The Warm-Up That Stuck — Bonus Chapter

Anniversary Ice

MM Hockey Romance | Goalie × Trainer | 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
by Chase Power

One year later.

The snowstorm hit at 4 PM on a Tuesday, which was inconvenient, because Kai and Nate’s first anniversary was on a Wednesday and Kai had reservations at the restaurant where they’d had their disastrous first date — the one with forty-seven wines and the 40% over-tip — and the snow was coming down like the sky had a personal vendetta against romance.

“It’s going to dump eighteen inches overnight,” Nate said, staring at his phone in the kitchen. “The city’s issuing a travel advisory.”

“We’ll be fine.”

“Kai, they’re closing roads.”

“The restaurant is three miles away.”

“Three miles of unplowed road in a blizzard.”

“I have a truck.”

“Your truck does not have supernatural snow-penetration abilities.”

“My truck has four-wheel drive and a goaltender behind the wheel. That’s the same thing.”

The restaurant called at 5:30 to cancel. Kai stared at the phone with the specific, controlled devastation of a man whose carefully planned anniversary evening had just been killed by weather, which was the one opponent he couldn’t study film on.

“We can reschedule,” Nate said. Carefully. Reading Kai’s posture the way he’d been reading it for a year now — the shoulder tension, the jaw set, the micro-expressions that mapped directly to emotional states. This particular configuration meant I’m disappointed and I’m trying not to show it, which is making it worse.

“I don’t want to reschedule. It’s our anniversary. You can’t reschedule an anniversary. The date is the date.”

“The date is tomorrow.”

“I know. And tomorrow the roads will be closed and the restaurant will be closed and we’ll be snowed in and our first anniversary will be —”

“Perfect.”

Kai looked at him.

“Perfect,” Nate repeated. “Because you’ll be here and I’ll be here and eighteen inches of snow will mean that neither of us has anywhere to be. No facility, no practice, no games, no sessions. Just us. In the apartment. For the first time in a year, with absolutely nothing to do.”

Kai considered this. The goaltender’s calculation — running scenarios, mapping trajectories, assessing the angle. The assessment resolved into something that was not quite a smile and not quite a concession but was, Nate had learned, the architectural precursor to Kai changing his mind and pretending it had been his idea.

“I’ll make dinner,” Kai said.

“You’ll make dinner.”

“I’ve been learning. Katya gave me a recipe for —”

“If you say pelmeni, I’m calling your mother.”

“It’s not pelmeni. It’s… adjacent to pelmeni.”

Nate kissed him. Quick, warm, the casual contact that had become their baseline — the touch that existed without negotiation, without calculation, without the ghost of a professional boundary or a secret or a locked door. Just a mouth on a mouth, in a kitchen, because the mouth was there and so was the person and a year had taught them that the simplest gestures were the most honest.

“Make me your adjacent pelmeni,” Nate said. “I’ll bring the wine.”

“We live in the same apartment. You can’t ‘bring’ wine that’s already in our kitchen.”

“Watch me.”

The storm buried the city overnight. By Wednesday morning, the world outside the floor-to-ceiling windows was white and muffled and still — the particular silence of a city under snow, where sound was absorbed and movement was suspended and the normal machinery of life was temporarily, beautifully, impossible.

Kai woke at 8 AM. Late, for him — the goaltender’s internal clock protesting even as his body luxuriated in the rare absence of obligation. Nate was still asleep beside him, face-down in the pillow, one arm draped over Kai’s waist, the sleeping configuration that hadn’t changed in twelve months and that Kai hoped would never change for the rest of his life.

He lay in bed and watched Nate sleep. The freckled shoulders. The sandy hair, longer now than when they’d met, curling at the nape. The steady breathing that Kai had memorized the way he’d memorized shooters’ tendencies — completely, obsessively, with a commitment to detail that bordered on worship.

One year. Twelve months since a training room session at 10 PM on a Tuesday night, when a man with steady hands had said you’re not here for the injury, you’re here because you’re tired and Kai’s entire understanding of himself had shifted.

He pressed his lips to Nate’s shoulder. Nate didn’t stir. Kai got up, made coffee — the espresso machine was long conquered, the Americano with oat milk produced with the reflexive ease of a morning ritual — and stood at the window, looking at the snow.

The city was buried. White on white, the river invisible, the buildings softened into ghosts. Nothing was moving. Nothing needed to move. The world had stopped, and inside the stopped world, inside the warm apartment, inside the life they’d built from coffee cups and protein bars and Egyptian cotton and midnight eggs, everything was exactly where it belonged.

