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I run the next drill cleaner than any drill I’ve run all week.

She’s in my periphery the whole time. I’m not going to examine that.

Two more rotations, and I’m locked in. Not performing — I don’t perform in practice, Coach would have something to say about that — just cleaner than usual. More deliberate. I step up at the blue line on the third rep and make a read that’s half instinct, half something else, the part that doesn’t want to look sloppy in front of a girl in a green coat who watched me do this same job in Burlington and never once held back on telling me what she saw. I poke check clean. I close the gap. I get the body off the puck in the corner and the whistle goes and Coach writes something down without saying anything, which is how I know it was right.

I come off the boards for water and I let myself look over at section four.

She’s got her elbows on her knees. She’s leaning forward slightly, her coffee long gone, watching the line currently on the ice the way she watched me — focused, serious, taking stock. She’s not on her phone. She’s not doing anything except watching hockey at a Thursday afternoon practice when she didn’t have to be here.

I know why she’s here. It’s the same reason I went to her gym.

And here’s the thing about her watching.

Burlington was a game. Stakes, a scout, sixty minutes of everything on the line. A performance, whether I wanted it to be or not. This is practice. The grinding daily work: line rushes and checking drills and Coach yelling corrections and a whiteboard with arrows and forty guys doing the same thing until it’s in their bodies for good. It’s not cinematic. It’s not meant to be seen by anyone who doesn’t have to be here.

She came anyway. Dressed for the outside world. Coffee in hand. Watching the defensive zone coverage drill like she actually gives a damn about it.

I skate a hard shift. I run a guy into the boards clean. I make the right read three times in a row, the instinct firing the way it does when I’m in proper game-head. And somewhere in the third rep I realize I’m playing sharper than usual. Not performing — I don’t perform in practice — just cleaner. More locked in.

Because she’s watching. And I want her to see the real version.

Which is exactly what she gave me at her gym. She let me see the bad runs, the bail, the half-second at the top when it finally worked. The work, not the performance. I went to her gym to understand what Margo Ashby looks like when nobody in the building is deciding whether to find her impressive. I needed to know.

She came here for the same reason.

I don’t know how many people in either of our lives have bothered to want the work instead of the show. I know the number for me is very small. I know she’s in it.

I understood that about Wednesday about halfway through her drill.

Wednesday. That’s where my head goes when I come off the ice for water, breathing hard, the cold of the rink rising off me in the break room. The flashback comes in pieces — the specific pieces that surface when I’m not keeping them managed.

I texted her late Tuesday. you free tomorrow night. Not even a full sentence, not even punctuation. She sent back sailmaker’s empty by ten and that was the whole plan. I drove over after film session. Parked two houses down and walked, because his truck in the Sailmaker driveway is the kind of thing that gets noticed and talked about, and Beau and Sloane knowing is one thing — neither of us is ready for it to be a whole conversation with the rest of them. Not yet. Which is not something I do and not something I’m calling a choice so much as a fact that happened, and I did it anyway. Because the coin is still in the air and the Bruins scout still hasn’t called and the spreadsheet total went up again on the first and every time I think about the draft and the debt and the door I might be about to walk through, the only thing that actually quiets it is her.

The Sailmaker was dark downstairs. She’d left the side door unlocked. I went up.

Her room is exactly what I expected, which is to say it’s entirely her: color-coded and ordered and small in the way she chose small, the good light, the window seat, the corkboard with the whole semester pinned to it in four colors. And her in the middle of it, in a big sleep shirt and no makeup and her hair down, sitting on the edge of the bed with her laptop open like she’d been waiting and wasn’t going to admit she’d been waiting.

“You came,” she said. Not surprised. Just noting it.

“I came.” I shut the door behind me. The house was quiet — June and Wren presumably asleep, the Sailmaker doing its old-house settling in the dark. “Is this —”

“Yes,” she said. Before I finished. Same thing she does when she already knows the answer.

And then I was across the room.

I got her out of the sleep shirt. She got me out of everything I’d bothered to put back on after the drive over. And then we were on her bed — her sheets, her pillow, the specific smell of her room that I was going to be carrying for a week — and she was warm under me and the expression on her face was the one nobody else gets, the real one, and I reached for what I’d brought out of habit, the one thing I always do, and she caught my wrist.

“Don’t,” she said.

I looked at her. She looked at me. Clear-eyed. Not impulsive. This was a decision she’d made before I knocked on the door. I know what her decisions look like. I’ve been reading her for months.

“You sure?” I said.

“I’m on the pill. I’ve been on the pill.” She held my eyes. “And I want to feel you. All of you.” Her hand came up to my jaw. “Yes. I’m sure.”

I set it aside. Her choice. Her certainty. I trusted both.

Before anything else, I put my mouth on her pussy. She made the sound she always makes at the first touch — the sharp quiet one, the caught breath, the involuntary pull of her hands into my hair. I went slow. I know her now. I know where she’s loud and where she goes quiet and what she needs before she knows she needs it, and I gave her all of it, unhurried, while she pressed her face into her pillow and kept herself from waking the house.