"Thanks."
Skates scraped ice beyond the glass. Voices echoed off concrete. The usual pre-game chaos—questions, equipment checks, nervous energy burning itself out through movement. I'd lived this routine for twenty years. Could navigate it blind. Which meant my hands kept working while my brain did something monumentally stupid. Wandered back to the café. To her.
Focus.
I gripped the marker harder, added another X to the offensive zone coverage. We needed tighter rotation on the penalty kill. Wyatt could handle the short side if Sam pressured high?—
"Hey Coach, Crown's asking about rotation minutes."
"Tell him he gets what he earns in practice."
"Copy."
The door opened. Closed. Someone laughed. The familiar rhythm of organized chaos that usually grounded me.
Today it just felt like noise.
It's game day.
I should be locked in. Reviewing every adjustment, every potential matchup, every weak point in the other team's defense. Instead, I kept seeing the way Olivia's fingers trembled when she handed me coffee this morning. The shadow under her eyes that hadn't been there yesterday.
The way she'd looked at that rookie—caught off guard, uncomfortable, trying to be polite when she should've felt safe enough to tell him to back off immediately.
My jaw tightened.
She's not your problem.
I knew that. Logically, rationally, I understood that Olivia Bennett was a part-time café employee I had no business thinking about. No claim to. No right to worry over just because I'd pulled her out of a nightmare fifteen years ago.
She was an adult. Capable. Handling her own life.
And I was her boss's colleague with a two-decade age gap and enough emotional damage to keep a therapist employed for years. The math wasn't complicated. So why couldn't I stop replaying the moment our fingers brushed over a coffee cup?
"Ackerman—Barrett wants the final lineup in five."
"Tell him it's ready." I grabbed the sheet, scanned it one last time. Everyone was positioned correctly. The matchups made sense. We'd drilled these plays until they were muscle memory. I handed it off without meeting anyone's eyes.
Get it together.
Another skate scrape. Another shout. The clock ticking down toward puck drop.
I turned back to the board, pretended to study strategies I'd memorized hours ago, and tried to ignore the fact that my mind kept circling back to one question: What had put that fear back in her eyes? And why did every instinct I possessed scream at me to find out?
I happened to glance up. Mistake.
She sat alone in the stands—her small frame hunched forward, elbows on knees, watching the ice with an intensity that didn't match her quiet demeanor. The arena lights hadn't come up fully yet, leaving her half-shadowed in the dimness. Most people wouldn't have noticed her there.
I noticed.
And then—worse—she looked at me. Not a casual glance. Not the quick, nervous dart of eyes I'd seen from her before. This was different. Direct. Unguarded.
Something tightened low in my stomach.
Heat spread through my chest—unwanted, unwelcome, impossible to ignore. The kind of awareness that had no business existing between a man my age and a girl barely past twenty. Between a coach and a café employee. Between someone who'd carried her out of hell and someone who shouldn't remember what her scared eyes looked like at seven years old.
I should look away.
Look away.
