Claimed By My Hockey Captain

Grace "Other people are standing on Milan Olympic podiums right now. What about you?" My mother didn't say it cruelly. She set the dish towel down on the kitchen counter like she'd just stated the weather, then walked upstairs. She didn't wait for an answer. She never wanted one. When Olivia Hart, my best friend, showed up twenty minutes later and announced she wasn't letting me turn twenty alone in a dark room, I let her drag me out the door. She took me straight across the Stormont University campus—the school I'd deferred enrollment to two years ago for an Olympic dream that no longer existed. Walking through the campus still felt a little like wearing someone else's clothes, but being surrounded by sprawling university brick was still better than staying in that stifling house with my mother. When Olivia steered me into the loudest party Stormont had going tonight, I didn't fight her. The air inside smelled like spilled beer and somebody's overambitious cologne, and the heat of too many bodies in too small a space hit me like a wall the second the door swung open. "Whose place even is this?" I asked, raising my voice over the noise. "Does it matter? It's the loudest one." She grabbed two red cups from a passing tray and steered me toward the wall. "Pick your battles, birthday girl." I let her drag me, watching her eyes dart around the crowded room. "Are you assessing trip hazards at a frat party?" "Clinic brain's already on the clock—the hazards of being a PT student," she said the second we'd claimed a few feet of floor, shoving a cup into my hand without asking what I wanted. Even off duty, her eyes were doing their usual sweep of the room—who's drunk, who's about to fall, who's one bad decision from needing her. "I diagnose you with needing this and slightly fewer feelings." "That's not a diagnosis." "It's my professional opinion. Close enough." The living room was packed wall to wall, one overworked speaker losing a fight against everyone's competing playlists, and someone had a screen rigged up over the fireplace—a sports channel looping condensed coverage of the Milan Games, the footage a little soft and blown up too large for the resolution, throwing glare off the ice every time a camera flash caught a blade. Right now it was running the free skate. My biggest rival's triple-triple, clean as glass, landing perfectly on a loop that didn't care this was probably the fortieth time tonight someone in this house had walked past it without bothering to change the channel. My stomach dropped the way it did on a bad landing—that half second where your body knows before your brain does. My ankle had given out on a triple Axel landing in December, three weeks before Nationals, and the selection committee had picked the team without me in it. My rival went to Milan. I stayed home and went to physio. Now her gold medal run was looping on a screen in a stranger's living room, like the universe had decided once wasn't enough. I looked away from the screen, and that was when I caught him. A guy leaning against the far wall near the stairs, not talking to anyone in his immediate radius, shoulders broad enough that they looked more locker-room than frat-house. He was looking right at me. Not the up-and-down inventory kind of look. Something quieter—like recognition had arrived a beat before surprise. Like he already knew who I was and hadn't decided yet whether to do anything about it. He didn't look away when I caught him looking, either, the way most guys did, like getting caught was the embarrassing part. He just held it, easy, unbothered, like staring back wasn't a thing that needed defending. I held it for about half a second before I broke it off. I didn't have the bandwidth tonight to wonder what a stranger's eyes were doing. I had my mother's voice sitting in my chest like a stone and a screen behind me replaying the exact future that used to be mine, and a guy across the room was the least interesting problem in the building. "You have your fight-with-your-mom face on," Olivia said, reading me the way she read everyone. "It's fine. I don't want to talk about it." She didn't push. She never did, not on nights like this—she just bumped her shoulder against mine, a silent show of solidarity, and let it drop. Whatever she was about to say next got cut off by a crash on the other side of the room—someone's beer-pong trick shot gone wrong, a guy stumbling off the coffee table and going down hard on one ankle with a yell that cut clean through the music. Olivia's whole posture changed before she'd even fully turned around. "That's a real fall." She was already moving. "I've got you. Give me five minutes. Don't go anywhere—I mean it." "Wasn't planning on it." She did not give me the five minutes she'd promised. She gave me thirty, crouched in front of some guy's ankle with a focus that wiped out the rest of the party, leaving me alone against the wall. Alone meant nobody asked what was wrong—which meant my brain immediately found something worse to do with the quiet. Alone meant replaying the exact frame where my blade had caught in December—the sickening catch and give on a landing I'd hit a thousand times before. I thought about the six-a.m. ice, the endless physio, and the triple Axel I still couldn't trust under me because trusting it meant asking to be broken twice. The drink in my hand went down easier than it should have. By the third sip, my shoulders dropped from my ears, and the Olympic footage on the wall softened into a distant blur. "Hey." A guy materialized too close, cup in hand, the kind of confidence that came from believing every approach worked eventually. "You've been standing here alone forever. Tragic. Let me fix that." "I'm okay, thanks." "You don't look okay. You look like you need a friend." He stepped in, and I stepped back, and my shoulder blades found the wall before I meant for them to. He smelled like rum and like he'd decided my politeness was an invitation instead of an answer. "C'mon. It's a party. Smile." "Maybe you just haven't had the right kind of fun yet." He reached out like he meant to tuck a piece of hair behind my ear, and I caught his wrist before he got there, every nerve in my body snapping alert. "Don't," I said. "Relax. I'm being nice." "I'm good," I said, sharper now, looking for an exit that wasn't there, because somehow he'd planted himself exactly between me and the rest of the room. "Grace." The voice cut through the noise like it had been waiting for an opening—low, certain, like he'd said my name a hundred times before tonight instead of zero. The guy from across the room slid into the space beside me with an ease that made it look choreographed, a few days of stubble, eyes that found mine like he already knew exactly where to look. "There you are." He said it like he'd been searching the whole party for me. "I was starting to think you'd ditched me." The rum guy blinked between us, recalculated something behind his eyes, and peeled off toward the kitchen without another word. I stared up at the stranger who had just invented an entire relationship between us out of thin air. "I have no idea who you are." "Mason." He said it simply, like that settled something, and didn't elaborate. Up close, he didn't look like he was about to ask for anything—no follow-up line, no obvious angle, just a steadiness that made the space around us feel less crowded than it had a second ago. "You looked like you could use the assist." "I could've handled it." "I know." The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile. "Looked like you were two seconds from handling it real well, actually." I might have laughed. I might have said something back—I was already reaching for it, something dry, something that would let me keep my balance in a conversation that had knocked me sideways—when the screen behind us looped back around to the medal ceremony. My biggest rival on the top step. The anthem starting again. The gold catching the light. I felt my whole face change before I could stop it, every muscle going still and stiff at once, twenty years old in a stranger's living room watching the exact future I used to imagine for myself happen to someone else, on a loop, twice in fifteen minutes. Mason followed my gaze to the screen, then back to me, something shifting behind his eyes like a piece had just slid into place. "I thought you'd be there," he said quietly. I went cold all over.