The volume is, objectively, embarrassing.

I know this. I am twenty-five years old, a professional athlete, currently third in PWHL scoring, sitting outside the Team USA common area at eleven-something PM with Tchaikovsky blasting loud enough that two Swedish cross-country skiers walked past and kept walking without a word.

I did not turn the volume down.

Triple axel. The commentator says it like it's news. I'd seen it coming before it happened — felt it, the way you feel a play developing before it breaks open, the way the body on screen had gathered itself, coiled, and launched into something that looked less like a jump and more like a decision. Like certainty made physical. The landing so clean it was almost offensive. One blade kissing ice like it had never considered the alternative.

I scrub back fourteen seconds and watch it again.

The costume catches the light differently on the second watch. Or maybe I'm looking differently — with the specific attention I save for game tape, for reading a defender's weight shift, for finding the seam in a penalty kill. Fifty minutes. Fifty minutes longer than I've studied anything unrelated to a hockey puck in recent memory.

Quad Lutz.

My jaw does something involuntary.

This is not the clean appraising eye I'd turn on an opposing center. This is something else. I'm self-aware enough to know it, and to find that deeply inconvenient.

Ethereal is a word I have never used in my life. I am from St. Louis. I say sick and filthy and obscene as the highest possible compliments. I do not say ethereal.

I am thinking it right now. Helplessly. Like a word appearing in a dream, unasked for, just there.

The music swells — Sleeping Beauty, Act Three, the part that sounds like a question finally getting its answer — and she moves through it like she composed it herself.

Then the end. The smile at the boards — exhausted, catching her breath — this soft private thing that looks like it just escaped. I feel it somewhere behind my sternum, clean and sudden, like a hit I hadn't seen coming.

I'd seen her in person first.

Three days ago. Arrival day chaos at the village commons. I'd been half-listening to Jules and half-watching the room the way I always watch rooms — clocking exits and energy, a hockey habit I've never turned off.

And she walked in.

I stopped mid-sentence. My brain — usually running in twelve directions — went one. I didn't know who she was yet — tall for a figure skater, long hair, that particular exhausted that lives in people who've been performing their whole lives. Then Jules grabbed my arm and I looked away.

I looked away. And spent the next hour getting increasingly specific in my search history until Jules looked over my shoulder and said "why are you watching her programs."

"Fan of sport," I said.

Jules had not accepted this.

And now here I am. Village courtyard, cold night, late — outdoor lights gone quiet amber. Tchaikovsky conducting my slow public humiliation. Watching the short program for what might be the third time and thinking ethereal again, against my will —

When I hear it. Right beside me. Close. Warm. Dry as a bone.

"Most people just ask for my autograph instead of stalking my programs in 4K."

My body does three things in very rapid sequence: startles, freezes, overheats. Tchaikovsky swells, absurdly triumphant, like the orchestra had been personally waiting for this exact beat.

I turn.

And she is there. Close enough to confirm the tired-behind-the-eyes thing is real — my phone had been a profound lie. Nothing about right now is fine. There is a smile happening. Small, a little wicked, the kind that already knows exactly how this looks and has decided it's funny.

I open my mouth. Close it. The music keeps playing between us.

Say something, I think. You are famously, sometimes irritatingly, good at talking.

"I was doing research," I say.

It sounds exactly as stupid as it did the first time.