His phone buzzed.

Dima: Happy anniversary. Katya made you a cake. You can have it when the roads open. She says do not try to drive to our house. She will kill you herself if the snow does not.

Kai: Thank her for me.

Dima: She also says to tell Shaw he is too good for you and she is available if he changes his mind.

Kai: Tell your wife I’m keeping him.

Dima: She says “we’ll see.” She is a terrifying woman and I love her.

The idea came at noon.

They were on the couch — Nate reading, Kai pretending to read but actually studying Nate’s face the way he’d been studying it for twelve months: the concentration lines between his brows, the way his lips moved slightly when he hit a passage he liked, the particular angle of his jaw when he was absorbed. A year of this face, and Kai was still finding new details. Still tracking. Still unable to look away.

“The facility’s closed,” Kai said.

“Everything’s closed. That’s what eighteen inches of snow does.”

“The facility’s closed, but I have a key card.”

Nate looked up from his book. Green eyes, steady, already computing. “Why would we go to the facility?”

“Because it’s our anniversary. And a year ago today — well, not today exactly, but close enough — you put your hands on me in a training room and changed my life. And I want to go back.”

“Kai. The roads are closed.”

“The facility is six blocks away. We can walk.”

“In eighteen inches of snow.”

“We have boots.”

“You want to walk six blocks through a blizzard to the Blizzard facility on our anniversary.”

“I want to walk six blocks through a blizzard to the place where I fell in love with you.”

Nate set his book down. The expression on his face was the one Kai had learned to read as you’re being ridiculous and I’m going to let you because the ridiculousness is part of why I love you.

“Get your boots,” Nate said.

The walk was six blocks and took forty-five minutes.

The snow was knee-deep in the unsheltered stretches, thigh-deep where the wind had drifted it against buildings and fences. They walked in the tire tracks of the few vehicles that had been through — compacted ruts that were navigable if you didn’t mind your feet being wet and your jeans being soaked and your dignity being repeatedly challenged by the act of trudging through a blizzard in the name of romance.

Kai led. Nate followed, because Nate had learned in a year of loving a goaltender that arguing with Kai’s more dramatic gestures was futile and that the gestures themselves — the scrubbed grout, the Egyptian cotton, the airport coffee — were how Kai said the things his mouth sometimes couldn’t.

They arrived at the facility looking like disaster survivors. Snow in their hair, their coats, their boots. Faces raw from the wind. Kai’s key card worked — the magnetic reader didn’t care about weather — and they pushed through the door into the lobby and stood dripping on the corporate carpet while the building’s emergency lighting cast everything in a dim, amber glow.

“We’re breaking and entering,” Nate said.

“I have a key card. That makes it just entering.”

“We’re entering an empty professional sports facility in a blizzard because you’re sentimental.”

“I’m not sentimental. I’m strategic. Sentimentality implies emotion. Strategy implies purpose.”

“And the purpose is?”

“Come with me.”

Kai took his hand. Led him through the lobby, down the hallway — the same hallway where they’d passed each other a thousand times, where Nate had stood outside the Nashville locker room, where Dima had told Kai to stop being afraid — and into the training room.

The room was dark. Emergency lighting only — the amber strips along the baseboards that activated during power events, casting the room in a warm, low glow that turned the stainless steel surfaces to gold and the white treatment tables to cream.

Their table was there. Third from the left. Squeaky hydraulic. The desk lamp dark, the supplies stocked, the paper fresh on the surface. The room smelled the way it always smelled — antiseptic and tape and the indefinable scent of a space where bodies were cared for.

Kai locked the door.

Nate heard the click and turned. His face, in the amber light, was half-shadowed and beautiful and doing the complicated thing it did when Kai surprised him — the composure rearranging itself around an emotion that was too big for the framework, the structural engineering of a man whose heart was exceeding its specifications.

“You brought me to the training room,” Nate said.

“I brought you to our training room.”

“On our anniversary.”

“On our anniversary. Because one year ago, you put your hands on my hip flexor and said you’re not here for the injury, you’re here because you’re tired, and I thought this person sees me, and I was terrified, and I fell in love with you anyway.” Kai stood by the table. Their table. His hand on the paper, the same surface where Nate’s hands had trembled, where they’d kissed for the first time, where Kai had undone Nate on a Tuesday night with the door locked and the echoes ringing. “And I wanted to come back to the place where it started. Because that’s what anniversaries are. A return to the beginning.”

