And then there’s Max.
He’s at center ice. No stick. No helmet, which strikes me first because every safety instinct I have fires immediately and then stops, because the context catches up. He’s crouched down to eye level with a boy who can’t be over five, both of them studying the ice with matching expressions of deep seriousness. Max is talking. The boy is nodding slowly. Max then stands, skates two feet away, and demonstrates a small stop, a spray of ice, and nothing remotely resembling what I’ve witnessed him do during practice. Deliberate. Slowed down.
The boy tries it. Wobbles. Max shoots one hand out without hesitation and catches him by the back of his jacket, holds him upright, and doesn’t make a single thing of it. Just steadies him and waits. The boy tries again. This time he stops. A small, shaky, perfect stop. Max doesn't grin. He just looks at the kid the way you treat something that genuinely delights you, open and unguarded, and says something that makes the boy's whole body go electric with pride.
My grip on the clipboard is so firm that its edge is digging into my palm. I look away. I focus on my notes. The boards. The Zamboni bay. Anything except what's happening at center ice. It doesn’t help. Because then Piper’s daughter comes flying across the ice and hits Max at approximately the speed of a freight train and he catches her mid-air and spins her once without even shifting his weight, like she weighs nothing, like he’s been catching her his wholelife, and she shrieks with a joy so pure it echoes off the rafters.
“Again, Uncle Max!”
Uncle Max.
He spins her again. She shrieks again. The boy who learned to stop comes barreling over now too, arms out, demanding his turn, and Max juggles them both in a way that should not be physically possible for a man his size and probably isn’t technically legal in terms of rink safety protocols. I write nothing on my clipboard. I’m staring. I can't find the part of me that should stop. He sets them both down with the kind of care you only use with things that matter to you.
Before I can react, Piper’s daughter grabs my hand and drags me straight onto the ice toward Max.
“Show her the spin!”
“Oh no,” I say immediately.
“Oh yes,” Max says.
The child wedges our hands together as if she’s solving a diplomatic crisis.
“Now spin.”
“This feels unsafe,” I mutter.
“For who?” Max asks. His hand closes around mine. Warm and bare. Strong enough that my knees nearly forget their structural responsibilities. But it doesn’t matter because Maxwell Stevens literally lifts me off my feet and spins me around before I can stop him. Then he lets me slide down his hard body until we are face to face. “Seems pretty safe to me. You don’t need skates to have fun on the ice with me.”He winks.
The little girl laughs and yells over to Piper. “Did I do good, Mommy?” I should’ve known.
Max makes a startling remark that sends them racing across the ice. His fingers remain locked around my waist, and he gazes directly at me. I don’t break away fast enough. That’s my first mistake. The second mistake is the half-second I don't arrange my expression in time. He sees it before I can pull it back. I watch him see it. My head drops, and I scurry away as fast as I can without skates on the ice. Too little, too late.
He skates over slowly. Fluid and unhurried. No performance in it. He stops at the boards a few feet away. His cheeks are red from the cold air, hair is wrecked. He looks nothing like the locker room version. And nothing like anything I have a professional category for.
“Surprised?” he asks. The question is reserved. No grin attached to it. He’s not using it to score a point. He actually wants to know. That's what I can't prepare for. I could handle the grin. I’ve been handling the grin all week. But this is Max Stevens standing in front of me without a single layer of performance, asking an honest question with genuine eyes. This version of him isn't in any file I've built. I don’t answer. Because yes. The answer is yes. I have spent a week building a working model of this man from penalties and film clips and the deliberate, maddening charm he runs like a defense mechanism. I knew the enforcer. I knew the provocateur. The guy from Rockford, I knew, pulled me into a hot tub beneath the pines and, for one reckless night, made me feel as though I didn’t have to be careful.
Most men perform confidence. Max weaponizes honesty, and somehow that’s worse. I did not know this.
That he slows his demonstrations down for small children was unknown to me. He catches people. Steadies them. Doesn't make a thing of it. Genuine delight renders him utterly unguarded; a state I haven't seen all week, not even in the sauna when he uttered words that came with a price. He is more than I built him to be. That is the problem. My brain is registering this as a structural problem.
“You’re good with them,” I say finally. My voice comes out steady. Another personal achievement.
He glances back at the ice. The two kids have pulled Chase into some kind of game that involves him falling dramatically every time they hit him with the foam puck, which Chase is doing with what I can only describe as professional commitment. Max watches it, and tenderness moves through his expression. “Piper’s kids are easy,” he says. “They already know what they want. You just have to not get in the way.” He says it as if it were nothing. Like the philosophy he just handed me, the words are obvious and small. I record it in the part of myself I was supposed to stop adding things to.
“The boy,” I say. “The stop you were teaching him. You shortened your knee bend by half.” He blinks. Stares back at me. “So he could replicate it,” I continue. “You calibrated the demonstration to his body, not yours.”
A pause. “Yeah.”
“You do that in the film sessions too.” I keep my voice clinical. Informational. A woman discussing techniques. “When I run a clip back, you watch the feet first. You always read body mechanics before you read the play.”
He’s very still. “I never thought about it that way.”
“I know.” And that’s the thing. That’s what’s been sitting under this all week. The thing I’ve been trying to avoid observing directly. “Your instincts for this game are stronger than your penalty record indicates. You’re not just an enforcer who reads the ice. You read people. You always have.”
The words land somewhere. I watch it happen. They absorb and stay. He stares at me the way you look at someone who just said the thing you’d stopped expecting anyone to say. I know that expression. I’ve worn it. This time, I’ll avert my gaze first. Back to my clipboard. Back to the footage notes I’m no longer seeing. “Coach Briggs is waiting,” I say. “Enjoy the skate.” I walk back toward the tunnel before my voice does what my face already did. Behind me, I hear the kids shriek his name again. I hear the sound of skates on ice, weight shifting, someone being caught. I don’t turn around. Reaching the tunnel, I make it to the hallway. I make it twelve steps toward the film room before I stop, stand still in the fluorescent solitude, and breathe.
He reads people. He always has. Including, apparently, me. The worst part is that I meant it as an observation. It landed as something else. In the acoustics of an empty rink, uncomfortably close to: I see you too.
