Defenceman: Parallel Ice (Non-Canonical Saga)
Copyright© 2025 by Cold Creek Tribute Writer
32. Canadian Thanksgiving
Coming of Age Story: 32. Canadian Thanksgiving - Defenceman: Parallel Ice (A Non-Canonical Saga) builds on Cold Creek’s Defenceman series while offering a new interpretation. Michael Stewart’s journey extends beyond the rink into intrigue, modeling, and the launch of his AI: Aegis. From Ann Arbor to London, Japan, and Spain, the story explores honor, love, betrayal, and resilience. Rivals and allies test his limits in the arena, courts and shadows—where triumph demands sacrifice and heart both on and off the ice.
Caution: This Coming of Age Story contains strong sexual content, including Romantic Celebrity Sports Interracial White Female Oriental Female White Couple Royalty AI Generated
Toronto, Northern Ontario
Arrivals, October 18, 2010
The reunion is going to be glorious—worth every minute of the trip.
Asuka, Hanna and I walk through the security gate and spot them immediately—Willow, Molly, Rachel, and Crystal all clustered together, and their smiles still catch me off guard after all these months. Molly’s red hair catches the fluorescent light as the whole group surges forward.
Willow reaches me first, and I pull her in tight, pressing a kiss to her hair before she tilts her face up for a proper one. “You look exhausted,” she says into my shoulder, arms wrapped around me.
“Thanks. You look beautiful.”
She pulls back and rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling. “Smooth.”
Asuka steps forward then, and Willow turns to meet her. The kiss they share is soft and intimate, lingering just long enough to be more than a greeting. Rachel and Crystal glance over, but it’s only a passing look—they’ve seen this before, back when Asuka was touring with Willow through Europe. Old news.
Molly slides in next, and I kiss her before catching the familiar scent of her perfume—something expensive and distinctly London. “Missed you, favorite redhead.”
“Missed you too, hockey boy.” She wraps me in a warm hug, and I hold her there for a moment before she steps back and looks me over with a critical eye. “You’ve lost weight.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Busy isn’t an excuse. We’re fixing that this weekend.”
Asuka exchanges a quiet embrace with Molly—arms around each other, genuine warmth passing between them.
Rachel and Crystal pile in, and for a moment it’s just chaos—bags getting shuffled, voices overlapping, everyone trying to catch up on three conversations at once. Hanna stays close to Asuka, still learning the rhythms of how we move as a group.
We depart the airport and split up. Asuka, Hanna, Molly, and I head to our hotel while Willow, Rachel and Crystal go to their respective parents’ homes. The drive is quiet in the comfortable way that happens when everyone’s tired but happy, the kind of silence that doesn’t need filling.
At the Best Western Plus check-in, the desk clerk gives a slightly raised eyebrow when she recognizes me and clocks the rest of the group, clearly unable to determine if I am dating any of them. Her eyes flick from Hanna to Molly to Asuka, then back to me, and I can practically see the mental calculations happening behind her professional smile. Four guests, Two connecting King Suites, one of them with a Fireplace.
That earns a quiet, amused smile from the women.
“Problem?” Molly asks sweetly, and the clerk’s composure cracks just slightly.
“No, ma’am. Not at all. Here are your keys.”
I remind them as we head toward the elevator that even in Ontario there are cameras and that Olympic gold tends to linger in people’s memories. The February games feel like a lifetime ago, but the recognition hasn’t faded. Hockey is the connective tissue up here—it’s the only language everyone speaks, and it turns out that makes for a loud conversation.
Molly pretends to be offended because of her “fame”, but she is joking.
The suites are excessive in the way that hotels always seem to be when someone else is paying, but they are clean and quiet and have enough space that we’re not tripping over each other. Hanna and I open the connecting doors while everyone unpacks, freshens up, and heads to Aunt Nancy and Uncle Aaron’s house.
The drive to the Hayden place takes less than ten minutes, and I spend most of it watching the familiar landscape roll past. Northern Ontario in October is something else—the trees burning with color, reds and oranges and yellows that look almost artificial against the grey sky. The air through the cracked window smells like wood smoke and dying leaves.
“It’s beautiful up here,” Hanna says quietly from the back seat.
“Yeah.” I don’t elaborate. Some things don’t need explaining.
