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
Arrival
Toronto Airport, October 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.
Rachel’s parents spot us before I spot them. Her dad is already weaving through the crowd with her mom a half-step behind, his face splitting into a grin when he catches Rachel’s eye. Her mom reaches Rachel first and pulls her into a hug, warm and familiar and completely uncomplicated.
“You’re too thin,” she tells Rachel, holding her at arm’s length.
Rachel rolls her eyes. “Mom.”
Her dad shakes my hand, solid and brief. “Good to see you, Michael.
Rachel’s mom works her way through the group with the ease of someone who considers every friend of her daughter’s an automatic member of the family.
Rachel’s dad nods to each of them in turn, steady and unhurried.
“We should get moving,” her mom says, turning to Rachel and Crystal. “Crystal, your mom’s expecting you. Long drive ahead.”
Willow’s parents appear a moment later, her dad scanning the terminal as her mom spots us and waves. Tom Rose is tall and broad through the shoulders, his greying hair cut short, his expression settling into careful assessment as he takes in the group around his daughter. Margaret Rose is already smiling, arms open for Willow before she’s fully closed the distance.
The two sets of parents exchange greetings, handshakes and small talk passing between them with the ease of people whose daughters grew up together. Rachel’s mom hugs Willow goodbye. Margaret Rose tells Rachel to be good. Tom shakes Rachel’s dad’s hand and says something about the highway construction near Ignace.
Then the groups split three ways. Rachel’s parents take Rachel and Crystal for the long drive back to Dryden. Willow leaves with her parents, who drove from Dryden, toward the parking garage, squeezing my hand once before she goes. “See you at dinner tomorrow. Two o’clock.”
“Aunt Nancy’s orders.”
She grins over her shoulder, and then she’s gone.
Asuka, Hanna, Molly, and I head for the rental car counter. The drive to the hotel is quiet, everyone tired and content, the city lights sliding past the windows in streaks of white and amber.
At the Best Western Plus, I spot Tom Rose at the front desk before he spots me. He’s signing a registration card, Margaret beside him with Willow leaning against the counter, arms folded, her travel bag slung over one shoulder. They haven’t seen us yet.
The desk clerk shifts her attention to me as Tom steps aside, and her eyebrow lifts slightly when she recognizes me and clocks the rest of my group. 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.
Tom sees it all. His jaw tightens. He looks at me, looks at the women, looks back at me. Margaret puts a hand on his arm.
“Problem?” Molly asks the clerk sweetly, and the clerk’s composure cracks just slightly.
“No, ma’am. Not at all. Here are your keys.”
Willow catches my eye from across the lobby and gives me a small wave, but she stays with her parents. Tom steers his family toward the elevator without a word, his hand firm on Margaret’s elbow. I watch them go.
“Her dad didn’t look happy,” I tell Molly quietly.
“Ah.” She glances toward the closing elevator doors. “He’ll get over it or he won’t.”
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. Toronto in October still surprises me, the residential streets canopied with maples burning red and orange against the grey sky. The air through the cracked windowsmells 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.
His expression hasn’t improved since last night. He’d watched me check into a hotel with three women, and now he’s standing in a house full of the same faces, his daughter threading her way through them like she belongs. Margaret Rose offers me a warm smile, but Tom’s eyes move from me to Asuka to Molly and back again, his mouth a tight line.
“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,
The next day we arrive at 2:00 PM as ordered by Aunt Nancy. 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 city hum fades to near-silence on this residential street, 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 staying at the hotel with Mom and Dad tonight,” she says, squeezing my hand. “Like we planned. Family time.”
My Aunt Nancy nods warmly. “Family time is precious. You hold onto that.”
“I’ll text you in the morning,” Willow says.
Tom and Margaret are already walking to their car. Tom gives me a curt nod. Margaret waves.
Asuka, Molly, and Hanna move toward our car, their breath making small clouds in the darkness. I pull Willow into a hug, pressing my lips to her temple.
“Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Michael.”
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