Chapter 107 The Return To Form

Chapter 107 The Return To Form


The first pass hit my stick like nothing had been broken.

I almost smiled before the play even finished.

Cassian was three strides ahead of me when it happened, skating into the zone with his head up, shoulders loose, and that sharp, familiar focus in his face that I had missed more than I wanted to admit. Therapy had done its job in ways I did not fully understand yet, but I felt the difference the second we stepped onto the ice.

The room before the game had been quieter than usual, but not awkward. Danton had gone over the lines, the matchups, the usual details. Nobody had said anything about the previous week, nobody had needed to. There was a kind of truce in the air now, not because everything was fixed, but because we had finally agreed to stop making our worst instincts carry the conversation.

Cassian glanced at me once during warmups.

I looked back.

That was all it took for the old rhythm to start clicking into place again.

The crowd was loud but not hostile, and the ice felt faster than it had in days. Our first shift was clean, the puck moved the way it should have. I took the outlet, sent it up ice, and Cassian caught it in stride without looking like he had to think about where I would be. He cut through the blue line, drew one defender wide, and slid the puck back to me just before he got hit.

I fired.

The goalie got a piece of it, the rebound came loose.

Another teammate buried it.

The bench erupted.

Cassian looked at me on the way back, and the corner of his mouth lifted just enough for me to feel it all the way in my chest. I caught his glove on the bench rail as he passed, a quick tap that should not have meant anything and meant everything anyway.

“One point,” he said under his breath.

I glanced at the scoreboard. “For now.”

He laughed quietly, and the sound hit harder than it should have.

The next shift started ugly, their forecheck came hard. They had clearly decided not to let us settle into anything easy. One of their defensemen tried to pin Cassian at the boards and found out quickly that Cassian had no intention of staying there. He spun off the pressure, sent the puck low, and I was already moving before it got there.

The play opened exactly the way we expected it to.

I returned it to him off the wall.

He shot.

Goal.

The building shook and our bench went up. Danton slapped the glass once with the back of his hand. Cassian turned towards me immediately, and I was already pointing at him before he even got back to center ice.

Two points.

I could feel the game settling into the shape it used to have when we were on. 

It had been missing for a week and now it was back, piece by piece, in the little things. The timing, the trust, the way he looked for me before the play was done, the way I moved before he had fully committed to the lane. We had been good all season, then we had been bad in ways that had nothing to do with skill. Now we were finally looking like ourselves again.

The third point came late in the second period.

I took the puck behind our net, skated it up the wall, and sent a stretch pass through the neutral zone before the defender could close the lane, Cassian was already there. He took it in stride, cut hard inside, and drew both defensemen toward him. I kept moving. He slipped the puck back to me at the top of the circle.

One touch.

Shot.

Goal.

The arena went up again, and I barely had time to breathe before Cassian was there on the bench, towel around his neck, eyes bright in the way they got when the game was turning in our favor.

“That one was nasty,” he said.

“You set it up.”

“I know.”

He smiled at me like that answer satisfied him, and for a second I forgot about everything else. 

The last point came in the third.

A broken play and a loose puck at the blue line. Cassian jumped on it first, tucked it under a defender’s stick, and fed me without hesitation, I redirected it toward the crease. Their goalie kicked it out, but the rebound bounced right back towards the slot.

Cassian was already there.

He buried it.

The goal horn went off and the bench exploded before the puck even settled in the net.

Four points.

Two goals. 

Two assists.

All of them ours in one way or another.

The scoreboard told the story, but the feel of the game told the real one. We were back in sync, not perfectly or magically, but enough that everybody in the arena could feel it. The third period became a grind after that, but the gap held. Raffi made the saves he needed to make. Danton kept the lines tight. A teammate and the third line did their job in the ugly minutes, and when the final horn finally sounded, we had the win.

The team came together on the ice in a burst of noise and motion.

Helmets flew, gloves hit the ice and someone yelled too loudly near the boards. Cassian was laughing when I found him, breathless and still flushed from the final shift. He looked at me with that same bright, dangerous satisfaction that had always made it impossible to keep a straight face for long after a win.

I caught him in a quick hug at center ice.

He held on longer than usual.

I did too.

When we pulled apart, he was still smiling, and I knew right then that the game was not the only thing that had come back to us tonight.

The room after the game was loud in the good way. The kind of noise that comes after a team has found itself again. Danton was already talking about details he wanted cleaned up, everything felt lighter than it had in days.

Cassian got to his stall before I did.

He had already taken half his gear off by the time I reached mine. We were close enough to hear each other over the room, but not close enough to make a scene. 

I pulled my gloves off and tossed them into my bag.

Cassian glanced over once, then looked away again like he was trying not to smile too hard in public. It did not work.

I looked down at the tape on my wrists and started unwinding it, pretending not to notice how he kept checking me out of the corner of his eye.

That old tension was still there.

Not the fight.

The other one.

The one that sat under the anger and the silence and the apology and made everything between us feel charged when we were too close. The kind that started when he looked at me too long and ended with me wanting to pull him into a hallway and forget the rest of the locker room existed.

He stepped closer when most of the team had started moving out.

His voice was low when he spoke. “We looked better.”

I glanced up at him. “We did.”

He nodded once, then looked at the floor for a beat before coming back to me. “That felt good.”

“It did.”

His eyes held mine. “I missed that.”

I did not answer right away.

The room was still full enough to make this private without making it obvious.

Cassian leaned one hand on the stall beside mine and lowered his voice another notch. “I missed you.”

The words landed so quietly that for a second I forgot how to answer them.

I looked at him then. 

His face was still warm from the game, his eyes still sharp and tired and soft all at once. He was close enough that I could feel the heat of him in the air between us, and for a second the whole room blurred around the edges in the way it always did when he looked at me like that.

I should have given him something clever.

I did not.

“I missed me too,” I said.

His expression changed immediately.

I had missed the version of myself that existed when we were right. When the line between us was not a wound. When I was not trying to save him from everything and he was not trying to shove me out of the conversation.

I had missed the part of me that could breathe while standing next to him.

Cassian stared at me for a long second, and I could feel the heat in his face turn into something quieter but more dangerous.

Then he let out a breath that might have been a laugh if it had come out softer. “That is unfair.”

I arched a brow. “What is?”

“You always know exactly what to say when it matters.”

I looked at him. “Do I?”

He stepped even closer to make it very hard for me to think about anything else. “Yes,” he said.

The room around us had mostly emptied by then.

Cassian looked at me with that same steady heat I had been missing all week. 

“Tomorrow,” he said softly.

I nodded. “Tomorrow.”

He looked like he wanted to say more.

I knew I did too.

Instead he reached down and caught my hand at my side, fingers threading through mine with the kind of ease that only came back after you had lost something and found it again. He gave my hand one quick squeeze, then let go before anybody could turn and make it awkward.

It was not enough.

It was exactly enough.

I watched him turn back towards his stall, and I knew as I looked at the ease in his shoulders, the real smile still sitting on his mouth, that we were not fixed. 

But tonight, on the ice, we had found the part of us that knew how to work again.

And for the first time in a while, that felt like more than a good game.