Icebound Hearts

Chapter 4

Monday practice started at 6 a.m., which meant Jake's alarm went off at 5:15, which meant he was standing in a dark kitchen by 5:30 eating toast over the sink so he wouldn't have to wash a plate, which was the exact same routine he'd had since he was fourteen years old and his dad had first started driving him to early-morning ice time before school.

Ben Thompson was already at the table when Jake came down, laptop open, a legal pad next to it covered in his small, cramped handwriting — stats, notes, whatever he'd pulled up from last night's game footage. He'd been up, Jake guessed, since at least five. Maybe earlier. His dad had never needed much sleep, not since Jake could remember, like some part of him was still running on the internal clock of a nineteen-year-old with a scout's stopwatch on him.

"You were slow getting back on that second-period rush," Ben said, not looking up. "Kowalski beat you to the redirect by half a step."

"Morning to you too."

"I'm serious. Watch the clip." Ben spun the laptop around. Frozen on the screen: Jake, mid-stride, a full body length behind where he should've been. "That's not effort, that's positioning. You were watching the puck instead of the guy."

"We won the game, Dad."

"You won the game *despite* that, not because of it." Ben said it without heat, which was somehow worse than if he'd said it angry — just flat fact, delivered the way you'd point out a typo. "Teams that are actually good don't get to make that mistake against real competition. Scouts aren't watching Pine Ridge play Pine Ridge. They're watching how you play against everybody else, eventually."

"It's October."

"October's when habits get built." Ben finally looked up at him, and for a second something moved behind his eyes that wasn't criticism at all — something closer to worry, dressed up as a coaching note because that was the only language the two of them had reliably agreed on for the last decade. "I'm not saying this to be a pain, Jake. I'm saying it because I know exactly how fast this window closes. I had it. I know."

Jake had heard the story enough times that he could probably recite it better than his dad could at this point — the juniors season, the scout from a Big Ten program supposedly circling, the ACL that gave out in a scrimmage four weeks before that scout was ever supposed to show up. Ben didn't talk about it often, not directly, not in full sentences with the words *knee* or *scholarship* or *what if* actually spoken out loud. But it was there, underneath basically everything his dad said about hockey, the way a rock is there under a lawn even after you've mowed over it a hundred times.

"I know, Dad," Jake said, quieter now.

"I know you know." Ben closed the laptop, some of the sharpness going out of his shoulders. "I just don't want you looking back in ten years wondering if you left something on the table because nobody told you the truth when it mattered."

"You always tell me the truth when it matters."

"Somebody's gotta."

It wasn't unkind. Jake knew, in the part of his brain that could step back and look at it clearly, that this was his dad's version of love — relentless, stopwatch-precise, incapable of just saying I'm proud of you without also attaching a corrective note about gap control. He knew his dad believed, genuinely, that pushing him this hard was a form of protection. He knew all of that.

He also knew that some nights, lying in bed running the same clip back in his own head, he wasn't sure anymore whether the thing driving him down to the rink at 5:30 in the morning was his own want or just a very well-worn groove that his dad had cut for him a long time ago, one he'd never really stopped to check whether he still wanted to be standing in.

He grabbed his bag instead of finishing that thought. Some mornings weren't built for it.

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The locker room at 6 a.m. had its own particular chemistry half the team still half-asleep, the other half overcompensating loudly to prove they weren't, someone's phone playing tinny music out of a single speaker that nobody had bothered to turn up properly.

"There he is," Cooper said, from the stall next to Jake's, already half into his gear. "Captain Positioning Error."

"You saw the clip."

"Your dad sent it to the group chat. The *team* group chat, Jake. At 5:47 in the morning."

"He didn't."

"He absolutely did. With a caption. It said, quote, 'good habits win championships.'" Cooper grinned, not unkindly — Cooper had grown up around Ben Thompson long enough to have made his own kind of peace with him, the way you make peace with weather. "Kowalski's gonna be insufferable about it all practice."

Two stalls down, Nate Kowalski didn't look up from lacing his skates, but the corner of his mouth did something that suggested he'd heard every word and intended to make full use of it.

"Not my fault the captain fell asleep on the rush," Nate said.

"You got lucky."

"I got good, there's a difference." Nate finally looked over, something a little sharper than a joke sitting behind his eyes. He was new-ish — two years in Pine Ridge, transferred in from a bigger program down near the Cities, good enough that he'd been a legitimate threat to Jake's spot at center before Coach Carter had settled things by keeping Jake there and moving Nate to wing, a decision Nate had never once, in eighteen months, given any sign of having fully accepted. "Some of us don't get handed the C because our name's already on the banner in the lobby."

"Nobody handed me anything."

"Sure." Nate stood, skates laced, and shouldered past on his way to the ice, close enough that it wasn't quite a shove and not far enough that it wasn't one either. "See you out there, Captain."

Cooper watched him go, then looked at Jake, eyebrows up. "He's fun this early."

"He's always like that."

"Yeah, but it's usually got more of a runway before it shows up." Cooper finished lacing his own skates, quieter now, in the particular way Cooper got when he was actually about to say something real instead of just filling space. "You good, man? You've been weird since Friday."

"I'm fine."

"That's not a real answer."

"It's the answer you're getting at six in the morning."

Cooper let it go mostly because the assistant coach stuck his head in just then and hollered that ice time was ice time and nobody's mother was going to reschedule the rink for them but Jake caught the look Cooper gave him on the way out, the specific look of someone filing a thing away instead of actually dropping it, and Jake knew, with the particular clarity of somebody who'd been best friends with Danny Cooper since they were both eight years old, that this was not, in fact, the end of that conversation.

It was just the part where Cooper decided to wait for a better moment to ask again.