Snowed In with Number Nine

by Maren Quinn

Heat 3 / 5Novel · 21 chapters68,328 words4h 57m read~7h 36m listen

The intake form arrives before Cole Maddox does — wedged under the observation room door at Northwood Civic Arena, his handwriting in the margin reading ‘not your business,’ crossed out, replaced by a question he clearly never meant to leave behind. Tiernan Voss, the Wolves’ non-binary sports psychologist, has seen plenty of resistant athletes. They have never found one who annotates his own paperwork like an argument he is losing with himself.

The arrangement is simple and suffocating: mandatory weekly assessments, league-mandated, PR-monitored, with Tiernan holding the professional authority to end Cole’s season and Cole holding the social authority to end Tiernan’s credibility with the team. Cole treats every session as surveillance. Tiernan treats every session as a liability. Neither of them is wrong.

But the Zamboni doesn’t care about power imbalances. When a late-night malfunction locks them both inside the arena past midnight — no cell signal, no staff, no intake forms, no performance left to maintain — the only thing colder than the ice is everything they have been refusing to say aloud.

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