Chapter 6
SIX
SIERRA
DRUGS ARE GREAT. Well, prescription drugs are.
It’s Wednesday afternoon, which means the rink is blissfully free of the peewees and hockey practice.
Lidia’s out trying to find me a partner, so I’m practicing on my own.
After all the dreams I shattered last year—Coach’s, mine, everyone’s—I need to be ready.
Though I’ve popped the same jumps six times. My Salchow is even worse. I feel off axis. I slam down, scraping the ice. Then I try again, and again, and ag—
“You’re doing it wrong.” A voice echoes somewhere behind me.
I freeze. I hate that I recognize that voice—deep, rumbly, and cocky as hell. I glance over my shoulder, and yup, it’s the jock from the party. He’s leaning on the boards, forearms braced, his amber brown gaze locked on me.
I turn back. No distractions. Especially not him.
With a deep exhale, I launch into something I’ve always been good at—a triple toe loop.
But a sharp tutting sound cuts through the air of my jump and throws me off-balance.
My landing is graceless, and with that thread pulled loose, a fire brews under my skin.
I glide to where he leans forward, coming face-to-face, the rink gate the only thing between us.
He’s still so much taller than me even when I’m in skates, but I refuse to let his height diminish my confidence.
“Shouldn’t you be tapping a keg somewhere?” I ask.
“Just giving you some friendly advice, princess.”
“I think that would require us to be friends. Besides, I don’t take skating advice from hockey players,” I say. “Or frat boys who spend their nights with their chest covered in paint.”
“Seems to me like you had a great time staring at my paint-covered chest.” He leans closer with an infuriating smirk. “You can look, but you’re going to have to be a little nicer if you want to touch.”
“Why? Am I too much to handle? Never had a girl that could put a skate to your throat?”
His dimple appears. A fucking dimple. “Never, but I think I’d enjoy anything you’d do to me.”
When his gaze crawls over me, the desperation to know what he’s thinking almost kicks in. He’s like a roller coaster you know you shouldn’t get on, but you do it anyway.
“I’ll be sure to surprise you, then.” I plaster on a saccharine grin.
He chuckles; it’s low and rumbly like his voice. “I’ll leave my door unlocked.”
“I’m sure it always is.”
If I wasn’t watching so closely, I wouldn’t have noticed his smile waver. “Maybe it’s best if you keep those skates on. Looks like you need the practice.”
He’s not wrong, but I’d never admit it. Telling a man he’s right? Yeah, hell no. “You wouldn’t even know the first thing about figure skating.”
“Your Salchow was under-rotated, and your landing was weak. And that triple toe loop? Way off axis.”
I’m left blinking like an idiot. His words scorch any retort I could have given. Because it’s exactly what I was scolding myself for.
“You lack confidence,” he adds, twisting the knife of his critique.
“Clearly you don’t lack balls. I didn’t ask for your opinion. You wouldn’t even be able to replicate any of my moves.”
His eyes narrow, and for a moment, it’s like he’s considering proving me wrong. I worry that he’ll actually do it, and I’ll have to live with the fact that a hockey player can skate better than me. Instead, he takes a step back from the boards. Our heated stare down disintegrates into the cold ice.
“Thought so.” I smirk. “Maybe if I toss a puck on the ice, you can chase after it like a good boy.”
A glint returns to his eyes. “Is that what you want? For me to be a good boy?”
I clench my fists. “I want you to get out of my arena.”
“Your arena?”
“My slot,” I say through gritted teeth. “You can crash headfirst into the baseboards all you want after that.”
“Not anymore,” he mutters, then pushes off the gate and turns away. “Dalton has a learn-to-skate program, by the way. It might do you some good.”
I flip him off.
“ASSHOLE!” I TOSS my bag on the table of the after-hours study room.
All the buildings on campus close at ten on Wednesdays, but there’s a private study room that Scarlett found freshman year that she sneaks into.
Like at midnight on a weekday when she needs to use the whiteboard to teach herself.
Tonight, the bold heading she’s written on the chaotic board is Proctology.
“Close! It’s actually the inside of a colon.” Scarlett points at the image on her textbook, staring at me over the rims of her glasses. She’s braided her hair into uneven pigtails. She stress braids when she studies.
“Did you run into Justin again or something?” she asks.
“Worse.”
“There’s worse than Justin?”
“Fine, not worse but equally as irritating,” I say. “That hockey player from the party.”
“The one whose head you ripped off?” She laughs when I give her a look. “Sorry, that’s what everyone’s saying. You went against the hockey stud at the first party of the semester. It was bound to circulate.”
“Oh please, people can’t care that much.”
“They do when it’s Dylan Donovan, Dalton’s beloved left-winger. Or I should say the captain. Well, for like a day, before his failed drug test thing.” Scarlett pauses. “Sorry, my dad’s been bringing work home, so a day in the life of Coach Kilner is all I heard about this morning.”
Failed drug test? Who the hell is this guy? “That would explain all the free time he has to irritate me. He’s the cockiest man on the planet.”
Scarlett snorts. “Match made in heaven.”
When I glare, she laughs loudly, standing to erase something on the whiteboard.
“It’s just that you’re the cockiest woman I know. I mean, not as of late, but you know you’re good and you aren’t afraid to show it. It’s a commendable characteristic.”
“I am not cocky.” Only Scarlett would see it as a positive.
I submerged all those parts of me with Justin, but that didn’t stop his ice queen comments.
Smile for once. You’ll make it hard for the judges to like us.
Just don’t be you, Sierra. Those words had lodged themselves deep, buried under every forced expression, every effort to be palatable.
“It’s not a bad thing to know you’re good at something.”
I purse my lips. “Okay, fine, a little cocky. But he exudes it.”
“That I believe,” she says. “But at least you won’t bump into him on the ice anymore. I’m pretty sure he’s getting suspended.”
She might be right, but I have a feeling Dylan Donovan doesn’t follow the rules.