Ice Between Rivals

Chapter 4

POV: Ava Carter

I made my first mistake on a Tuesday.

We were in the film room watching tape from the charity game and Coach Merritt paused on a play and asked me to walk through my decision making on the left wing sequence. I leaned forward and started talking and I used my hands the way I always do when I explain something I care about and my voice went up at the end of the sentence the way it naturally does when I am excited.

Just me. Kai turned his head slowly from across the room. I caught myself immediately and cleared my throat and finished the sentence in a lower register and looked at the screen like nothing happened. But when I glanced sideways two minutes later Kai was still looking at me. Not suspicious exactly. Just the way he always looked at things he had not solved yet.

I went back to the dorm that night and sat on my bed and pressed my face into my pillow and screamed without making any sound.

This was getting harder.

Not the hockey. The hockey I could do in my sleep. It was everything around it. The way I had to think before I spoke every single time. The way I could not stand a certain way or laugh too loud or forget to take up enough space when I walked into a room.

The way Liam kept looking at me with that almost knowing expression that made my chest tight for two different reasons. One because he was Liam and he always made my chest tight. Two because if anyone in the world would figure it out, it would be him.

And then there was Kai.

Kai who watched me like I was a problem he had decided to solve.

He had started testing me. I noticed it three days after the scrimmage. Small things. He mentioned a girl from a school two towns over that apparently Noah had dated and waited to see how I reacted. I gave him nothing. He brought up a specific memory from a tournament two years ago with wrong details buried inside it and waited to see if I corrected him. I said nothing because I did not know enough to correct anything.

Each time he tested me he filed the result somewhere behind those calm cold eyes and said nothing.

I was running out of time and I knew it.

++++++

The storm hit on Thursday night.

It came off the water fast and mean and by nine o clock the rain was hammering the windows and the lights in the dorm flickered twice and then died completely. Backup power kept the hallway lights dim and yellow but our room went dark.

A pipe in the ceiling above Kai's side of the room chose that exact night to start leaking.

He moved his mattress to my side of the room without asking and dropped it on the floor between my bed and the wall. I sat on my bed and looked down at him and said nothing because arguing about it felt like too much energy for something that did not matter.

For a while neither of us spoke. The rain was loud and the room was very dark and small.

Then Kai said, "My father called this morning."

I looked at the ceiling. "What did he want."

"To remind me that you beat me at regionals two years ago." He paused. "He does that. Finds the sharpest thing available and uses it." Another pause. "He said if I lose to you again this season then I have been wasting my talent on sentiment instead of strategy."

The room was quiet except for the rain.

"That is a terrible thing to say to someone," I said.

"He is a terrible person in some specific ways." His voice was flat saying it. The kind of flat that takes practice. "I have been trying to beat you since I was fifteen years old and half of it is because I actually love competing and the other half is because I want one phone call where he cannot use your name against me."

Something opened up in my chest. I looked down at him in the dark. I could just see the outline of his face. He was staring at the ceiling with his arms behind his head and he looked younger than he ever let himself look during the day.

I wanted to tell him.

The words were right there. I am not Noah. Noah is my brother. I am Ava Carter and I have been pretending my whole life too and I think I understand exactly what it feels like to chase something for two reasons at the same time.

I pressed my mouth shut.

"You will beat whoever you need to beat," I said instead. "On your own terms."

He turned his head and looked at me in the dark. "Yeah," he said quietly. "Maybe."

++++++

Coach Merritt gathered us after morning practice the next day. Falcons versus Eagles. Season opener. Three weeks away. Six scouts confirmed in the stands including two from national development programs.

The room erupted.

I stood in the middle of it and felt the ground shift under my feet. Scouts. National level scouts. People whose entire job was to watch players carefully and see everything.

Everything.

I went to my locker afterward with my head down and my hands not quite steady and pulled it open.

Kai was standing beside me. He reached past me slowly. His fingers came back holding something small. Something that must have fallen from my inside jacket pocket without me noticing. Something I had been carrying since home because old habits are hard to kill.

A hair tie, pink, thin and unmistakably mine. Kai held it up between two fingers. The locker room was emptying around us. His eyes moved from the hair tie to my face. Something had changed in his expression. It was not a test this time.

This was a conclusion.

"Carter," he said quietly.

"Explain this."