I sat still, breathing slow, letting the locker room noise fade into the background.
Catching my reflection in the black glass of the phone screen, I saw the scar, the tired eyes, and the guy who’d spent his life bracing for the worst. And underneath it, something I still wasn’t used to.
Relief.
I next turned my attention to stripping off my damp pads, the shoulder straps sticking to my skin, and shoved everything into the locker. My phone went back into the side pocket of my bag, where it wouldn’t get wet.
Five minutes later, the shower was hot enough to sting. I stood under the spray longer than I needed to, letting the heat dig into the muscles around my shoulder blades, and by the time I stepped out, the locker room had mostly emptied.
A few guys were still at their stalls, but the noise had dropped to the low thrum of a room winding down. I grabbed my phone again. Karter’s message was still there. I read it twice before switching text threads.
To Mama, I sent a single message:Hi Mama. Completed first skate. I’m okay. Love you.
My phone went dark, and I sat there a second longer in the quiet, the heat from the shower fading off my skin, thinking about nothing in particular... just soaking in the fact that I was finally here.
My Milwaukee apartment building sat ten minutes from the rink, a brick mid-rise with a parking garage. My rented unit came fully furnished: a gray couch that still smelled like plastic wrap, a bed with an actual sturdy frame, and a kitchen counter clean enough to eat off.
The lease office had stocked it like a hotel room, right down to the matching towels. Nothing in it was mine yet. No posters, no dents in the wall, no history. And the silence was different from the Ice House attic, cleaner but also emptier, and it took me the first three nights to stop listening for Karter breathing through the wall.
I ate a frozen dinner over the sink and spent the afternoon on the couch with game tape on my laptop. Three hours of penalty kills from last season, and I rewound the same sequence four times without absorbing any of it.
My legs were still shot from the morning skate, the kind of deep muscle fatigue that settled into the bones and stayed there.
Around nine, I gave up and hit the FaceTime button.
Karter’s face came up on my screen.
“Is that my shirt?” I asked.
Karter glanced down at the collar of the shirt he was wearing. “You left it in the laundry basket.”
“And you’re stretching out the neck.”
“It’s already stretched out.” He tugged the fabric down over his nose and inhaled, dramatic as hell. “Besides, it smells like you. I’m never washing it.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“Oh, please, you love it.” The video feed shook as Karter set his phone against something, the screen tilting to catch him leaning back in his desk chair, grinning. The usual tension around his face was gone. He looked relaxed, the way he only got when it was just us.
“So, hate to tell you this, but you look like shit,” he said.
“Thanks. You’re the second person to tell me that today.”
“No, seriously. Did they even let you breathe up there?”
“I feel like I’m dying.” I let my head drop against the back of the couch. “Coaches here don’t hold back.”
“Have you puked yet?”
“Almost. Lunch stayed down by about two seconds.”
“A personal best.” He laughed. “Anyone giving you trouble?”
“Veteran named Clarke. But he’s alright. I think he’ll really test me tomorrow.”
“You’ll pass.” Karter didn’t say it like a question.
“How are classes?”
