Page 40 of The Last Inch Of Ice
Tries not to think about the fact that “I just haven’t had sex in a long time” might have been Rykov’s clumsy attempt at honesty, not dismissal.
Tries very hard not to think about anything at all.
His phone buzzes. A text from Sam:You good? Heard the locker room got tense.
Kai stares at the message for a long moment, then types back:All good. Just tired. Long week.
It’s a lie, but it’s an easy one. The kind everyone accepts without question.
He sets his phone face-down on the nightstand and finishes his third glass of champagne.
Bonifazio is still asleep, unbothered by human drama.
Kai wishes, not for the first time, that he could be more like his cat—capable of sleeping through emotional disasters and content with solitude.
12
Chapter 12 Nazar
The apartment is quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the distant sound of traffic thirteen floors below.
Nazar sits on his couch—a secondhand thing he bought off Craigslist when he first moved to Vancouver—with a beer in his hand. He doesn’t particularly like beer. Never has. It’s too bitter, sits wrong in his stomach, makes him feel bloated and sluggish.
But Derek loved it.
Derek introduced him to beer when Nazar was twelve, stealing a can from their stepfather’s garage fridge and sneaking out to the backyard. Nazar had taken one sip and made a face so disgusted that Derek had laughed until he couldn’t breathe, doubled over with his hands on his knees, tears streaming down his face.
“You’ll grow into it,” Derek had promised, still laughing. “Everyone hates it at first.”
Nazar never did grow into it. But he drinks it anyway on days like this.
Today marks ten years since Derek died.
A decade. An entire lifetime. Nazar has now lived more years without his brother than he lived with him, which feels impossible and wrong.
For the first time since Derek’s death, the anniversary falls on a day with no game. No practice. No travel. Just empty hours that Nazar has to fill somehow, and he’s doing a terrible job of it.
He’d never noticed the pattern before. How he was always conveniently in another city on this day, always able to bury the grief under the mechanical routine of hockey. Game day rituals. Pre-game skate. Team dinner. The physical exhaustion that made sleep possible.
This year, the schedule gave him nothing to hide behind.
He and Derek had different surnames—Rykov and Morrison—because they shared a mother but different fathers. Nazar never knew his biological father. The man disappeared before Nazar’s first birthday, and his mother refused to talk about him. Derek’s father, Frank Morrison, eventually became like a stepfather to Nazar, raising him alongside Derek without making distinctions between biological and step.
Frank died years ago. Heart attack. He hadn’t cried at the funeral, but he’d stood at the grave thinking about how Frank had taught him to tie his skates, had driven him to 6 a.m. practices, had never once made him feel like less than Derek’s brother.
Derek was a better hockey player than Nazar could ever be. He knows this with absolute certainty, the way you know facts about physics or math. Derek had natural talent—the kind scouts notice immediately. Intelligence that made him read plays three steps ahead. Vision that turned chaos into opportunity.
He could’ve been extraordinary.
The memory surfaces unbidden, clear as if it happened yesterday instead of many years ago.
Nazar was five years old. Derek took him to the outdoor rink at Davidson Park for the first time. It was winter, early morning, the sun barely up. Derek held his small hand as they walked across the frozen surface, their breath visible in the cold air.
“Why does Dad say you don’t play anymore?” little Nazar had asked. He’d overheard Frank on the phone the night before, his voice tight with anger, saying something about Derek being “out of the game.”
Derek’s smile had been immediate, but his eyes were sad in a way Nazar was too young to understand. “That’s just how life turned out, little man. But I’m still close to the ice. I work here now, taking care of it.”
“Why is taking care of ice important?” he had asked, genuinely confused. Ice was just ice. It was there, like air or water.
