Ice beneath the skin
Author
Andreea Albu
Reads
17.1K
Chapters
37
The smell of baked salmon and disappointment hung in the air. Celine was cutting into dead flesh. Literally. The fish on her plate had been cooked at the precise temperature where hope and flavor evaporated—and in the Ravel household, hope evaporated daily. Serena, her mother, quietly sipped from a glass of white wine, wearing the dull look of a woman who knew no decision was hers anymore. She had once been alive—now she was a fragile presence in beige dresses and measured gestures. Whatever was left of her dreams dissolved night after night into cold Chilean wine and fractured conversation. A
Chapter 1
CELINE
The smell of baked salmon and disappointment hung in the air.
Celine was cutting into dead flesh. Literally. The fish on her plate had been cooked at the precise temperature where hope and flavor evaporated—and in the Ravel household, hope evaporated daily.
Serena, her mother, quietly sipped from a glass of white wine, wearing the dull look of a woman who knew no decision was hers anymore. She had once been alive—now she was a fragile presence in beige dresses and measured gestures. Whatever was left of her dreams dissolved night after night into cold Chilean wine and fractured conversation.
At the other end of the table, Nathan Ravel sat upright, shoulders slightly hunched forward, as if holding up the entire moral structure of the room by himself. Impeccably dressed, with a perfectly symmetrical gray tie, he looked less like a father and more like an institution.
He had that low, curated voice that never needed to rise—because it didn’t have to. He sliced through the air with his tone and enforced discipline with a glance.
Celine didn’t hate him. That would’ve been easier. She endured him with the sharpness of someone who knew true revenge lay in well-measured silence and a reply too refined to be punished. She had studied him. She could read him. But she would never bow. She ate methodically, in silence, as if every bite was a thesis on control.
“How was school today?” he asked, without looking up, chewing methodically, as if the entire question was a bureaucratic checkbox to tick off at dinner.
Celine stabbed her fork into the limp vegetable. Raised her eyebrow slightly, but not enough to seem insolent. Just…observant.
“Just another day. Teachers firmly anchored in textbooks, classmates engaged in conversations about nothing, horizons steady.”
Serena coughed briefly. Not from choking, but from that involuntary reflex that came when you sensed a crack about to form. She shifted in her chair, touched the collar of her dress, but didn’t speak. Maybe because she knew it wouldn’t help.
Nathan blinked slowly. He was the kind of man who responded with calibrated silences, not comebacks. He set down his fork, aligning it perfectly with the edge of his plate.
“I told you, irony isn’t a weapon, Celine.”
She tilted her head slightly and smoothed the napkin over her lap.
“I suppose it depends on the context. And the target. Sometimes you don’t even realize you’ve been struck.”
A long silence followed, thick as syrup, slow to pour.
And then, as if he hadn’t heard a thing, Nathan set his knife down on the plate and said—calm, but clear, “Ezra Vale is coming back to town.”
No clinking of cutlery. No slammed utensils. Just a stillness so precise it hurt—as if everything, even motion, had snagged on an invisible knot beneath the table.
The air turned heavy, dense. It felt like the table sank a few centimeters into the floor under the weight of that name.
Celine blinked, slowly, like a scene from an old film played in slow motion. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t speak. But something shifted in her gaze—not visibly, but inside. A breeze of something familiar, something she’d much rather leave buried, brushed the corner of her eye.
Why now? Why him? And why here, in the middle of a dinner barely held together by its brittle surface?
“Excuse me?” she asked, her voice low, wrapped in a politeness that was almost docile—but edged, like silk dipped in ice.
“He’ll be coaching the hockey team this year. Ezra Vale. You probably haven’t heard of him—he was about eight years older than you.”
Nathan smoothed the napkin across his knee, slowly, with fingers that seemed to deliver a silent lecture on the importance of calculated gestures.
“I taught him, years ago. He had talent. Raw, unshaped. Like a stone, you have to crack open just to see if there’s a diamond inside. I disciplined him. I shaped him. He became one of the best, but only because someone kept him on track.”
Serena tilted her glass slightly but didn’t drink. She spun it between her fingers with the mechanical precision of someone who’d learned how to seem calm while everything around them shattered in silence.
She didn’t look at him, nor at her daughter. Only at the glass. Maybe if she held eye contact with the wine, reality would dissolve into alcohol. Or into forgetfulness.
Celine moved her hand slowly, lifting her cutlery with the same elegance one might lift a weapon. She said nothing for a moment, then tilted her head, lips curling into that faint smile—almost appreciative.
“I didn’t know him personally,” she said, letting the words glide out, smooth. “But his reputation…it’s a story the boys at school keep rewriting. They turned him into a kind of urban myth—all skates and fists. Some still want to see him. Others just want to knock him out.”
It wasn’t an accusation. Not a joke either. Just a truth, spoken low, wrapped in cold velvet.
Nathan pressed his lips together. He didn’t like it. Not because Ezra was like that—but because he no longer controlled the narrative. He reeled it back in:
“Reputations are made by those watching from the sidelines. I saw him on the ice, where it counts. I knew what he was capable of, how much strength he carried. But he was an open flame—and no one can tame fire unless you teach it how to burn properly. I raised him. I refined him. He became someone not in spite of his weaknesses, but because of the direction I imposed.”
Serena drank. Not slowly, not excessively, but just enough to empty the glass. She set it down without a sound and reached to refill it.
Celine leaned back. She didn’t smile, but the corners of her mouth lifted slightly—a trace of expression Nathan knew well but couldn’t translate.
“Interesting,” she said, her voice like a thread of ice running down the throat of a sentence. “So the problem child turned out to be a successful creation. And now, what’s next? You bringing him in to exhibit him in your personal museum of moral salvations?”
