The Hockey Alpha Rejected His Plus Sized Mate

Thin Ice

Chapter Nine: Thin Ice

Nora's POV

I waited until the building emptied before I found him in the film room, because some conversations only work in silence.

"Sit down, Theo."

"That's not usually good."

"Sit down anyway."

He sat, hands flat on the table, watching me the way he watches a play he already knows the ending of.

"I want to talk about the pattern," I said. "Not the owner. Not yet. Just the shape of things. The suspension that got dropped the same week I was hired. Scouting reports that mentioned my name before I'd applied anywhere. A franchise that's lost for six straight years and somehow still had the money to guarantee my salary when no other club in this league would take my call."

"Go on."

"I don't think I was hired because you believed in me. I think I was hired because somebody wanted a very specific story told, and I happened to fit the part."

He didn't flinch. He didn't look away either. "That's not entirely wrong."

"Which part is wrong?"

"The part where you think I don't believe in you. Both things can be true. You're exactly the right coach for this team. You're also the answer to a question somebody else was asking before you ever walked through that door."

"How long have you known?"

"Longer than I've been comfortable with."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"There were things I couldn't tell you until you had enough of the picture. I was waiting for you to get there on your own."

"Am I there now?"

"You're close."

"That's not an answer, Theo."

"I know."

"Then give me one."

"Give me until the end of the week."

"You've got forty-eight hours."

"Nora"

I stood before he could turn forty-eight into something softer, because I knew if I stayed in that room another minute, I'd hand him more time simply because part of me still wanted to.

The player slipped the next afternoon, and I almost missed it.

Delacroix sat on the bench end, phone in hand, thumbs moving fast the way they do when somebody's mid-argument instead of mid-conversation. He set it down to retie his skate, screen still up, still unlocked, and didn't think twice about it because I'd spent three weeks making sure he never once suspected I was watching him.

I kept walking the bench line like I was checking sticks. Kept my eyes moving instead of stopping. Counted the seconds without looking like I was counting.

Ten. Fifteen.

The thread was still glowing when I passed behind him the second time, close enough to catch a name at the top of it before the screen dimmed on its own. Not the message. Not enough for that. Just the name, and the small green dot beside it that meant somebody on the other end was awake and reading in real time.

I didn't reach for my own phone until I was three benches away, in the equipment room, door shut, hands steadier than they had any right to be. I typed the name into a note before it could slip out of my head the way names do when your heart's still catching up with what your eyes just saw.

Then I went back out and ran the rest of practice like nothing in the world had happened, because that was the only version of this I could afford anyone seeing.

Theo showed up at my apartment a little after ten that night, standing in the hallway in his jacket with no explanation for being there.

"It's late," I said.

"I know."

"We're not finished from earlier."

"I know that too."

I let him in anyway.

We ended up at the kitchen table with my father's old notebooks spread open between us, pages full of formations he'd drawn thirty years ago in handwriting I still recognized faster than my own.

"He drew this one for a game he lost," I said, tapping a diagram. "Kept it anyway. Said the losses teach you more than the wins do."

"Smart man."

"He used to say hockey wasn't really about the score. Said the score was just proof of something that already happened between the players before the puck ever dropped."

"Trust."

"He never used that word. But yes."

"Is that why you do this?"

"I do this because I don't know how to stop. I think it's the same for you."

"It is." Theo turned a page slowly, careful with the paper the way you're careful with something that isn't yours. "I used to watch tape of losing teams more than winning ones. Wanted to see the exact moment things came apart. Figured if I understood it well enough, I could keep it from happening to us."

"Did it work?"

"Not until you got here."

I didn't have an answer for that, so I let it sit in the room instead of filling it with something smaller.

We talked until almost two in the morning not strategy, not the league, just what the game meant to both of us and why neither of us had ever managed to walk away from it, even when walking away would have been easier.

When he finally stood to leave, he stopped at the door with one hand on the frame and stood there a moment too long, like he was deciding something and needed the extra second to finish deciding it.

"Theo?"

"Forty-eight hours," he said. "I heard you."

"That's not what you were thinking about just now."

"No." He looked at me once, quiet and steady, like he was confirming something only for himself. "It wasn't."

He didn't tell me what it was. He just went, and I stood at my own door a long time after it closed, my father's notebooks still open on the table behind me.

I ran the name from the phone through the league's credentialed contact database once the apartment had gone quiet again.

It came back tied to a number I didn't recognize. I ran the area code separately, more out of habit than suspicion.

It matched the same city Grayson's father lived in.

I stared at that until the screen dimmed twice before I finally called Finn.

He picked up on the first ring.

"Finn."

"I know why you're calling."

"You don't even know what I found."

"I know the area code you're about to say. I've known longer than I want to admit."

"Then why am I the one who had to find it."

"Because some things you have to find yourself before you're ready to believe them from somebody else." A pause, long enough that I heard him exhale. "Where are you right now?"

"Home."

"Stay there. Don't call anyone else tonight. Not Theo, not Grayson, not the league. Just stay where you are until I get there."

"Finn, tell me what you know."

"I will. In person. Not over a line I'm not sure is clean anymore."

The call went quiet, and I sat there with the number still glowing on my screen, a city I now understood far better than I had an hour ago, and one question circling everything else in my head.

If Finn already knew where that number led, how long had he known it and who else already knew it too, standing close enough to me every single day that I'd never once thought to ask?