14. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
My limbs shook with exhaustion from the beating I was giving and I was barely listening to Eli’s instructions as my skates slid smoothly on the ice, my already blurry vision wavering even more.
Everything about today seemed to be going to shit and it was clearly showing in my skating.
After a less-than-amazing doctor’s appointment this morning which showed that the special eye drops they’d prescribed upon my arrival had done little to slow my vision loss, we were now discussing a potential surgery in the next few months.
Then Enzo and I had gotten into an argument in the car about skating yet again. The doctor warned me that any head trauma could not only speed up my already accelerated vision loss, but it could also potentially put the surgery to stave off the vision loss on hold.
He wanted me to stop completely until after the surgery and I’d refused outright. Enzo would never understand the feeling of skating in the same way I did—the itch that filled me whenever I went too long without stepping onto the ice. I tried to explain it to him, but my stubborn alpha’s first priority was always my eyes.
From the time that my parents put me on the ice at five, hoping to have a talented son that could make all of the hardships they went through when they left Ukraine for Britain, skating had been everything to me.
I’d skated nearly every day of my life since then and could probably count on one hand all of the times I had to take a break. I hadn’t even gone to a regular secondary school or made any friends until I made it to University because of how much time I dedicated to my sport.
I’d spent so much time on the ice that it had made me painfully shy. It had taken a very handsome, very extroverted alpha with a wonky American accent to finally pull me out of it.
“Up!” Eli barked and I lifted off of the ice, my brain stalling at the last minute as I came down awkwardly on one shoulder as Enzo’s sharp words from this morning came to mind.
‘Babe, you can’t just ignore the fact that you’re going blind! Why are you running headlong toward it instead of trying to figure out ways to keep your eyesight for as long as possible?’
His voice still rang in my head as my arms and legs smarted from connecting with the ice.
We’d left the car in a sour mood with Leith trying to soothe the tension, but even a few hours later I was still peeved off.
He wasn’t the one who was actually dealing with this. I was.
But even as I thought those angry thoughts, I felt myself softening up almost immediately when I thought of my stubborn alpha.
Arsehole, I thought bitterly as I got up. He’s lucky I love him so much.
“Try some step work,” Eli called, his voice cutting through my inner thoughts.
That was fine by me. Step work I could do all day. Step work I could do in my sleep.
As I moved through the motions, my ears picked up conversation that was happening in the stands of the ice rink.
I’d quickly learned that one of the funny side effects of losing one of your senses was that all of the others seemed to grow in order to compensate for it.
It meant that my sense of smell, taste, and hearing were all heightened, and that I could pick out the specific words of the women snapping at each other even over the sound of my skates on the ice.
“I understand accommodations, Callaghan. But aren’t they supposed to make things fair and not give someone else an advantage. We all have to skate with multiple other people on the ice. That’s fair.”
That was the voice of the snooty blonde who always seemed to show up when it was my solo ice time.
My stomach flipped at the pure vitriol in her voice.
I hadn’t explicitly asked to have the ice to myself when we were discussing potential accommodations I would need to be an athlete at the Seattle Sports Complex.
It had been a pleasant surprise and one I’d fully intended on using, but it also seemed to be pissing off the other figure skaters who had to skate three to the rink at a time.
A familiar voice responded to the woman before she squawked: “What? You can’t kick us out!”
There was another, more muffled exchange, and then nothing until I saw a blurred figure dressed in a purple spandex figure skater’s outfit skating toward me.
I knew who it was even before she was close enough for me to pick out more details about her.
Eli barked something at Ciara, but I was too busy looking away from her, my face burning with embarrassment over the fact that she’d seen me at my worst.
I didn’t run into her as much as I thought I would considering we lived right across from each other. I had a sneaking suspicion that it was because she was avoiding us.
I didn’t want to look at her, but I could smell her cinnamon scent and despite everything it soothed something deep inside of me.
“I can hear them,” I told her, gesturing to my ears. “The funny thing about going blind is that it makes you have ears like a bat. I could hear you too.”
There was a huff and I realized she’d laughed.
“Do you want me to kick him out?”
I finally looked over at her, finding her face to be a blur of indecision. “You can’t. He’s the coach.”
Ciara turned and started to bicker with Eli, telling him to leave. I barely paid attention, too wrapped up in her scent and her closeness.
