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Cally cared deeply.

To him, strength and endurance training wasn’t about brute force; it was an exact science. Every weight and rep went into his little black notebook. He tracked details I didn’t even know existed—scapular retraction, hip alignment, edge stability—and the second my form broke down or I got overly winded, he’d kill the set.

Garbage reps, he’d told me, only taught your body garbage patterns.

The fact that this was only being pointed out to me now was a bit of a mind fuck.

I’d been playing for years, and my teams all had strength coaches, full sports science setups, and staff who supposedly knew their shit. I’d done the work, training in-season like I was told a hockey player was supposed to train.

But in those setups, you got the program everybody else got. Nobody was watching your bar path on the bench press. Nobody was breaking down your squat depth on video. Nobody was sitting across from you asking why you were compensating with your shoulders, because there were twenty other guys in the room who also needed attention.

We had the program, just not personalized attention, and I hadn’t known to ask for it. I still didn’t know whether they would have accommodated that.

Cally, on the other hand, had been getting this kind of attention since he was a kid. It was baked into him at a level I was only now starting to understand—and feel in every burning inch of muscle as I held two hundred and twenty-five pounds suspended over my chest.

I drove through the final rep, Cally’s hand hovering an inch above the bar, ready to spot me if my form collapsed, but I locked out and racked it on my own.

“Good set,” he said, stepping back toward the squat rack a few feet away.

“Thanks.” I sat up, dragging a towel across my forehead, then scooped up my water bottle.

He crossed his arms over his chest, his gaze dipping to my torso. “Your obliques are getting crazy.”

“Sorry, what?” I sputtered, water dribbling down my chin.

It wasn’t that I had a bad body. But it wasn’t the kind of body Cally had, which looked like it had been sculpted by one of those Italian Renaissance guys. Standing next to him in the locker room was a humbling experience for most of us. A guy who looked like a fucking superhero complimenting my body simply did not compute.

Slowly, he dragged his gaze away from my torso up to my face, stammering, “Um, I just meant you’re recruiting more through the core on the press. Your form’s good now. You can see the work. Yeah. That’s—that’s all I meant.”

“Is that your way of saying you like what you see?” I teased, adding in a flirty little wink just to be a dick.

I watched, in real time, as his brain seemed to glitch. He blinked several times, his mouth opening and closing like a fish. Then his neck turned a deep, blotchy red, the color climbing to his perfect fucking hairline.

Hunter Callahan didn’t get rattled. Not by guys who ran their mouths at him on the ice. Not by reporters, who camped outside the arena in an attempt to corner him with questions about why he’d taken so long to link up with the team that’d drafted him or what his dad thought about that team’s chances now that Cally was here. And certainly not by the coaches when they corrected him, though that didn’t happen too often.

The only person who seemed to rattle this guy was me.

And I liked it.

So much so that I’d started looking for opportunities just to fuck with him.

Which was probably something I should examine at some point, since he was taking time away from whatever he did outside of hockey to make sure I wasn’t the next guy cut. Fucking with him didn’t seem like a great way to repay that kindness, but I sometimes also got the impression he kind of liked it, too—even when he was glitching.

“That came out wrong. Oblique recruitment is—” He gestured at my midsection. “There’s this, like, kinetic chain. The press isn’t just an upper-body movement. Your obliques stabilize the trunk, and if they’re not firing properly, the load redistributes to the anterior delts, which is what was happening with you before. Your breathing’s also better—you’re bracing through the lift instead of holding your breath—and that builds intra-abdominal pressure, which protects your spine and lets you load heavier.” His shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch. “That’s all I meant by it.”

I stared at him for a beat, mentally replaying everything he’d just said and confirming I had no fucking idea what a kinetic chain was or why it mattered, only that it seemed to be something good.

“Where the fuck did you learn all that?”

“Harvard.”

“Yeah, no shit, but like, why? How?”

Most players I knew who’d gone the college route hadn’t really focused on academics. For them, school was a way for their bodies to catch up with their skills, or to refine aspects of their game the grind of the minors might have snuffed out.

Cally shrugged, murmuring, “I majored in Human Biology and Evolution. Even thought about becoming a doctor for a while”

I blinked at him. “You could have been a doctor?”