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Chapter Eight: Held Breath
publish date:
2026-06-20 16:40:06
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Off The Ice Rink Chapter Fourteen: Sunday Calls
My father calls Sunday morning at eight, same as always, and I'm already awake because I haven't slept properly in five days and my body has apparently decided sleep is something that happens to other people now.I sit on the edge of my bed and look at his name on the screen for three full rings before I pick up."You're up early," he says."Couldn't sleep.""Season pressure. That's normal. Happens every year around this time." He sounds easy, comfortable, a man calling about hockey and nothing else in the world. "Coach says the new forward is settling in well."There it is. Thirty seconds in."Kai's great," I reply, keeping my voice exactly as easy as his, matching his register note for note, because that's what we do, my father and I. We have entire conversations in the space between what we're actually talking about. "Best addition to this roster in two years. His read on the play is something else.""I hear you've been spending extra time with him. Additional sessions.""He's my f
Off The Ice Rink Chapter Thirteen: The Shape of It
I find Cassidy between fourth period and lunch the next day, which requires waiting outside the east wing science corridor for eight minutes, which Rohan describes as lurking and I describe as strategic positioning.She sees me coming and her posture changes, not dramatically, just a slight squaring of the shoulders, the automatic adjustment of someone who has decided to be prepared."Liam," she says."Cassidy. Do you have two minutes?" She looks at me for a moment, assessing. "Two minutes," she agrees.We step into the alcove beside the water fountain, out of the main corridor traffic, and I keep my voice easy and my body language open because this conversation only works if she doesn't feel cornered."I'm not here to argue about the complaint," I say. "I just want to understand something.""Okay.""The person who approached you, who made you aware of the situation..." I watch her face carefully. "Did they have a reason to know what was in Kai's scholarship file?" Something shifts
Off The Ice Rink Chapter Twelve: Cassidy, Actually
Rohan finds Cassidy first, which is either fortunate or catastrophic depending on how it goes, and with Rohan those two outcomes are genuinely equidistant.He reports back at lunch, sliding his tray onto the table beside Kai and me with the energy of a man who has completed excellent reconnaissance and wants full credit for it. "She's in the east courtyard," he says, stealing one of Kai's chips without asking. "Eating alone. She looks like someone who made a decision and is currently renegotiating with herself about it.""How can you tell?" Kai asks, watching his chips disappear piece by piece. "She's been on the same page of her book for forty minutes. I checked.""You watched her for forty minutes," I say."I was eating nearby. It's not weird." He steals another chip. "Also she kept looking at her phone and putting it down without unlocking it, which means she's waiting for something and not getting it just yet."Kai and I look at each other."I'll go," Kai says."Kai.""No, liste
Off The Ice Rink Chapter Eleven: What Coach Knows
The film room empties like water draining out of a basin, fast and quiet, everyone suddenly very interested in being somewhere else. Coach had told me to wait behind and the way he said it in front of everyone gave the impression I was in some kind of trouble.Rohan goes last, and the look he throws me over his shoulder on the way out is the kind of look that says "I'll be right outside" and "Please don't die" simultaneously.Then it's just me and Coach Reyes, and the hum of the projector on standby, and the particular silence of a room where something important is about to happen whether I'm ready for it or not.Coach pulls a chair around and sits on it backward, arms folded across the top, and looks at me the way he looks at game footage, patient and thorough, not missing anything."Sit down, Liam."I sit. I keep my face exactly where I've trained it to stay for eighteen years of people looking at it and deciding things."I'm going to ask you something," Coach says, "and I want you
Off The Ice Rink Chapter Ten: Filed and Quiet
I text Kai before I'm even out of Bridget's building."We have a problem. Don't freak out yet. Give me twenty minutes."Three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again."Already freaking out."I find him outside the east entrance, leaning against the wall with his jacket zipped to his chin, arms folded, eyes tracking me across the courtyard the moment I clear the door. He reads my face before I've said a single word, the way he always does, and something in his expression shifts from fear to bracing, the particular adjustment of someone who's spent a lifetime learning to take bad news on their feet."Tell me what happened," he says.I tell him. All of it. The complaint. The Monday morning deadline. Sienna knowing. The fact that someone went to the administration without going to either of us first.He doesn't explode. He doesn't crumble. He goes very, very still, the way he went still the first time our eyes met across the locker room, and in someone else that stillness might look like cal
Off The Ice Rink Chapter Nine: What Bridges Break
Bridget opens her dorm room door in an oversized sweater, mascara she's mostly scrubbed away still faint at the corners of her eyes, and she looks at me for a long moment without saying anything before she steps back and lets me in.Her room smells like vanilla and the particular warmth of a space someone has lived in long enough to make entirely their own. String lights over the desk, photos layered on the mirror, the two of us in half of them, grinning at cameras at functions neither of us particularly wanted to attend. I look at those photos and feel the full weight of what I've been doing for three years fall on me all at once, the comfortable convenient beautiful lie of us."Sit down," she says, sitting cross-legged on her bed, hands folded in her lap.I sit. The desk chair. Enough distance to have a real conversation."You don't have to explain everything," she says. "I need you to know that upfront. I'm not sitting here needing the full history of Liam Whitemore laid out in chr
Off The Ice Rink Chapter Seven: What the Dark Hides
My hands are still shaking when I lock the equipment room door behind us.Kai's pacing, three steps one way, three steps back, phone clutched so tight in his fist I'm half afraid the screen is going to crack. "He knows, Liam. Rohan said he wasn't going to say anything and I believe him, but somebod
Off The Ice Rink Chapter Six: What Rohan Knows
Liam's POV I don't sleep.I lie in my bed and stare at the ceiling and count the ways my life is about to collapse. Rohan is my best friend on this team. Has been since freshman year, since he covered for me the night I missed curfew and my dad would have driven six hours just to drag me back by t
Off The Ice Rink Chapter Five: What the Ice Remembers
Liam's POV Practice is brutal. Not because Coach pushes us harder than usual, but because Kai is everywhere I am, fast, sharp, perfect, and completely unreachable. Every pass he sends me is clean and hard and silent. Every drill he runs flawlessly, like he's decided the only way to survive this is
Off The Ice Rink Chapter One: The Weight of Other People's Eyes
Liam's POV The locker room smells like rubber and sweat and the cheap pine cleaner the janitor uses on Tuesdays, and I am sitting on the bench pretending I give a damn about my skate laces."You're doing that thing again," Rohan says, dropping down beside me with his pads half on."What thing?""T
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