“You good?” he asks, casually.
I roll my eyes to give him something familiar. “I’m great.I’m thrilled. I love fluorescent lighting and overpriced, burnt coffee and the lingering scent of hockey boys.”
He grins, and I know it’s a performance. His eyebrows are pulled together in a way that’s supposed to look relaxed and instead makes it clear he’s holding himself together by habit alone. He’s in that in-between stage where he’s not a boy, yet not a full man—tall, still adjusting to his own height, like he grew too fast and hasn’t forgiven his body for it yet.
His excitement makes him reckless, like all teenagers are reckless.
His nerves make him sharper.
With anyone else, it would be hard to tell which is which. With him, I can tell by the slight tap of fingertips on his leg and the way his left shoulder creeps up when his thoughts get ahead of his breath.
“Okay,” I say as a large security guard nods at us from the end of the hallway. “Now you can go be annoying on the ice.”
He smiles, victorious. “Por fin.”
We push through the swinging doors and the cold hits us immediately.
The training rink we are assigned to is still wildly better than our rink back home. The boards are scuffed, yes, but nothing looks like it’s one hit away from shattering completely. The hallway smells faintly of rubber mats and old sweat. Signs taped to the walls mix printed schedules with handwritten warnings, and it’s familiar yet foreign at the same time.
The exhibition rink is next door, connected by a corridor that looks too spotless to be real. We walked past it yesterday.Rodrigo slowed in front of the glass, eyes going wide at the empty stands, the spotlights, the kind of perfect ice he’s only seen a handful of times in his lifetime, the majority of those this year alone.
He inhaled like he’d been underwater too long.
“Okay,” he murmured, reverent.
Now he’s already pulling his guards off before we reach the boards, and I have to stop and wonder when exactly he even changed into his skates.
“Slow down,” I tell him, because I have to. It’s my job to be the brakes.
“I am slow,” he says, which is a lie delivered with the unshakable confidence of a seventeen-year-old whose frontal lobe is still under massive amounts of construction.
He sets his guards down with more care than his tone suggests, then looks up at me—waiting, without admitting it.
I give him a small nod.
Dale.
Rodrigo steps onto the ice and pushes off, and his body changes immediately. His shoulders drop. His jaw unclenches. His long arms find their place. The noise in him quiets.
So does mine.
It’s always like this. The ice takes him and gives him back to himself.
I take my usual spot near the boards, close enough to see his feet without making him feel watched. It’s a balance I’ve learned to hold over the years, one that shifts as he grows.When he was younger, my eyes were safety. Now my eyes can become pressure if I’m not careful.
On the ice, a handful of skaters are already moving, carving overlapping circles that look chaotic to anyone who doesn’t know what to watch for. Music bleeds from the speakers in clipped bursts—one chorus colliding with another. A whistle and a laugh, followed by a dull thud against the boards that makes Rodrigo glance over and then keep going, unbothered.
Good.
He weaves through traffic like he belongs there, polite but not apologetic.
That’s the point. That’s what I’ve been trying to teach him since he was twelve: take up space without asking permission for it.
Five years ago, he used to look at me before every entry, studying my face intently to understand if the jump was good enough, clean enough. Now he looks at the ice like it’s a language and he’s fluent in it.
I should only feel proud. And I do—immensely. But sometimes that’s not enough.
Rodrigo starts marking his run-through, eighty percent power and heart. Arms half-committed. Jumps not fully snapped. Smart. He knows better than to burn his legs on practice ice. He’s learned how to save himself.
