Cold Enough To Burn

“Again.”

I say it out loud even though nobody is here to hear me.

That’s the thing about 5am. The rink belongs to me and nobody else. No coaches with clipboards. No other skaters warming up in my peripheral vision. No noise except the hum of the overhead lights and the sound my blades make against the ice.

I push off from the boards and go again.

The combination I’ve been working on for three weeks… a triple lutz into a triple toe loop, has been fighting me all morning. My left landing keeps pulling wide. Coach Darren would tell me it’s my hip angle. My old coach before him would have told me to feel the ice before I commit. My mother would tell me to eat something first.

None of them are here.

So I go again.

My name is Neve Delaney. I am nineteen years old. I have seventeen dollars in my checking account, a crack in my right skate boot I’ve been ignoring for two months, and one dream that I have been feeding every single thing I have since I was eleven years old.

I don’t come from money. My mother cleaned houses in the suburbs of Chicago so I could afford rink time.

I’ve skated in borrowed costumes and secondhand blades and competition venues where I was clearly the girl who didn’t belong. I’ve heard the whispers in changing rooms. Seen the looks.

None of that matters when I’m on the ice.

On the ice I am not the girl with the cracked boot and the empty account. I am exactly what I was made to be.

I hit the lutz. Land it clean. Follow it straight into the toe loop and come out of it steady, controlled, perfect.

“Yes.” I breathe it out into the cold air and watch it disappear.

Then I hear the door.

I don’t have to turn around to know who it is. I know his footsteps. Isn’t that embarrassing. Two years of Beckett Hargrove managing my career and I know the way his shoes sound on the rubber mat outside the rink entrance.

Measured and unhurried. Like a man who has never been late for anything in his life.

I keep skating. I’m not going to stop and look at him like I’ve been waiting. Even if some stupid part of me has been.

“You landed it.”

His voice carries across the empty rink. Low. Calm.

The same voice he uses whether he’s telling me I’ve qualified for a competition or telling me my sponsorship fell through. Beckett Hargrove doesn’t have volume settings. He just has that voice.

“I’ve been landing it,” I say without stopping. “For the last forty minutes.”

“Your left edge was pulling on the lutz.”

I stopped skating and turned around.

He’s standing at the boards in his coat. Dark wool.

Always the same dark wool coat this time of year. His hair is neat because of course it is. It’s five in the morning and Beckett looks like he stepped out of a meeting that hasn’t happened yet.

He is twenty seven years old and he manages four athletes. I am the youngest. He never lets me forget that. Not with words… Beckett doesn’t waste words.

Just with that look he has. The one that says he sees more than you want him to.

“My left edge is fine,” I tell him.

“It was fine just now. The first forty minutes is what I’m talking about.”

I skate to the boards and stop in front of him. There’s always this moment when I get close. This stupid, inconvenient moment where my chest does something I refuse to name. He’s my manager. He is older. He is the most controlled, unreachable person I have ever met.

And I have been in love with him for so long it’s embarrassing.

“You’re early,” I say instead of all of that.

“You’re always here at five.”

“And you’re never here at five.”

He doesn’t answer that. He looks at me the way he sometimes does when he thinks I won’t notice… like he’s calculating something that has nothing to do with my skating scores. Then it’s gone. Back to the flat, professional expression I know better than his actual face.

“How are you feeling about Thursday?” he asks.

Thursday. The regional qualifier. The one that determines whether I go to the invitational that could change everything.

“Good,” I say.

“Neve.”

“I’m ready, Beckett.”

He looks at me for a moment. “Your stamina in the back half of your programme dropped by eight seconds at the last practice session.”

“I know.”

“Eight seconds is not nothing.”

“I know that too.” I grip the board between us. “I’ll fix it.”

He holds my gaze. Something passes through his expression too fast for me to read. Then he straightens and looks down at his phone. Back to business. Back to the version of him that I am supposed to deal with.

“Good,” he says.

He starts to turn. I should let him go. I always let him go.

“Beckett.”

He stops.

“Why are you here at five in the morning?”

He doesn’t answer immediately. That alone is unusual. Beckett always has an answer. He looks back at me over his shoulder and something in his face is different.

Not different enough for anyone else to notice.

I notice.

“There’s something we need to discuss,” he says.

“About Thursday?”

“No.” A pause. “Tomorrow. My office.”

He walks away before I can ask anything else. His footsteps cross the rubber mat. The door opens. Closes.

I stand at the boards in an empty rink at five in the morning and stare at the space where he was.

Tomorrow. My office.

Four words and somehow every single one of them feels like a warning.