She didn’t say it with malice. But neither with respect.
Celine leaned forward, elbows on the table—a calculated gesture, feminine, but provocative in its ease.
“I admire your optimism. Maybe it really is time to give him a second chance. Sometimes, the best stories begin with a…dramatic return.”
Nathan rose slowly, like a king abandoned by his army. Back straight, gaze cold.
“I want respect at this table.”
Celine looked at him, and for a moment, the room seemed to tilt slightly in her direction, like a stage set aware that something important was about to happen. She didn’t reply right away. Lifted her glass slowly, turned it between her fingers, and tilted it toward Nathan—not as defiance, but as a neatly wrapped thank-you.
An offering folded in ambiguity.
“Of course,” she said. “And I thank you for the evening. And for the…thoroughly relevant information.”
Her voice was warm, perfectly tempered, without a trace of irony on the surface. Which was precisely why it was impossible to decipher. A gesture too precise. A tone too carefully chosen.
Nathan studied her with locked eyes. He wasn’t sure, even now, whether he’d been mocked or praised.
“I’ll take my leave,” she added, rising with the same elegance with which she assembled her words—letting nothing slip. She lifted her plate with slender fingers, and for a moment, she seemed to belong to another story entirely—one where this dinner never happened, and they were only shadows from an unfinished play.
Her footsteps echoed softly on the cold tiles, like an old song played too quietly. The door didn’t creak or slam. She just vanished. And in her wake, a space remained—one not easily filled again.
Nathan sighed—barely. Then he rearranged his cutlery, as if order might somehow summon peace.
Serena drank. Didn’t blink. Didn’t ask. She poured herself another glass with the steady motion of someone who had long forgotten how to stop.
***
Celine’s room was cold, tidy, and stripped of any trace of a teenage girl who might’ve trusted the walls around her. On the nightstand, a lamp flickered with a soft, trembling glow, and the laptop cast bluish shadows onto the walls.
Celine sat with her knees pulled up beneath her, wrapped in a hoodie she’d stolen from Serena years ago and hadn’t washed in a while. The scent gave her a vague sense of belonging. Or perhaps a kind of comfortable loneliness.
The keyboard creaked faintly beneath her fingers. Ezra Vale. Search.
She hadn’t lied. She’d never known him personally. He was far too old, and back then, she hadn’t belonged to any group that might’ve brought her near him. Not with the girls who let boys touch them in locker rooms, nor with the boys who fancied themselves gods of the rink.
She’d always been in between. Always between.
But that didn’t mean she hadn’t heard.
Ezra had been their legend. Theirs—not hers. Whispered about between periods, between coffees, between failed flirtations and glances soaked in testosterone.
Mal called him “the pretty fist of hockey” and claimed he’d learned to stand in goal after watching a video of Ezra blocking a puck with his knee, then throwing off his gloves, ready to fight.
Levi looked at him like a ghost. Said that if Ezra had been born with a gentler voice, he probably would’ve been king.
“He’s got the kind of jaw that says no for you,” Levi had once said, staring at an old photo of Ezra on the school’s honor board.
The girls—the ones Celine avoided on instinct, with their too-short skirts and lipstick smeared at the corners of their mouths—talked about him like he was a separate species of man. They adored him, mythologized him, but also kind of hated him.
“He’s the kind who fucks you senseless and then doesn’t even remember your name,” one of them had laughed in the girls’ bathroom, tying her hair into a high ponytail.
Celine hadn’t picked a side. She hadn’t wanted him. She hadn’t hated him. She’d kept him at the distance of a story others told with too much fire in their eyes. But now, he wasn’t just a story. He was the man Nathan—the man she killed in her mind hundreds of times a day—had deemed worthy of being spoken about at dinner.
That meant something. Ezra was becoming real. And that made her tremble in a place so deep she didn’t even name it.
The image on the screen loaded slowly, line by line, like a revelation that refused to be rushed. And when it finally came into full shape, Celine felt her chest tighten.
Not because she recognized him. Not even because she had been waiting. But because the man in the photo was absurdly beautiful. Dangerously put together. Immorally unreal.
He had the kind of beauty that didn’t ask for permission—it threw itself in your face and waited to see what you’d do. A press photo, probably a few years old, showed him in a leader’s stance: dark gray suit, perfectly tailored, shirt slightly open at the collar, two-day stubble giving him a calculated edge of rebellion.
His jaw looked sculpted on purpose, carved by the scalpel of genetics and hardened by years of simmering rage. His gaze hovered between exhaustion and contempt, but something in his eyes—gray, like the wind that slipped past your temples when you weren’t paying attention—seemed to know exactly who he was and why he was there. They were the eyes of someone saw everything, but asked for nothing. And forgot nothing.
Ezra Vale. Not just a name. Not just a reputation. But a warning, beautifully wrapped in skin, voice, and past.
Celine felt a wave of heat crawl up her throat. A ridiculous tremble in the tips of her fingers. She bit her lower lip, trying to chase away the feeling that was neither fear nor pure attraction—but a form of recognition. Of instinct. Of what was coming.
That night, the laptop stayed open. The screen went blue, but she didn’t notice. She fell asleep with the light on and her heart stretched tight like a thread of ice under pressure.
And when she dreamed, Ezra wasn’t a face. He was a shadow with shape. A silhouette walking on ice, hands in his pockets, mouth near her ear. He didn’t say a word. Just breathed. And every breath was a promise she didn’t want to hear.
And she, in the dream, didn’t pull away. Didn’t run. Didn’t scream.
She stepped closer.
For the first time, the ice didn’t cool her.
It burned.
