Chapter 6 Cracks in the Ice

~Author's POV~

Colt limps into the weight room the next morning trying to walk it off in front of the few teammates present. But Liam the six-foot-five defenseman was impossible to fool. He clocks in on Colt's discomfort as soon as he walks past him.

“You okay there, cap?" Liam asks.

Colt waved it off as usual. "Yeah, no sweat. Just a slight limp.”

"That's not a normal limp, Colt," Liam said, dropping a dumbbell back onto the rack with a heavy clank that echoed through the near-empty weight room. "That's a 'something's actually wrong' limp."

Colt froze mid-step, one hand braced on the squat rack, caught red-handed trying to walk off whatever was happening in his hip before anyone clocked it. "It's nothing, man. Relax."

"I've watched you play through a broken finger without blinking," Liam said, straightening up to his full six-foot-five, arms folding across his chest like a wall going up. "You don't limp for nothing, Colt. Not you."

"Maybe I'm just getting old."

"You're twenty-two."

"Old in hockey years." Colt forced a grin, the same easy, careless grin he gave scouts, reporters, his father and anyone who asked too many questions he didn't want to answer.

When Liam casts him a judgy look, Colt sighs.

"Alright, alright. I took a hard check against our Alberta game last weekend. Bruised groin. It's already healing up."

Liam's eyes narrowed slightly. "That's the exact same thing you told me last week."

"Because it's the truth."

"You said it faster this time." Liam tilted his head, studying him the way he studied a chemistry problem he couldn't quite solve. "Faster and smoother. Like you rehearsed it."

Colt felt something tighten behind his ribs. He hadn't expected Liam to notice that part. "You've got a whole conspiracy theory going, huh? Should've been pre-law instead of pre-med."

"I'd rather be wrong about your hip than right about you hiding something from the coaching staff a month before the draft," Liam said flatly. No jokes this time. Just the plain, heavy truth sitting between them.

Colt looked away first, grabbing a towel off the bench and wiping down his neck like it needed it.

“You'd tell me if it was bad, right? Like, actually bad. Not 'walk it off before Coach notices' bad."

"It's not bad," Colt said again, rolling his shoulder like that somehow proved his hip was fine. "I've got it handled, Liam. I promise."

For a long second, Liam just looked at him and Colt felt the weight of that look more than he wanted to admit. Liam wasn't stupid. He never had been, no matter how many opposing players underestimated him because of his size, no matter how many people assumed a six-foot-five enforcer couldn't also be the guy quietly acting organic chemistry between practices.

But Liam also wasn't the type to force a locked door open when a friend clearly needed it shut.

"Alright," Liam said finally, picking the dumbbell back up. "Your funeral."

"Not funny."

"Wasn't trying to be funny." Liam turned back to his set, jaw tight, and that was supposed to be the end of it.

It wasn't, not really. The lie sat there anyway, quiet and heavy, coiling in Colt's chest like something he'd swallowed wrong and couldn't cough back up. It bothered him more than the actual pain did, if he was being honest with himself, which he tried not to be too often these days.

He'd told Nova the exact same lie two nights ago. Bruised groin. Hard check. Nothing serious. It had come out clean and practiced then too, smoother than it should have for something that wasn't rehearsed. Now he'd just repeated it to his best friend, word for word, like his body had quietly learned how to hide the truth without his permission.

That should have made him feel safer. Instead it made him feel like a fraud standing in his own gym, surrounded by guys who'd bleed for him on the ice and had no idea he was slowly falling apart from the hip down.

"You good?" Liam asked, not looking up from his set, voice softer now.

"Yeah," Colt said. "I'm good."

He wasn't sure which lie bothered him more anymore. The one about his hip, or the one about Rink B, and the fact that his own father's signature was the reason it might not exist in a month.

Liam didn't know about that part either. Nobody on the team did. As far as they were concerned, the Annex was just good news, more space, more funding, a bigger name attached to the program. None of them knew what it was costing on the other side of that deal.

Colt grabbed his bag off the bench harder than he meant to and headed for the door before Liam could ask anything else.

------

By the time midnight rolled around, Rink B sat in its usual dim quiet, the overhead lights humming low over empty bleachers, and Colt had almost forgotten the ache in his hip, mostly because Nova had spent the last twenty minutes drilling him on deep crossovers until his legs burned in a completely different way.

"Again," she said, standing at center ice with her arms folded, breath fogging faintly in the cold.

"We've done this ten times already, Arden."

"Then it should be easy the eleventh time."

"You say that like repetition doesn't hurt."

"Pain builds muscle memory," she said, unbothered. "Complaining builds nothing."

Colt exhaled hard through his nose, positioned himself at the blue line, and pushed off. He focused the way she'd been drilling into him for the past weeks, weight shifting cleanly from edge to edge, hips loose, core tight, letting the blade carry him through the curve instead of fighting it the way he always had before.

Somewhere around the third stride, something clicked.

The crossovers came smooth, one after another, no wobble, no stiff jerk through the hip, no forced momentum dragging him sideways like a shopping cart with a bad wheel. He carved a full lap around the circle clean and fluid, like his body had finally remembered how to do the thing she'd been screaming at him about for three straight weeks.

When he came to a stop in front of her, breathing hard but grinning, he caught something on her face he hadn't expected to see.

Surprise. Maybe even pride, real and unguarded, before she could catch it.

It was there for barely a second before she smoothed it back into her usual flat, unimpressed expression, but Colt had seen it. He knew exactly what he saw, and something warm and stupid unfurled in his chest at having caught her off guard for once instead of the other way around.

Neither of them said anything right away. The rink was silent except for the low hum of the compressors and for one long moment, they just looked at each other, something unspoken sitting heavy in the space between them that neither of them had the nerve to name out loud.

"That was…" Nova started, then stopped herself.

"Good?" Colt offered, eyebrows raised. "Impressive? Borderline elegant?"

"I was going to say 'not terrible.'"

"Same thing, Arden. Just say it."

"It was one clean lap," she said, though the corner of her mouth twitched like it wanted to do something other than frown. "Don't let it go to your head."

"Too late." Colt grinned wider, and the moment stretched a beat too long, the air between them shifting into something neither of them was equipped to deal with at this hour, on this ice, with everything else hanging over both their heads.

Colt broke it first. He always did.

"Careful, Arden," he said, smirking. "That looks almost like respect."

Nova opened her mouth, ready to fire something back the way she always did. Some sharp little jab to put him back in his place, to knock the smugness off his face before it got comfortable there. Nothing came out.

For the first time in weeks, she genuinely didn't have a comeback ready.

Her mouth stayed open half a second too long before she closed it, cheeks warming despite the cold, and something like panic flickered behind her eyes at the realization that she'd been caught with absolutely nothing to say.

"I…" she started.

"Yeah?" Colt leaned in slightly, clearly enjoying this far too much. "Go on. I'm listening."

"Shut up," she finally managed, which wasn't the comeback either of them expected, and definitely wasn't the win she wanted it to be.

She turned and skated off toward the boards instead, annoyed with herself more than with him. Annoyed that her chest had done something stupid and fluttery the second he'd looked at her like that, annoyed that she'd let him see her surprised at all after weeks of building a wall so carefully between them.

Colt watched her go, arms resting loose at his sides, his smirk staying fixed in place to cover something he didn't want to look at too closely. His chest felt strange. Lighter. Not from the skating, not from the drills, not from anything that had to do with hockey at all.

"Yeah," he muttered to no one, quiet enough that the empty rink swallowed the words whole. "Didn't think so, Barbie."

He didn't examine too closely why he'd wanted her to say something back.