I lay back, staring up at her ceiling, which had glow-in-the-dark stars arranged in actual constellations.
"Close your eyes," she said, and her voice shifted into something lower, softer. "You're in goal. Period one. The puck drops."
I closed my eyes, and immediately my heart rate kicked up. But then her hand settled on my chest, right over my sternum, warm and grounding.
"Breathe with me," she murmured.
I followed her rhythm, feeling my heartbeat slow under her palm.
"The other team has possession. They're skating toward you, but you're ready. You've studied their patterns. You know their tells." Her voice was hypnotic, painting the scene. "Their center winds up for a slapshot. You see it in slow motion—the way his shoulders drop, the angle of his stick. You know exactly where this shot is going."
I could see it. More than see it—I was there, in that moment, completely calm.
"You shift your weight. The puck comes at you like it's on a string, and you catch it in your glove. Easy. Like you've done it a thousand times before. Because you have."
Her hand was still on my chest, moving slightly with each breath. It was the most intimate thing I'd experienced, and we were both fully clothed with a foot of space between us.
"Every save is like that," she continued. "You've practiced these movements until they're not thoughts anymore—they're just actions. Muscle memory. Trust."
"That's what you did," I said, opening my eyes to look at her. "Before competitions."
She nodded, her hand still resting over my heart. "I'd visualize every element of the program until I could perform it in my sleep. Every jump, every spin, every moment choreographed in my mind first. The anxiety doesn't go away, but it transforms into something else. Preparation. Readiness."
"My dad doesn't understand that." The words came out before I could stop them. "He wanted me to take over the family banking firm. Thought hockey was... frivolous. A waste of my potential."
Mira's eyes softened. "And the anxiety?"
"Is partly about proving that abandoning the predetermined path was worth it. That I'm not just his disappointment in goalie pads."
"You're not," she said firmly. "You're one of the best goalies I've ever seen, and I've seen Olympic-level competition. Your dad's wrong."
"You say that like it's a fact."
"It is a fact. I have statistical evidence." She reached for one of her notebooks, and I caught her hand.
"Stay," I said. "Just... talk to me. Tell me about your pre-competition rituals. All of them."
So she did. She told me about the specific breakfast she always ate, the way she'd listen to the same playlist in the same order, the lucky hair tie she'd worn for three years until it finally broke. She told me about visualizing not just the performance, but the feeling afterward—the satisfaction of landing every element, the pride in executing the program exactly as planned.
"You don't visualize winning?" I asked.
"Winning is outside my control. The judges, the other competitors, the conditions—I can't control those things. But I can control my performance. So that's what I focus on."
"That's very zen."
"That's very anxiety management," she corrected with a small smile. "You can't afford to spiral about outcomes when you're attempting a triple axel."
We talked for another hour, her hand still resting over my heart, my breathing synced to hers. At some point, I realized the knot of anxiety in my chest had loosened significantly, replaced by a different kind of tension—the awareness of how close we were, how easy it would be to pull her down beside me.
"Thank you," I said finally. "This helped. More than anything else has."
"Good." She started to move her hand away, and I caught it, lacing our fingers together.
"Mira?"
"Yes?"
"You said you wanted to understand what I'm dealing with as a goalie." I sat up, bringing us face to face. "What if I wanted to understand what you dealt with as a pairs skater?"