Aunt Nancy is exactly as I remember. She’s waiting on the porch when we pull up, and she’s down the steps before I even get the car door fully open. She hugs me hard, the kind of hug that says she’s been counting days, and I let myself sink into it for a moment.
“You’re too thin,” she says, stepping back to look at me. Then she recalibrates when she sees the women beside me, her expression shifting from maternal concern to polite curiosity.
“Aunt Nancy, this is Asuka Matsuda, Hanna Sanders, and Molly Treadwell.”
“Atkinson,” Molly corrects quietly. “Professionally Treadwell, but Atkinson is the family name.”
Nancy takes this in stride, hugging each of them warmly in turn. “Welcome to our home. Any friend of Michael’s is family here.”
Uncle Aaron appears in the doorway, wiping his hands on a dish towel. He’s got more grey in his beard than the last time I saw him, but his handshake is still firm enough to remind me that he spent twenty years doing manual labor before moving into management.
“Michael.” He shakes my hand like I am grown now, holding eye contact in that way he has. “You know what you’re doing?”
It’s not really a question. Or maybe it is, but he already knows the answer.
“I’m figuring it out.”
He smiles like he already knows the answer. “That’s about all any of us can do.” He glances at the women behind me. “Ladies. Welcome to our home.”
Introductions feel surreal because this is the best collision of my life I have ever allowed. These are the people I love, standing in the house of the family I almost never knew I had, and for once there’s no crisis driving the meeting.
Asuka is polite and steady in a way that makes adults relax without realizing why. She compliments the house, asks Nancy about the garden visible through the back window, and within five minutes has somehow ended up helping Aaron out back of the house. I’ve seen her do this before—the way she makes herself useful without being intrusive.
Hanna watches the room carefully. She’s still learning how to be in spaces like this, still finding her footing after everything that happened. But she’s trying, and that matters.
Molly draws attention without trying, and my nieces orbit her with the kind of awe only kids manage. Mary is trying to play it cool, the way eight-year-olds do when they want to seem mature, but her eyes keep drifting to Molly’s hair, her clothes, the way she moves. Ellen has no such reservations.
“You’re so pretty,” Ellen announces, tugging on Molly’s sleeve. “Are you a princess?”
Molly crouches down to Ellen’s level, and something in her expression softens. “Not a princess, love. But I know a few.”
“Real princesses?”
“Real princesses. One of them is my very good friend.”
Ellen’s eyes go wide. “Does she wear a crown?”
“Sometimes. Mostly at fancy parties.”
Once they learn that Molly and Emma are best friends and that we spent time together in London, they explode into questions. Emma is instantly the most important person in the room, even though she’s not here. I watch Molly field questions about Hermione with the patience of someone who’s done this a hundred times before, and I go all warm and fuzzy.
Willow arrives with her parents about an hour later. I hear the car in the driveway and meet them at the door, which is probably a mistake because it means I’m the first thing Tom Rose sees when he walks in.
Her dad gives me a hard stare while her mother looks amused. Margaret Rose has always liked me—or at least tolerated me with good humor—but Tom is a different story. I can see him working through the math in his head, counting the women in the room and trying to figure out exactly what kind of situation his daughter has gotten herself into.
No father wants to contemplate this situation, so he chooses a glower instead of confrontation.
“Mr. Rose. Mrs. Rose.” I extend my hand. “Good to see you again.”
Tom takes my hand and squeezes harder than necessary. “Michael.”
“Dad.” Willow’s voice carries a warning. She steps between us and gives him “the look” before he goes “All Dad on me.” I’ve seen that look before. It’s the one that says she’s an adult and she’s made her choices and he can either accept that or spend the weekend sleeping on the couch.
Tom backs down. Barely.
“Tom, leave the boy alone,” Margaret says, patting her husband’s arm. “He’s been nothing but good to our girl.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” Tom mutters, but he lets it go.
The house fills with the smell of turkey, stuffing, and gravy as Aunt Nancy finishes cooking. People drift into the kitchen offering help and being told, politely but firmly, to sit. Nancy has a system, and she doesn’t need anyone disrupting it.
We ask at least three times anyway. You can take the boy out of Canada, but you can’t take the Canadian out of the boy.
“Sit,” Nancy says for the fourth time, pointing at the living room with a wooden spoon. “All of you. I’ve got this.”
