Soft Catch

Paige Gallagher is a senior, she is the captain now, and the one thing she has never learned is how to let anybody see her flinch. One more season. Hold the line. Do not crack.

Nico Alvarez skates before the building is awake, on ice nobody scheduled him, through a door somebody opens off the books. He talks with his hands. He notices everything. He reads her correctly the first time, which nobody untrained has ever done.

She has spent three years making silence a wall. He keeps showing up on the other side of it. The ice is the only place she has ever been fluent, and he is fluent there too, in a language her sport was never supposed to share with his. She has one season left. He is not going to stop showing up early.