The Hockey Playing Alpha and His Human Ice Princess

Georgia

They stop sneering at me entirely, and that scares me more than the sneering ever did.

It starts small enough that I almost don’t notice it as its own separate thing, folded in as it is with everything else happening this week. Mollie’s cold promise still hangs over me like frost that won’t melt. The Classic looms less than forty-eight hours away. My legs ache constantly from the final stretch of training, a deep, bone-tired soreness that settles into my muscles and refuses to leave even after I stretch. But somewhere in the middle of all that noise, I realize Bella and Bianca haven’t said a single sharp word to me in days.

I catch it first at breakfast, of all places, when Bianca actually holds the dining hall door open for me as I’m walking through with a tray balanced awkwardly in both hands. A glass of orange juice slides toward the edge and I catch it just in time, my knuckles white around the tray’s rim.

”After you,” she says, warm and easy, and smiles, an actual smile, not the thin, calculated version she usually deploys right before delivering some comment about my mother.

I blink at her, adjusting my grip on the tray. ”Thanks,” I manage, my voice caught somewhere between confusion and suspicion.

”Good luck with the Classic,” she adds, cheerful and light, before turning to catch up with Bella at their usual table, leaving me standing there holding my tray, momentarily too stunned to actually walk through the door she just held open for me. My feet stay planted on the tile like they’ve forgotten how to move.

I tell myself it’s a fluke. Weird timing, maybe, or some private joke between the two of them that I’m not in on. But it keeps happening, small moments accumulating over the next two days into a pattern I can’t quite ignore no matter how badly I want to chalk it up to coincidence.

Bella offers to share her notes with me in English when I miss a class for an extra training session, sliding the folder across my desk without a hint of her usual condescension. Bianca compliments my footwork after catching a glimpse of me running through choreography on the quad, an actual compliment, specific and detailed enough that it’s clear she’s actually been watching closely. She lingers by the edge of the grass afterward, arms crossed, studying me the way a jeweler studies a stone.

”Your edges are cleaner than they were last month,” she says, thoughtful and measured, tilting her head like she’s cataloguing something. ”You’ve been working on that inside edge transition, haven’t you?”

”I have,” I say carefully, the compliment sitting strange in my chest, too heavy for something that should feel light.

Both twins start saying hello to me in hallways, easy and warm, the kind of casual friendliness you’d expect from any two students who’ve simply decided to be decent to a classmate, nothing more sinister than that. Bella waves once from across the courtyard, her smile stretching wide and untroubled, and something in my stomach clenches so hard I nearly stumble on the stairs.

It should be a relief. I spent my first weeks here absorbing their sharp comments about my mother, my rankings, my charity invitation to a school that clearly never wanted me here in the first place, and now, out of nowhere, all of that hostility has just evaporated, replaced with something that looks, on the surface, exactly like kindness.

It doesn’t feel like relief. Something coils tight and wrong in my stomach every single time one of them smiles at me now, some instinct I don’t have language for firing off warnings my conscious mind can’t quite justify. My palms sweat. My pulse ticks up half a beat, every time, like clockwork, like my body knows something my brain refuses to catch up to.

”They’ve been so nice lately,” Mandi says at dinner one night, poking at her food with her fork instead of eating it, puzzled and a little unsettled. ”It’s kind of freaking me out, honestly. Bianca complimented my hair yesterday. Bianca. Complimenting anyone.”

”I noticed too,” I say, pushing food around my plate without much appetite, the mashed potatoes going cold and gluey under my fork. ”Do you think something happened? Like, did someone tell them to be nicer, or something?”

”Maybe.” Mandi doesn’t sound convinced, her brow furrowing as she sets her fork down entirely. ”Or maybe they’re just tired of being awful. People change.”

”Do they, though?” I ask, quiet and doubtful, watching her face for some flicker of agreement.

Mandi shrugs, but she doesn’t look at me when she does it, her eyes sliding instead toward the twins’ table across the room, where Bella and Bianca sit with their heads bent close together, laughing at something too soft to hear.

I want to believe that. I really do. It would be so much simpler if this was just two mean girls having some unexpected change of heart right before a big competition, softening at the exact moment it would be easiest for me to accept the softening at face value and move on with my life.

But every time Bella smiles at me in the hallway now, something in my chest goes cold instead of warm. Every time Bianca offers help with something, notes, choreography feedback, a spare hair tie, some part of my body flinches inward instead of relaxing, the way you’d flinch from a hand reaching toward you even when you can’t see exactly what it’s holding.

I think about Bianca’s voice through that door, low and sharp, *it has to look like an accident*, and I try, again, to convince myself I misheard it, that it belongs to some completely unrelated conversation that has nothing to do with any of this. But the two things sit side by side in my head now no matter how hard I try to separate them, the overheard sentence and the sudden, unnatural warmth, refusing to stay in the neat, unconnected boxes I keep trying to build for them.

By the time I get back to my room that night, the Classic barely two days away, I’m too unsettled to focus on anything else. Mandi’s already asleep, curled up under her blanket, her breathing slow and even, the room dim except for the small reading lamp on my nightstand. I pull my notebook out from under my mattress - my threat log, the ritual I’ve kept for weeks now - and flip to the next open page. The pen feels cold between my fingers.

I sit there for a long moment before I actually write anything, pen hovering. The feeling won’t hold still long enough to be described properly. It isn’t fear exactly, not the sharp, immediate kind I felt hearing Bianca’s voice through that door. It’s slower than that, quieter, a low-grade unease that’s been building in my gut for two full days now, gathering weight with every unexpected kindness, every held door, every compliment that shouldn’t feel like anything other than what it appears to be on the surface.

I think about the twins specifically, everything I’ve already written down about them. The way they move through hallways like their bodies run on different mechanics than everyone else’s. The way they folded, submissive and silent, the moment Puck said two flat words in a hallway weeks ago. None of that ever unsettled me quite the way this does, two girls being nice to me in a hallway, because nothing else ever tried so hard to look like nothing at all.

The Classic is the day after tomorrow. I still don’t know what I heard through that door, still don’t know what’s changed in them or why, and I’m running out of time to figure it out before I have to walk out onto that ice in front of people who are watching every single thing I do.

I press pen to paper, my handwriting slower than usual, like I’m working out the shape of the thought as I write it rather than transcribing something I already fully understand.

*The twins are being nice to me. Why does that feel like a threat?*

I stare at the sentence for a long time after I write it, the lamp humming faintly beside me, the rest of the room dark and quiet and offering no answers at all. Outside, the wind picks up against the window, rattling the old glass in its frame, and I pull my blanket tighter around my shoulders without looking up from the page.