“At least let me set the table,” Willow offers.
“Mary and Ellen are handling it. Go. Sit. Visit with your families.”
We retreat to the living room, suitably chastised, and I find myself on the couch with Willow on one side and Asuka on the other. Molly is on the floor with the girls, helping them fold napkins into shapes that look vaguely like swans. Hanna is talking quietly with Margaret Rose about something I can’t quite hear.
Tom is watching me from across the room. I pretend not to notice.
“He’ll come around,” Willow says quietly, leaning into my shoulder.
“He doesn’t have to.”
“He will. Give him time.”
I look around the room—at the people I love, at the family I found, at the life I’m building piece by piece—and I think maybe she’s right. Maybe time is exactly what we all need.
Thanksgiving Dinner, October 18, 2010
Dinner is loud. Turkey, sage stuffing, mashed potatoes, squash, green beans, and gravy crowd the table until plates overlap and serving spoons clatter against ceramic. People talk across each other, voices rising and falling in overlapping waves that would be chaos anywhere else but here feels like music.
Aunt Nancy commands the room with practiced ease, moving between the kitchen and the dining table with the kind of authority that brooks no argument. “More potatoes, Michael. You’re still growing.” She sets another heaping spoonful on my plate before I can protest. “And Willow, honey, you barely touched the stuffing. Aaron made it from scratch.”
“I had two servings already,” Willow says, but she’s smiling, and Nancy is already moving on to her next target.
“Nobody apologizes for anything at this table,” Nancy announces when Aaron starts to say something about the gravy being a touch too salty. “It’s Thanksgiving. We eat. We’re grateful. That’s the whole deal.”
Ellen tugs at my sleeve from her booster seat beside me. “Mikey, can you cut my turkey smaller?”
“You got it, munchkin.” I reach over and work my knife through the meat on her plate, making the pieces small enough that she can spear them with her tiny fork. She watches with the intense concentration only a four-year-old can muster, then nods her approval.
“Thank you, Mikey.”
“Anytime.”
Mary, sitting across from us, rolls her eyes with all the world-weary sophistication of an eight-year-old. “She can cut her own food, you know. She just likes making you do it.”
“Mary,” Aaron says, his tone mild but pointed.
“What? It’s true.”
Ellen sticks her tongue out at her sister. I hide my grin behind a forkful of stuffing.
Stories spill out naturally, some of them mine from the road, some of them Willow’s from the studio, some older than either of us—Nancy telling the one about the time my mother got lost in the woods behind their childhood home and came back three hours later with a baby raccoon she’d somehow convinced to follow her.
“She named it Bandit,” Nancy says, laughing so hard she has to set down her wine glass. “Our father nearly had a heart attack. Made her take it right back where she found it.”
“Did she?” Willow asks.
“Oh, she walked it back into the woods, sure. But that raccoon showed up on our back porch every night for the next two years looking for table scraps. Mary Ellen had basically adopted it without anyone’s permission.”
These stories are the only way I get to know her now—my mother as a girl, as a teenager, as someone who existed before I did. Aunt Nancy gives them to me freely, without making it heavy or turning dinner into a memorial service. Just family history passed down the way it’s supposed to be.
Laughter comes easily. Food disappears faster than expected. Uncle Aaron goes back for thirds on the turkey and doesn’t apologize for it, which earns him an approving nod from his wife. Molly, seated between Willow and Asuka, has relaxed in a way I wasn’t sure she would. She’s been quiet but not uncomfortable, watching the family dynamics with something like wonder on her face.
“This is lovely,” she says to Nancy when there’s a brief lull in the conversation. “Really. Thank you for having me.”
Nancy waves off the thanks. “Any girlfriend of Michael’s is family. That’s how it works. You want more green beans?”
“I couldn’t possibly—”
“That wasn’t really a question, sweetheart.” Aunt Nancy is already spooning beans onto Molly’s plate.
Asuka catches my eye across the table and the corner of her mouth twitches. She’s been doing that all evening—these small, private acknowledgments that feel like their own kind of conversation. She fits here, her usual stillness providing calm rather than distance. Ellen has already decided Asuka is her new favorite person after Asuka spent twenty minutes before dinner examining every single one of Ellen’s crayon drawings with genuine interest.