“From me,” Ciara said. “If you’ll have me.”
I blinked with surprise. “Sorry?”
“I give up,” I heard Eli say, but I was too busy staring at the alpha in front of me to care about the coach.
“Have you where?” I asked stupidly, my cheeks immediately flushing at the image of her pushing me up against a wall and pressing her lips to the spot where my pulse was the strongest.
But she didn’t mean that she was going to have her way with me and make all of the dreams I’ve had about her come true. No, she meant something far different.
“As your figure skating coach,” she finally supplied, the corner of her mouth pulling up into a grin.
I must have been asleep or something, because this was exactly how one of my dreams had begun last week… though admittedly she’d been dressed in a sexy nurse outfit and had smelled like a mixture of the rest of my pack.
“Artie?” Ciara prodded, not knowing that the mind-equivalent of a porn plot was playing out in my head.
It was enough to make the block I’d put on my bonds with Enzo and Leith slip for a moment, giving them the full feel of my ridiculous horn dog thoughts.
There was a curious brush from Leith before I slammed them back into place again.
“Why would you want to be my coach?” I asked, frowning at her as if she’d grown a second head. “Don’t you have enough on your plate without worrying about me?”
Ciara shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe. Or maybe I’m just tired of watching Eli do a shit job trying to work with you.”
I didn’t want to admit that I was uncoachable by the man whose trainees had dominated the female singles at the Olympics this year.
It should have been a dream come true to be coached by him.
But half the time it felt like he was trying to fit me into the mold he’d created for the rest of his skaters. A bit like trying to fit a square shaped peg into a round hole.
Ciara’s sigh filled my ears and she reached out and grabbed my hands. The contact was nearly electric, like my instincts were trying to tell me something I’d kind of already assumed all along.
I liked Ciara on a biological level and I was sure—if given half a chance—I’d like her on an emotional one too.
“Has Leith ever told you about my weird little quirk?” she asked, giving my fingers a squeeze.
Before seeing her again at the Olympics he honestly hadn’t mentioned her much past having a bad night here and there. Of course he’d told us the gist of their relationship—or I guess the lack thereof—but anything else I had to pull out of him as if I was trying to yank teeth out of his head.
I did know, however, that he was just as in love with her as he’d been four years ago. Time and space had changed nothing for my sweet alpha.
“No,” I finally answered. “I don’t think he has.”
“Bless that man for not embarrassing me at least.” Ciara’s voice was sheepish as she spoke and lifted my fingers to her eyelids, closing them. “When I was little and things were horrible, I had this DVD of a really old movie. Have you ever seen Ice Castles?”
I shook my head. It sounded vaguely familiar, but I wasn’t much for movies. I was a series binge-watcher through and through. Give me a two-hour film and I had the attention span of a honeybee, but give me twelve hours of a television show? I was locked in.
“Well, it’s a movie about a figure skater who falls and hits her head and it causes her to go blind,” Ciara explained, patting my fingers when she felt them stiffen at the mention of vision loss.
“She thinks her whole world is ending because of it. I could sort of relate.” Ciara’s breath tickled my skin as she laughed. “Her boyfriend teaches her how to count the strides of the ice rink she’s in until she doesn’t even need to think about where she was going. She just went and did it.”
I scoffed at that. “But that’s a movie. Not real life. Do you think I can just count my way through my figure skating career?”
Ciara finally let go of my fingers and shook her head. “Not at all. But the counting was never the point. You don’t have an eye problem, you have a confidence problem.”
“I watched your Olympics routine and you were amazing. You flew right across the ice like you owned it,” Ciara continued and began to skate backward away from me.
“Yeah until I nearly botched it by running into a wall.” My words were dry but my feet were already moving to follow her.
“Doesn’t matter. You had confidence then, so you were able to skate, but somewhere along the line you lost it.”
She twisted away from me and the sound of skate blades on ice filled my ears and I sped up to chase her.
“And you think you can help me get it back? With counting,” I asked sardonically, nearly running into her as she skirted to a stop. Her cinnamon scent was so mouthwatering that I nearly pressed my nose to the spot just under her chin where it was the strongest.
“I don’t know,” Ciara said, reaching out and gently brushing my eyes closed. The all-consuming darkness was a comfort after a day of straining my eyes to see what little I could.