Nate crossed the room. Slowly. Not the slow of hesitation — the slow of a man savoring the approach, the closing of distance, the same walk he’d made a hundred times to this same table but that was different now because everything was different and nothing had changed.

He stopped in front of Kai. Twelve inches apart. The same distance as the first kiss — the space that had felt like an ocean and a millimeter at the same time.

“Get on the table,” Nate said.

Kai’s breath caught. “What?”

“Get on the table, Rossi. Like the first time. Let me put my hands on you.”

“Nate, you don’t have to —”

“I’m not your trainer. The boundary is intact. The professional separation is permanent and correct.” Nate’s mouth curved. The slow, dangerous curve that Kai had learned to recognize as the precursor to something he was going to enjoy enormously. “But in this room, on this table, on our anniversary, with eighteen inches of snow and a locked door and nobody else for six blocks — I want to put my hands on you. Not as your trainer. As the man who loves you. The way I wanted to from the first session and couldn’t.”

Kai got on the table.

He pulled off his coat, his sweater, his T-shirt. The cold air hit his skin — the facility’s heating was in emergency mode, the temperature lower than normal — and goosebumps rose across his chest and arms. He lay back on the paper. The same paper. The same crinkle. The same ceiling tiles above him, invisible in the amber dark.

Nate pulled off his coat. Rolled up his sleeves. And then — in a gesture that made Kai’s chest constrict — he pulled on nitrile gloves.

“What are you doing?” Kai asked.

“Starting where we started.” Nate’s gloved hands settled on Kai’s hip flexor. The right side. The chronic problem. The muscle that had brought them together in the first place.

The touch was — the same. Exactly the same. Nate’s hands finding the tension, pressing in with the oblique approach, listening for the muscle’s permission. The same patient, intuitive technique that had rewritten Kai’s understanding of what touch could be. The same focused, consuming attention that made him feel not like a body being treated but like a person being known.

But also — completely different. Because the last time they’d been in this position, the tremor in Nate’s hands had been fear. Now the tremor was gone. Nate’s hands were steady, sure, operating with the quiet confidence of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and exactly who he was doing it for.

“Your hip’s good,” Nate said. Quietly. “Rick’s been taking care of you.”

“Rick’s competent.”

“Rick’s excellent. Don’t be a snob.”

“Rick doesn’t make my brain go quiet.”

“Rick’s not trying to.” Nate’s hands moved higher. From the hip flexor to the obliques, the intercostals, the muscular lattice of Kai’s torso. Professional terrain. Familiar territory. “But tonight I am.”

His hands traveled Kai’s body the way they had in the first session — with the same methodical, attentive thoroughness, reading every muscle group, assessing every tension pattern. Except now the reading was accompanied by knowledge. Not clinical knowledge — intimate knowledge. The map that a year of loving someone’s body had drawn: where Kai tensed when he was stressed. Where he softened when he was safe. Where his breath caught when the touch shifted from therapeutic to personal.

Nate found the shift point. The place on Kai’s ribs where the clinical territory ended and the personal territory began — the invisible line that he’d spent the first weeks of their relationship trying to identify and that he now crossed without hesitation.

“One year,” Nate said. His hands circling Kai’s shoulders, thumbs pressing into the traps. “One year since I stood at this table and tried to fix your hip flexor and instead ruined my entire professional objectivity.”

“Best ruins of your career.”

“Worst pun of yours.” Nate’s hands slid down Kai’s arms. Found his wrists. Circled them. Held. “One year since my hands started shaking and I didn’t know why.”

“You know why now.”

“I know why now.” Nate lifted Kai’s right hand. Pressed it to his own chest — palm flat over his heart, the way Kai had put his glove over his heart in the stands. “Feel that?”

Kai felt it. Nate’s heartbeat, fast and hard, hammering against his palm through Nate’s shirt.

“Steady hands,” Nate said. “Racing heart. That’s the year in two data points. My hands learned to be still. My heart never did.”

Kai sat up. The paper crinkled. He was shirtless on the treatment table, Nate standing between his knees in the amber emergency light of a training room in a snowstorm, and the geography was exactly the first kiss and the choreography was exactly the first kiss and the only thing different was that the fear was gone.

“Take off the gloves,” Kai said.

