tell anyone you were coming," Josh said finally. "Coach clearly knew. You could've given me a heads up."

"Would it have mattered?"

Josh didn't have an answer for that, and the fact that he didn't made something twist low in his stomach.

"That's what I thought," Kai said, and pushed off the lockers, shouldering his bag again. He paused just long enough to add, quieter this time, like it wasn't meant for the rest of the room, "I'm not here to start anything, Callahan. I just need ice time and a scholarship that doesn't fall through. That's it."

He walked out before Josh could figure out what to say to that, which was probably the point.

Josh sat back down on the bench, alone now except for Marcus, the team's other alternate captain, who'd clearly been standing close enough to hear all of it and was doing a terrible job pretending otherwise.

"So," Marcus said. "You want to explain that, or should I just assume you two have a whole history I don't know about."

"There's no history."

"Right." Marcus raised an eyebrow, unconvinced, and grabbed his bag off the floor. "Whatever you say, Cap."

Josh sat there a while after Marcus left too, lacing and unlacing the same skate he didn't need to touch, trying to talk himself back into the version of the morning where this was just another roster change, another name to learn, nothing more complicated than that.

It didn't take. Because Kai Reyes had walked back into his life wearing Fairview's colors and Josh's whole careful, controlled world had tilted about fifteen degrees off its axis in under an hour, and he had no idea yet how much further it was going to go before the season was through.