OFFSIDE

COLE'S POV

COLE

I requested the seven-thirty slot on a Tuesday in August, standing in Patterson's office with a schedule conflict I'd manufactured myself.

I'm not proud of it.

The thing is—and I've thought about this more than I'd like to admit—there's a version of this semester where I round a corner and she's just there. No warning, no time to arrange my face into something that isn't complicated. I've been doing a lot of things since freshman year but I haven't been doing ready, and ready was the only thing I actually needed.

So I built a thirty minute window. A controlled first sighting, on ice, with gear on and a team around me and something to do with my hands.

It had seemed reasonable in August.

On the actual morning it felt insane.

"You're doing that thing," Dom said, pulling up beside me at the near boards.

"What thing?"

"Where you skate like you're trying to punish the ice personally."

I hadn't noticed. I eased up on the edges and ran the next drill at a human pace. Across the stadium the music cut and I didn't look up because I'd already looked up once and that was my limit.

She looked exactly like herself. That was the problem. Two years and she looked exactly like the person I'd been not-thinking about since the wrong dorm floor freshman year. Same sharp posture, same way of standing like she was already in charge of whatever room she was in. Different hair maybe. Same everything else.

I'd had thirty seconds of eye contact and then I'd looked away first because I'm not a complete i***t.

"South side," I told the team. "Formation drill, let's go."

They went, and I went with them. I ran them through the full set twice, made corrections, demonstrated a crossover transition that Kowalski had been getting wrong since last spring, and was almost entirely focused for most of it.

Almost.

"She's coming over," Dom said.

"I know."

"You want me to-"

"I'm fine."

He drifted back exactly far enough to be plausibly uninvolved. I turned around.

And here's the thing about Nadia Reeves that I'd forgotten, or maybe not forgotten but hadn't fully prepared for; she doesn't come at you loud. Other people, when they're angry, they signal it from a distance. You can see it coming and adjust. Nadia walks toward you at the exact same pace as always, same expression, completely level, and you don't register the impact until she's already said the thing.

*We were here first.*

True. Also the direct result of a scheduling maneuver she didn't know about and wouldn't find funny.

I kept my voice even and cited Patterson because Patterson was actually where the fault was—I'd booked correctly, the double entry was his problem—and I watched her hold herself very still while she decided whether to escalate.

She didn't escalate. She negotiated. Cheerleaders, north section. My team, south section, clean line down the middle. Efficient.

It was the same thing I'd have done.

I hated how unsurprising that was.

"Good call," Dom said when she walked away.

"Stop."

"I'm just saying. Clean resolution. Very mature."

"Dom."

"Very adult of both of you."

"I will trade you," I said, "to another team. I will call Coach Reyes at Denton personally and tell him you're available."

Dom grinned and skated backward away from me. "You'd miss me."

I ran the team through second-half conditioning and kept my eyes on my people. That was the job. Twenty guys who needed a captain who was actually present, not one who was using peripheral vision to track the north section of the stadium floor.

I used peripheral vision to track the north section of the stadium floor.

She was running them hard. I could see the correction pattern. Same combination twice, stop, adjustment, again—and whoever the girl with the dark braid was, kept getting pulled up on the same move. Nadia didn't seem frustrated about it. Patient in a way that was different from her public sharpness. Like the squad got a version of her other people didn't.

I understood that more than I wanted to.

"Cole." Kowalski, at my elbow. "Crossover again?"

"Yeah. Watch the weight transfer." I demonstrated. He tried it. Better. "Again." Better still. "Good. Go."

This was what I was good at. The team, the ice. The thing that had been consistent since I was nine years old and my dad first put skates on me in a parking lot in December. Everything else in my life had seasons—good ones, bad ones, the year that was just survival—but the ice stayed level. The ice did what you asked if you put in the work.

I'd put in the work.

We ran drills until eight fifty, and I was running through the second set when Dom came back from the boards with that specific careful expression that meant he'd done something I didn't ask him to do.

"I talked to her," he said.

I stopped skating. "Why."

"Because you weren't going to."

"Dom-"

"I told her you booked two weeks ago. That it wasn't about her." He paused. "She said she didn't think it was."

"She thought it was."

"Obviously. But she said she didn't, which is its own thing." He looked at me sideways. "She seems good, man. Like put together. She's running that squad like a head coach."

I started skating again. "Good."

"Is that all you've got?"

"What do you want me to say?"

"I don't know. Something that acknowledges that this is a situation."

"It's not a situation. We're in the same athletic program. We'll manage it professionally."

Dom was quiet for a beat. On the floor across the stadium, the music cut again and I heard Nadia call water break in that carrying voice that didn't need to be loud to reach everywhere.

"You looked up when the ice doors opened," Dom said. "Before the team was even out. You looked straight at her."

I didn't answer.

"That's all I'm saying," he said, and skated off before I could tell him it wasn't a situation again.

I ran the last set. Tight, focused, exactly what the team needed. When we wrapped at nine I didn't look at the floor. I gathered the team at center ice, ran through the week's schedule, answered Kowalski's question about Saturday's scrimmage, told Reeves—a different Reeves, Marcus, our goalie—that his positioning in the third drill was excellent and to keep it.

By the time I looked up, the floor was empty.

She was gone.

I stood there for a second in the quiet stadium and I thought about the phone call I didn't answer two years ago and the silence that came after it and the fact that thirty minutes ago she'd stood three feet away from me and looked at me like I was just a scheduling conflict.

Which was fine.

Which was what I'd made inevitable.

I got off the ice.