Then Ciara’s voice was right next to my ear. “But all I do know is that when I was in your skates—though the situation was a bit different—I knew that I needed something to cling to and counting seemed to work.”
There was a brief pause before she put my hand on the low wall. “Start with the length and count out loud and then we’ll do the width.”
An hour later, Charm, who had been sleeping next to my duffel while I skated, greeted me with a gentle woof once I stepped off of the ice.
Ciara had left me alone ten minutes ago to get ready for her own ice time and my instincts were already mourning the loss of her presence.
“She’s honestly too nice,” I told the dog as I settled on the bench and began to unlace my skates. “She acts like she doesn’t care half of the time and then she does something like that.”
Ciara offering to coach me was the last thing I ever expected her to do. She was a bit like a cat, I was quickly realizing, a bit standoffish but fiercely protective once she came around to you.
I vaguely wondered if that made me her kitten. I sure hoped not… or maybe I did?
It was all a muddle mess of confusing omega hormones and rational thought.
Pulling on my slippers, I shouldered my bag and whistled for Charm. “All right, girlie, let’s hit the showers.”
There were locker rooms for both male and female athletes, but I bypassed them for my private dressing room and shower, holding my ID card to the keypad until it beeped and opened.
The room was dim and I flipped the lights on, dropping my bag on the bench and undressing from the sweatpants and long-sleeved shirt I was wearing.
Charm settled in the corner with a huff and I could feel her eyes on me as I snagged the mesh shower bag out of my duffel and headed for the shower, remembering at the last second that there was a six-inch lip leading into the damn stall.
The edge of it caught on my foot, nearly sending me careening into the tiled space. Thankfully, I had a grip on one of the metal bars that were on either side of the entrance and I managed to keep myself upright.
The top of my foot stung from scraping it, but otherwise I was unscathed.
“How could you forget about the ledge, you idiot?” I chastised myself out loud as I kept a firm grip on the bars until I was in the shower.
Charm’s whine filled my ears and she nudged the back of my bare leg.
“I’m all right,” I told her, reaching back to give her head a reassuring pat.
Charm didn’t seem to believe me because she flopped down just outside of the shower and rested her chin on the lip. I knew that once I was done with my shower that she would be there to remind me to step over the damned thing that time.
Sighing, I turned the shower on as hot as I could get it, letting it pound away the ache in what was undoubtedly a bruised shoulder from the tumble I took.
That would be fun to explain to Enzo later.
While I soaped up, I weighed my options. I could just keep my shirt on around the alpha until the bruise faded—though even as mad as I was at him I knew that would be hard to do.
Our best sex was, after all, make up sex.
And if I tried to keep my shirt on during a romp in my nest he definitely would pick up on it and it would most definitely ruin whatever mood we had going.
That just left showing him the bruise and dealing with his panicked fluttering.
He’d always been protective. From the moment he cut in at a bar when we were in Uni while another alpha was breathing down my neck, he’d done his best to look out for me and my best interests.
But over the last year that had changed into an almost anxious sort of protectiveness with an unhealthy dose of paranoia.
I was also going to have to tell him about Ciara coaching me which was going to be a nightmare in itself.
Enzo had made his opinion about her known to us after we confessed that we liked her and wanted to try and court her into the pack.
I knew he at least thought she was pretty. That much had been obvious from the bond on that first day we moved in.
But, just like he’d done with my eyes and protecting what sight I had left, Enzo had made himself a crusader for Leith’s happiness.
Their bond with each other was different than theirs with me. It was brotherly. After we’d met Leith in Scotland after our move from London three years ago, we’d both seen firsthand how shattered Leith was over the gorgeous female figure skater that had left him high and dry.
Because of that, I probably should have felt the same way as Enzo did… but I just couldn’t find it in myself to hate Ciara Callaghan.
The shower water began to turn tepid, telling me that I’d stood underneath the jets for far longer than I thought. I finished rinsing my hair quickly before it cooled off anymore and turned the shower off.
Leith was probably waiting outside for me which meant that I needed to hurry up and get dressed.
Moving to exit the shower, my damp leg was met once again by Charm’s cold nose reminding me to step over the ledge.
“Thank you,” I whispered to her before lifting my foot higher and stepping out of the shower. I still had a lot of things on my mind, but the first thing I needed to deal with was telling both Leith and Enzo about my new figure skating coach.