Page 89 of The Last Inch Of Ice
He gets up, yanking on his jeans and shirt with jerky movements. His hands are shaking. He wants to say something cutting, something that will hurt Kai the way he’s been hurt. But the words won’t come.
He leaves without looking back, the way Kai always fucking does. The door closes behind him with a soft click that sounds like finality.
In the rental car, the leather cold against his bare back, Nazar sits in the dark and feels the pride evaporate. It leaves behind only regret.
He’d finally had him. For a few hours, he really had him. Kai had let him in — not just physically, but emotionally. They’d talked. Really talked. Kai had been open and vulnerable and everything Nazar didn’t know he needed.
And then Nazar had destroyed it with two thoughtless words.
You begged me so well.
Like it was a victory. Like he’d won something. Like reducing what they’d just shared to a power dynamic.
Kai doesn’t want to be reminded that he was vulnerable. Nazar knows this, he has seen how fiercely Kai guards that part of himself.
“Fuck,” Nazar says to the empty car. “Fuck.”
His phone is on the passenger seat. He could text. Could try to explain. Could apologize for being an emotionally stunted idiot who doesn’t know how to have a normal human interaction without sabotaging it.
But what would he even say?Sorry for making you feel weak when you let yourself want something?Sorry for being so bad at this that I destroy it every single time? Sorry that I’m obsessed with making you beg?
He starts the car and drives back to his hotel, replaying the whole night. The conversation in the kitchen. Kai’s admission about watching Nazar’s games. The way he’d opened up about visiting Halina, about being lonely.
The way he’d looked at Nazar afterward — trusting and vulnerable and something that might have been the beginning of hope.
All of it destroyed because Nazar couldn’t resist the urge to assert dominance or prove something or whatever psychological clusterfuck was happening in his brain.
By the time he reaches his hotel, it’s after five AM. The lobby is empty except for a night clerk who doesn’t look up from her phone as Nazar passes.
In his room, he strips off his clothes and stands under a scalding shower, trying to wash away the lingering scent of Kai’s and the memory of how good it felt to be trusted with something precious.
He’d finally figured out what he wanted. What he needed. And in the space of two words, he’d lost it.
Derek’s voice echoes in his head, asking him if he’s learned anything. If he’s capable of having something good without destroying it.
27
Chapter 27 Nazar
Weeks pass.
They pass in a blur of identical airport lounges and pre-packaged salads, pre-game skates where his legs move on autopilot, and hotel rooms that all smell like the same scent no matter what city he’s in.
Nazar’s obsession with Kai doesn’t fade. If anything, it gets worse. It becomes a ritual, something he does without thinking, like brushing his teeth or checking his phone.
After every game —his own, or one of the Wardens’ — he finds the highlights. He knows which accounts post them first, which streamers have the best quality, which analytics accounts break down plays in slow motion.
He sits in the dark of whatever hotel room he’s occupying that week, phone glowing in his hand, and watches.
He watches Kai split the defense with a burst of speed that shouldn’t be possible on tired legs in the third period.
He listens to the commentators praise his “evolution as a player,” his “newfound maturity.”
He replays a single, beautiful goal twenty times, the way Kai’s stick blade catches the puck at an impossible angle, the arc of the shot, the way the goalie doesn’t even move because it’s already past him.
Nazar traces the path of the puck with his thumb on the screen like he’s trying to understand it through touch. Like if he watches it enough times, he’ll figure out what went wrong between them. How to fix it.
He feels a strange surge of something that’s not quite pride and not quite rage. It’s possessive and painful and completely irrational — Kai isn’t his, has never been his, has made it abundantly clear he never will be his. But that doesn’t stop the feeling from flooding through him every time Kai scores, every time some commentator calls him underrated, every time the camera catches him laughing with teammates.
