Chapter 31
Maybe, Maybe, What a Word
Paisley
Knox stops his Range Rover in front of iSkate. I can see by his glance that the place causes him pain. I am proud of him for trying to face his demons. It will be tough, but I think he’s doing exactly the right thing. Small steps. Big results.
Harper sees us. Her UGGs leave traces behind in the snow and her Bordeaux-colored cashmere coat blazes. Her eyes flash in our direction, stop on the car, then move upward to stare at us. They narrow into slits, but she doesn’t look angry, just hurt. Broken. Then she goes inside.
“What’s with her?” I ask.
“Hakuna Matata” is playing on the car stereo. Knox looks to the door of iSkate where Harper has just disappeared. His mouth is agape. “Before meeting you, I was an asshole.”
Harper has never been nice to me. But never really vicious either. She’s always been honest. Sometimes it hurts, but honesty isn’t vicious. We just think it is because we don’t want to hear those things, and when we do, we feel pain.
“Do you regret it?”
“I regret having hurt so many women,” Knox says. He runs a hand across his gray Calvin Klein jogging pants, then begins fumbling with the heater. “I shouldn’t have given any of them false hope.”
I nod. “They’ll forgive you. At some point they’ll find someone, and then they’ll forgive you.”
“You think?”
“Of course.”
“Come here, Baymax.”
“Why do you call me that?”
He laughs. Soft and somewhat hoarse. There’s nowhere for the sound to go in the space of the car, so it keeps resounding. “Because you’re my Baymax. You with your puffy white jacket.”
His fingers take hold of my collar. He pulls me to him, over the gearshift, and a second later I feel his lips on mine.
It’s contagious. We both smile, we kiss, Pumba is singing about having no worries and at this moment, this very second, I believe this little warthog, believe his words, believe that Knox is my Hakuna Matata.
Knox moves away from me, rubs his nose over the corners of my mouth. “Get going. Show ‘em how it’s done, Snow Queen.”
“Will we see each other later?”
“We live together.”
I run a finger over his birthmark. “I mean, dating-wise.”
“Say that again.”
“Dating-wise.”
His smile grows bigger. “One more time.”
“Dating-wise.”
“Crazy.”
“What?”
Knox leans his head back against the seat and shoves his fingertips into the band of his jogging pants. An absent-minded gesture that makes me react so strongly, I have to keep from gasping.
“It’s really true what people say about butterflies in the stomach. They exist. And the tiniest little things the right person does can get them going. Like you, when you say dating-wise. It’s nuts.”
I lock my fingers with his, which, at the moment, are still in his pants, and run my thumb across his skin. “So, we’ll see each other later? Dating-wise?”
“Of course. You’re my girlfriend.”
I have to smile like a teenager in love for the first time.
“Say that again.”
“Girlfriend.”
“Again.”
He grins. “Girlfriend.”
“These butterflies,” I say. “They’re so manic.”
Knox tugs at my earlobe and laughs. And all of a sudden, I’m thankful for my ethereal ears because he likes them.
“Later,” he says.
“Yeah. Later.”
I slide out of the car, my bag over my shoulder, and don’t think I’ve ever felt this happy. Suddenly everything seems brighter. Suddenly everything seems more real. Maybe this is the way life’s supposed to be. The way everyone should experience life. Full of joy and ease.
In the changing room, I run into Gwen. She looks up as I enter and frowns. “What’s with your face?”
“What should be up with it?” I plop down onto the bench next to her and undo my boots. Snow falls to the ground.
“It’s doing this weird thing.” Gwen waves her hands around as if trying to push air in my direction. “It’s glowing from the inside out.”
I undo the buttons of my jeans and pull my hoodie over my head. It smells of Knox. I press it to my nose for a second because I want to hold onto the scent a little longer before putting it in my locker and pulling on my skating dress.
“No idea. The party at Buttermilk Mountain yesterday was nice. I rode a snowboard for the first time ever.”
I’d like to tell her the real reasons for feeling the way I do, but Harper is sitting behind us and listening in while tying her skates. I don’t want to hurt her.
Gwen pulls her legwarmers straight and casts me a doubtful glance. “When you were leaving, you were totally over it and were bitching about having to take care of the tourists.”
“Yeah, but I managed to sleep and I’m good.”
“Well, well.” She stands up and steps from one foot to the other, just like always. “After training you want to go to the warm-up for the X Games? It’s fun, there’s always something going on and the beer’s good. Levi and Aaron are going, too.”
“Of course.” I don’t tell her that I’d hoped she’d ask me so that I could watch Knox snowboard. I pull on my boot covers and put my hair into a bun. “What’s with your Lutz?”
“What do you mean?”
“Yesterday you landed a double. Didn’t you want to do a triple?”
Gwen waves it off while holding open the door to the rink for me. Harper is right behind us. “Yeah. But not until Skate America. If I’d done it yesterday, Dad would’ve freaked.”
“If he could see you pull it off, maybe not. Maybe he would’ve let you incorporate it into your program.”
Gwen rolls her eyes. “Maybe, maybe. Such an awful word. Not a yes and not a no. Who can do anything with that? I don’t like ambiguity, so I do things my way.”
“Your way won’t work,” Harper hisses as she pushes past us out onto the ice. “It never does, Gwen.”
“Not like your wobbly Rittberger yesterday,” Gwen fires back with a bittersweet smile.
Harper glares at her but doesn’t say anything. I watch her glide across the ice, elegant and graceful. She is beautiful, like a model, and I wonder what it is about me that Knox likes when he didn’t want someone like her.
