Page 19 of Fractured Ice

Early morning skates. The only time that's entirely mine.

I cap my pen and walk.

Whatever's going on with Ethan Walker, I've got enough for a first interview and a semester of access ahead of me. That's the job. That's what matters. Everything else is noise.

I'm very good at tuning out noise.

Usually.

5

Sienna

The one drawback of covering hockey is the cold.

I dressed for class today, which means a simple, fitted navy dress, black stockings, ankle boots, and approximately the wrong number of layers for sitting in an ice rink for two hours. I find a spot in the middle of the stands where I have a decent sightline to most of the ice, set up my camera on the seat beside me, open my notebook, and accept that my fingers are going to be slightly numb by the time practice ends.

Small price. I've interviewed people in worse conditions.

The team's already running drills when I settle in, and I spend the first few minutes just getting oriented, learning the shapes of the practice, figuring out where to point the camera. I'm looking for Ethan. That's the job. I need to see how he moves in his actual environment, how he communicates, what he looks like when nobody's watching him be charming.

I find him pretty quickly.

And then I sit there and do something I wasn't expecting to do, which is actually watch him.

Ethan on the ice is not the same person as Ethan at breakfast. That version of him is easy and disarming and constantly trying to make me laugh at something I don't want to laugh at. This version is locked in. He's directing a drill on the far end of the ice, calling something to a younger player, repositioning him with a gesture that's quick and precise and entirely without condescension. The younger player nods and adjusts before Ethan moves on, already reading the next thing that needs his attention.

He's fast. I knew hockey players were fast, but knowing it as a concept and watching it are different. He crosses the ice in stretches that shouldn't cover the distance they cover, changes direction without the kind of wind-up I'd expect, and the whole thing looks easy, which I understand enough about athletics to know means it's the opposite.

I take a photo.

Then another.

I'm supposed to be taking notes. I look down at my notebook and there are four words on the page from the last twenty minutes, which is embarrassing. I write two more and then I look up again because there's a play developing on Ethan's end of the ice that I want to see how he handles.

He handles it well. He handles everything well. He's talking constantly, to teammates, to himself maybe, I can't hear it from here but I can see it, and the team moves differently around him than around other players. There's a gravity to it. People know where he is without looking. Even Jace, the captain of the team, seems to be sitting back a bit more and letting Ethan take the lead, which is curious. Do they often handle practices like this?

I've covered enough sports to recognize a natural leader when I see one. I just didn't expect to see one when I looked at Ethan Walker. And I didn’t expect to find him… this hot.

I take another photo.

He's in the middle of running a drill when he glances toward the stands, and I know the exact second he spots me because the entire shape of him changes. It's subtle, even the coach probably doesn't see it, but I've been watching him for forty minutes and I see it. His shoulders drop out of the focused position they've been in. He skates a half-second slower into the next sequence.

He's seen me.

Great.

I put my eye back to the camera and pretend to be very focused on the other end of the ice.

For about thirty seconds, things proceed normally. Then I look up and Ethan's doing something that I can only describe as showing off. He takes a shot he didn't need to take, all extra power and no strategy, and it goes wide. A teammate calls something to him that doesn't look complimentary. He glances at the stands.

I look down at my notebook.

This continues for the next twenty minutes and it gets progressively worse. He's skating like he's trying to prove something to someone, which, I understand, is me, and it's having the opposite effect from the one he probably wants. The plays he's forcing don't work the way the instinctive ones did. He misses a pass he should've had easily, and the teammate on the receiving end throws his hands up.

I write: loses focus when observed. Reconsider whether to use that.

I look up just in time to see Ethan glance toward me instead of the drill coming at him from the left and then he's gone, absolutely leveled by a hit he never saw coming. The sound of it echoes in the rink and I'm on my feet before I've made any decision to stand up.