Nate stripped them. Slowly. One finger at a time. The same deliberate removal from the night he’d shown Kai his shaking hands — except now the hands weren’t shaking. They were steady and warm and bare and Nate held them up, palms out, the same gesture from that night.

“No tremor,” Kai said.

“No tremor.”

“What happened to it?”

“You held it until it stopped.”

Kai took Nate’s bare hands. Pulled him forward. Kissed the center of each palm — left, then right — his mouth warm against the skin that had healed him, held him, mapped every inch of his body and his fear and his love.

Then he pulled Nate between his legs on the table and kissed his mouth.

The kiss was both — the first one and the new one. The collision of the training room, the desperation of the hotel, the reverence of the apartment, the urgency of the shower, the tenderness of the morning. All of it compressed into one point of contact in the amber dark of the room where everything began.

Nate kissed back with the full year behind it. His hands — bare, steady, free — found Kai’s face, his neck, his chest. Mapped the terrain that was simultaneously the most familiar landscape in his life and an ongoing discovery. His fingers traced the geometric tattoos in the dark, following lines he knew by heart, the structure that Kai had drawn on his skin when he was twenty-one and afraid and that Nate had spent twelve months proving he didn’t need.

“I want you,” Kai said. Against Nate’s mouth. “Here. On this table. Where it started.”

“We’ve done this before.”

“Not like this. Not on the anniversary. Not with a year behind it.” Kai pulled Nate’s shirt over his head. The freckled shoulders emerged in the amber light, constellations he’d been studying for twelve months and hadn’t finished charting. “I want to feel you in this room as the person I’ve loved for a year. Not the secret. Not the crisis. Not the man I was hiding. The man I chose.”

Nate’s breath shuddered. His hands went to Kai’s belt.

They undressed each other on the training table. Unhurried — the pace of a snowstorm, of a city stopped, of two people who had nowhere to be except exactly where they were. Clothes dropped onto the floor, onto the stool, onto surfaces that had held medical supplies and now held evidence of something no clinical protocol covered.

Nate produced lube from his coat pocket, and Kai laughed — breathless, delighted.

“You packed lube.”

“You brought me to an empty training room on our anniversary. I drew reasonable conclusions.”

“You’re a strategist.”

“I’m a person who’s been with you for a year. Preparation is survival.”

They came together on the table. Nate seated on the surface, Kai in his lap, face to face — the position they’d found in the apartment, the one that allowed maximum eye contact, the one that was less about leverage and more about looking. Kai sank onto him slowly, feeling every inch, his hands on Nate’s shoulders, Nate’s hands on his hips, their eyes locked in the amber dark.

“Eyes open,” they said. Together. The same words. The same breath. The phrase that had started as an instruction and become a vow, spoken in unison by two people who’d spent a year learning that the bravest thing you could do was look at someone while they were looking at you.

They moved together. The training table creaked. The paper tore. The emergency lighting painted their bodies in gold, and the snow fell outside the windows in thick, silent curtains, and the training room — their room, the room where everything had started, where the tremor had been born and the wall had cracked and the quiet had been found — held them the way it had always held them.

With care. With warmth. With the specific, structural tenderness of a space that had been designed for healing and had, against all odds and protocols, become a place for love.

Kai came with Nate’s name in his mouth and the anniversary in his chest and the snow against the windows and the year — the whole, impossible, ordinary, extraordinary year — gathered in his body like a save. Nate followed with his face pressed to Kai’s neck, his steady hands gripping Kai’s hips, his voice breaking on the words he’d first said in a Marriott in Columbus on a night when nothing special happened except everything.

I love you.

The echo rang off the tile. The same echo from a year ago. The same room, the same surfaces, the same acoustics that turned private sounds into shared ones.

They held each other on the table. In the amber light. In the snow. In the year.

“Happy anniversary,” Kai said.

“Happy anniversary.” Nate pressed his lips to the spot between Kai’s shoulder blades. The spot. Their spot. “Thanks for the warm-up.”

Kai laughed. The sound filled the training room — warm, full, the laugh of a man who’d been afraid of being too much and had found the one person who wanted all of it.

“Anytime,” he said.

They walked home through the snow. Six blocks. Forty-five minutes. Hand in hand, because the streets were empty and the world was white and there was no one to see them except the storm, and the storm didn’t care, and they didn’t care that it didn’t care, because they’d spent a year learning that the only audience that mattered was each other.

The apartment was warm. The coffee was cold. The pelmeni-adjacent dinner was still uncooked.

They made midnight eggs instead.

Some things you don’t change.

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