“She’s gone,” Gwen says. “Out with it.”
“What?”
We set off backward, parallel, not looking at each other, but I know Gwen’s rolling her eyes. It’s as if I could hear it.
“What happened last night? All of a sudden Gargamel’s gone and you’re walking around like the happiest little thing.”
“Paisley!” Polina’s voice cuts across the ice and takes in the whole rink. “Tension!”
I imagine being pulled into the air by an imaginary little man, chin up, chest out, farther and farther until Polina gives me her slight nod.
“Well done, Watson,” I say, get ready to perform a double Lutz, jump and land clean with my blades on the ice. Gwen follows my example. Then I say, “Something has come up between…Knox and me.”
Gwen squeals and it feels like everyone in the rink casts us a glance. Polina doesn’t look particularly impressed, but, then again, she never does, so I don’t give it a second thought and quickly perform an axel to make her happy.
Gwen and I turn and skate on, when Levi and Aaron come toward us, skating backward so that they can look at us.
Aaron is wearing a new outfit. It’s pale green and goes wonderfully with his red hair.
Before either of them can say anything Gwen repeats, “Something has come up between Knox and Paisley!”
Levi mimics Gwen’s squeak and Aaron asks, “What exactly has come up?”
“Something real?” Levi asks.
“What wouldn’t be real?” I ask. The cold wind cuts my face.
Gwen spins backward, forward, backward, forward. Watching her makes me a feel a little dizzy, but Gwen does it regularly. She needs all the movement because she’s got too much energy.
“Well, if he got you on your back and now you’re reading too much into it like every other girl before you, then you go back to the resort and he ghosts you.”
“Or if he got you on your back and now you’re reading too much into it like every other girl before you, then you go back to the resort and he gets you on your back again before ghosting you,” Levi says.
“Has he ever done that?” Aaron asks. He truly sounds interested, as if it had to do with planning his program and not Knox’s sex life. “I mean, laid someone twice?”
“Good question,” Gwen says. “I’ve never heard of things ever lasting more than one night.”
“Then Paisley would be the first,” Aaron says. “And maybe that means that something real indeed did come up.”
“There it is again, that word,” Gwen says. “Maybe, maybe.”
“People.” I stretch out my leg, go deeper and deeper, pull it in and spin, which turns everything around me into a swirl of color before I stand back up and continue skating with clean movements. “He didn’t lay me. And anyway, that sounds so demeaning. Why are you even using that term?”
“It’s Knox,” Gwen and Levi say in unison, while Aaron shrugs as if there wasn’t anything he could do to counter their words. “He does that kind of thing,” he adds.
Gwen, Levi, and Aaron look at me as if I had told them I was giving up figure skating and leaving Aspen.
“Ooooookay,” Levi says. “That doesn’t fit.”
“What doesn’t fit?” I’m a bit out of breath after executing a Biellmann—grabbing my free blade and pulling the heel of my boot behind and above the level of my head.
“Knox and the word real,” Gwen says. “But keep on talking, bestie, keep on talking. I’m curious.”
Those butterflies again. Gwen just called me her best friend. I can feel my head begin to whirl a little. It could have to do with my spin, but I think my body today is overproducing serotonin, and it’s not used to it. Not at all.
“He said that I was his girlfriend.”
Gwen stumbles, Levi screws up his Lutz, and Aaron runs into the side of the rink. Harper skates past and considers the three with a frown. I have to bite my lower lip in order not to laugh. “People, I said that I was his girlfriend, not that Skate America was canceled.”
“That’s even heavier,” Gwen says. “That thing about being his girlfriend.”
Levi nods. “Knox and the word girlfriend? That’s miles beyond Skate America.”
“If William knew, he’d fire off a tweet,” Aaron says.
“Woe betide you if you tell him!” I threaten. “If you do that, I’ll burn his monster reindeer and blame it all on you.”
“He’ll find out anyway,” Gwen says. She lands a double axel surprisingly well and flails her arms. “I mean, Knox has a girlfriend! That’s going to get out quicker than a stink bomb going off in front of a fan in a windowless room.”
Levi nods. “You’d best give us an autograph already, Paisley. You’re a celebrity now.”
“Which paper is going to bring it out first, do you think?”
“Ice Today,” Gwen says right as Aaron shouts out, “USA Today.”
Gwen shakes her head and almost loses her balance. “When it’s got to do with their little star, Ice Today will never let anyone else drop the girlfriend bomb.”
“It won’t go public at all,” I say, louder than intended.
Polina casts me a severe glance and I attempt to collect myself, but my heart is racing more quickly than the spin I make to keep my face hidden from my trainer.
When I come back up, I say more quietly, “I don’t want it to go public. So, not a word to anyone, okay?”
“But, Paisley,” Gwen says. She exchanges a look with Levi and Aaron, who are both wearing the same expression.
Levi’s voice is careful when he speaks. “Knox Winterbottom having a girlfriend is virtually impossible not to go public.”
I don’t want to hear it, but I know he’s right. The thing is, I don’t want to admit it because that would mean having to face reality, and reality is ugly, and, right now, things are just too damn nice to be ugly.
“Simply promise me you won’t say anything to anyone. Please.”
“Promise,” they all say simultaneously, but it sounds sympathetic somehow, like poor-thing-it’s-going-to-get-out-anyway. I hear it, I know it, but pretend I don’t. I pretend to be dumb, so that things remain beautiful. Maybe it’ll work.
Maybe, maybe. That word.