Dean
By the fourth day,the rink should have felt settled.
That was usually how competition weeks worked for me. Timing got locked in and muscle memory took over. The longer I stayed somewhere, the less I had to think.
Today that wasn’t happening.
I pushed through another run, relying on habit to carry me while my attention wandered. The skating itself was fine, clean entry, clean landing. Nothing Mark could point to and complain about.
Halfway through the footwork, I caught myself looking for him again.
I drove into the next pass, sharpening every transition as though precision alone could solve the problem.
It didn’t.
“Do it again.” Mark’s voice carried across the ice.
I circled back toward the boards. “It was fine.”
“You rushed the exit.”
“It still worked.”
Mark didn’t answer right away. His attention drifted past me toward the far side of the rink.
Unfortunately, mine followed.
That was apparently all the confirmation he needed.
“Why is Luka Davorin staring at you?”
I looked back at him sharply. That wasn’t a question I wanted my coach asking. “Everybody watches everybody. Shared practice, remember?”
“Not like this.”
I adjusted my grip on my gloves.
Mark had spent years coaching elite athletes. Pretending he hadn’t noticed things was not one of his skills.
His expression remained infuriatingly neutral. “Dean, you’re skating like you know exactly when he’s looking.”
That hit a little too close to home.
I pushed off before he could say anything else.
“Again,” Mark called after me.
I stayed on the ice long enough to finish the session without embarrassing myself, though the ease I normally relied on never fully returned. The elements stayed clean enough that nobody else would have noticed a difference, but my concentration kept catching on the same point.
Luka.
By the time practice ended, my legs felt fine, breathing steady, but irritation still sat under my skin because none of this made sense. I wasn’t somebody who got thrown off balance by another skater.
Apparently, that was no longer true.
I toweled off quickly and headed toward the locker rooms while the noise of the rink faded behind me into the usual blur of blades, voices, and coaches calling corrections across the ice.
The corridor was crowded now, athletes moving between sessions in half-zipped jackets and skate guards, conversations overlapping. Normally I barely noticed any of it.