Pumpkin pie follows, with whipped cream passed down the table and arguments about who cut the slices too generously.
“That piece is massive,” Mary says, pointing at the slice Uncle Aaron is sliding onto his plate.
“I’m a growing boy.”
“Dad. You’re like fifty.”
“Forty-seven, thank you very much. And pie doesn’t count calories on holidays. Everyone knows that.”
“That’s not how science works.”
“It’s exactly how science works. Ask your cousin. He’s in college.”
Mary turns to me with the expectant look of someone who knows she’s about to be vindicated. “Mikey, tell Dad that’s not how calories work.”
I hold up my hands. “I’m staying out of this one.”
“Coward,” she says, but she’s grinning.
At some point, between the pie and the coffee and Ellen falling asleep against my arm with whipped cream still on her chin, I look around and realize how precious this is. The warm light from the overhead fixture. The cluttered table with its overlapping plates and half-empty serving dishes. Aunt Nancy laughing at something Uncle Aaron said. Mary trying to sneak a second piece of pie. Willow’s hand finding mine under the table. Asuka’s quiet presence. Molly’s knowing grin. Nobody wants anything except to make the person beside them comfortable. For one evening, I am just Mikey, who cuts Ellen’s turkey and listens to Aunt Nancy’s stories and argues with Mary about the rules of pie consumption.
The deep, dark silence of the Northern Ontario night presses against the windows, but inside this house, everything is warm and loud and alive.
When we leave late, the cold hits like a wall after the warmth of the kitchen. Our breath fogs in the air as we stand on the front porch saying our goodbyes.
Aunt Nancy tries to press leftovers on us anyway, holding out a Tupperware container of turkey and stuffing. “You can eat it on the plane.”
“Aunt Nancy, we can’t take food across the border, plus we will see you for breakfast tomorrow.”
“I know no such thing. Smuggle it. Live dangerously.”
“We’re not smuggling turkey into the United States.”
“Your loss.” She pulls me into a hug that’s tighter than her small frame would suggest. “You come back soon, you hear me? Don’t make it months again.”
“I won’t.”
“I’m holding you to that.” She releases me and moves on to Willow, then Asuka, then Molly, giving each of them the same fierce embrace. Uncle Aaron shakes my hand with his usual firm grip, his dark eyes warm above his grey-shot beard.
“Drive safe,” he says. “Roads might be icy.”
“We will.”
Ellen, half-asleep in Nancy’s arms now, waves a limp hand. “Bye, Mikey.”
“Bye, munchkin. I’ll see you soon.”
Willow lingers on the porch, her breath fogging in the cold air. “I’m heading home with Mom and Dad tonight,” she says, glancing back at her parents. “Like we planned.”
My Aunt Nancy nods warmly. “Family time is precious. You hold onto that.”
“Get some sleep at the hotel,” Willow says to me. “I’ll text you when I’m heading out tomorrow.”
Asuka, Molly, and Hanna are already moving toward the rental car, their breath making small clouds in the darkness. I pull Willow into a hug, pressing my lips to her temple.
“Say hi to your folks for me.”
“I will.”
The Day After, October 19, 2010
The day after Thanksgiving has no agenda, which makes it rare. Molly, Asuka, Hanna, and I head over to Aunt Nancy’s house. She meets us at the door with a huge smile, and the smell of Canadian bacon; instantly my mouth water. I ask where Uncle Aaron is, and Aunt Nancy informs us that he left for work hours ago. The girls are off at school, so it’s just us—the adults—drifting through a morning that feels borrowed from someone else’s quieter life.
Breakfast stretches late into the morning. Coffee gets poured and forgotten, then reheated when someone remembers it exists. I continue to receive withering looks from Aunt Nancy, Molly, Asuka, and Hanna for drinking Diet Coke instead of coffee, as though I’ve chosen to gnaw on raw meat at the breakfast table. Willow is at her parents’ house getting spoiled, I’m sure. She’ll spend the night with us at the hotel tonight.
Aunt Nancy moves through the kitchen without urgency, asking questions that land somewhere between curiosity and concern. She wants to know how things are going—really going—with “my ladies.” It’s a bit unusual, having girlfriends in my life, but she doesn’t lecture or judge. She just listens and offers love. There’s something about her presence that strips away pretense.
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