Felix:You’re still late.
I laughed. Out loud. Alone, in my kitchen, with the dead plant and the mug that needed washing and a brain that was just starting to accept that we’d done it, we’d actually done it.
Then I grabbed my coffee and went to see my boyfriend.
The film room looked the same as it always did , bad chairs, worse lighting, the laptop on the table and the whiteboard with someone’s diagram still half,erased from yesterday. Mivo and Reeves were already there. Kieran had a muffin and the expression of a man who had been up too late on a gaming headset.
Felix was at the front with the remote.
This was normal. This was our normal: him running film, me being late.
I came in two minutes past and took my usual seat beside him. Set my coffee down. Felt the eyes in the room do a quick, collective flicker , there, gone , like everyone was checking the frequency.
“Morning,” I said. To the room. To him.
“Morning,” he said.
Just that. Just morning. No loaded eye contact, no flinch, no careful avoidance.
But he put my coffee a little closer to his hand when he said it, like he was claiming it by proximity.
He clicked play.
We ran the breakdown.
If you’d frozen the session and shown it to someone from October, they wouldn’t have seen a difference. Same content. Same notes. Same Mivo asking questions. Same Kieran pretending not to take them seriously and then doing exactly what Felix said on ice anyway.
The difference was that I didn’t have to work to be in my chair.
For weeks I’d been managing myself in this room, keeping my volume calibrated, my jokes useful, my eyes off Felix’s hands on the laptop and his shoulders when he leaned forward. Keeping the fine intact.
Now the fine didn’t require maintenance.
It was just , there. Underneath everything else, the way structural supports are underneath a building. I could lean into my seat, stretch my legs, nudge his knee with mine when he rewound the same clip for the third time and say, “You’re enjoying this too much,” and he could say, without looking away from the screen, “Correcting preventable errors is one of life’s few pure pleasures,” and I could feel the room breathe around us.
Later, Mivo leaned over to Reeves and said, low but not quiet, “I don’t know what changed, but the team vibe is back.”
I heard it.
Reeves said, “We’re scoring again. I’m not asking questions.”
Also fair.
Practice was where it really hit.
The ice had been wrong for weeks. Hartley had said it out loud once, in his way, and then he’d stood back and watched me and Felix try to fix it separately, like two idiots with tools on opposite sides of the same wall.
Today the ice felt like it remembered us.
Warm,up laps. The usual chirping, the usual sounds , Kieran doing commentary, Mivo still talking about the last game, Reeves groaning about some drill he’d invented an exaggerated hatred for.
Felix skated past me, shoulder bumping my arm just enough to register.
“Stay on your lane in the two,on,ones,” he said. “You’ve been drifting high.”
“Yes, coach,” I said.
He gave me a look.
