Chapter 22
I rolled off Red and collapsed onto my back, panting.
We hadn't made it to the bedroom. We'd made it to a bedroom, the first door we'd found after stumbling through the entryway, but not the one I'd planned.
The master was at the end of the hall with the ocean view.
This was a guest room with white walls and a king bed and sheets we'd already destroyed.
Four days. I had four days before I needed to be back on ice. Natalia had cleared my schedule, rearranged two sponsor calls, and pushed a fitting to next week. She hadn't asked why. She never asked why.
Red was breathing hard beside me, his chest rising and falling, sweat cooling on his skin.
The house was quiet around us. No traffic noise, no neighbors close enough to hear.
I'd checked the property lines before I booked it, noted the fence height and the sight lines from the road.
Three hundred yards to the nearest house. Far enough.
My phone buzzed from somewhere on the floor.
I ignored it. Red's hand found mine on the mattress, his palm warm against my knuckles, and I let myself have that for ten seconds before the phone buzzed again.
"You should get that," Red said.
"It can wait."
"Joel." His voice was soft. "It's buzzed four times."
I pulled my hand away and sat up, scanning the floor for my jeans. They were crumpled near the door with Red's shirt and one of my shoes. I found the phone in the back pocket.
Three missed calls from my father. One text: Call me when you're done with the shoot. We need to discuss the campaign.
The post-sex warmth drained out of me.
"Everything okay?" Red asked.
"Fine." I set the phone on the nightstand face-down. "Just my father."
"You're not going to call him back?"
"Not right now."
Red was quiet. I could feel him watching me, reading the shift in my posture, the way my shoulders had climbed toward my ears. He was good at that. Too good.
"The house is nice," he said finally. "Bigger than I expected."
"Four bedrooms. Pool. The kitchen has one of those islands." I didn't know why I was listing features like a real estate agent. I didn't know why my father's text was still sitting in my chest like something I'd swallowed wrong.
He'd probably seen the announcement. Lynx had posted a teaser this morning, just a silhouette and a release date, but my father tracked everything.
Every tag, every mention, every piece of coverage that shaped how the skating world perceived Joel Coffey.
He had Google alerts set up. He'd told me once it was part of managing a career.
I'd understood, even then, that he meant managing me.
"Hey." Red sat up. "Where'd you go?"
"Nowhere."
"You're doing that thing where your face goes blank." His hand landed on my shoulder. "Talk to me."
"There's nothing to talk about." I stood up before he could push. "I'm going to shower."
The bathroom was enormous. I stood under the water and let it run hot enough to hurt, and I didn't think about my father's text or the campaign or the fact that I was wasting training days on a man I couldn't introduce to anyone who mattered.
When I came out, Red was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. He was standing at the window looking out at the pool, his shoulders loose, his weight settled easy on his feet.
He turned when he heard me. "Feel better?"
"I wasn't feeling bad."
"Okay." He didn't argue. "So what's the plan?"
"Plan?"
"For the week." He gestured at the house around us. "We've got four days. What do you want to do?"
I didn't have an answer. At home, every hour was accounted for.
Morning ice at six, off-ice training at ten, choreography sessions, media prep, the meal containers that showed up three times a week, so I never had to think about food.
My life was a machine my father had designed, and I had perfected.
Here, there was nothing. No schedule, no structure, no one telling me where to be.
"Groceries," I said, because it was the only thing I could think of. "We should probably get groceries."
"I can cook," Red said. "I used to make all my dad's meals before—" He shrugged. "I'm pretty good at it."
"I'll do it."
He blinked. "You know how to cook?"
"How hard can it be?"
"Joel." He was looking at me differently now. "You don't have to. I'm offering."
"And I'm saying I've got it." The edge in my voice surprised us both. I didn't know why I was pushing back. I just knew that I couldn't stand here and let him take care of me, couldn't be the one who needed handling while he did the work.
Red held up his hands. "Okay. It's all yours."
Red went to explore the house. I sat on the couch with my phone and opened the grocery delivery app.
Categories lined the top of the screen: Produce. Dairy. Meat. Bakery. The cursor blinked at me from the search bar, waiting for input.
I had no idea what to type. I hadn't thought about what to eat in over a decade.
Red was an athlete. He needed protein. I added chicken breast, then paused. Did he like chicken? I'd never seen him eat chicken. I'd been sleeping with him for years and I didn't know what he ate for dinner.
I added salmon instead. Everyone said fish was healthy.
Vegetables: broccoli, spinach, and three pounds of avocados because I didn't know how many two people went through in a week. Eggs, pasta, rice, bread, olive oil, garlic, onions. I had no plan for any of it.
I hit order anyway.
The groceries arrived an hour later. Red helped me unpack them, and I watched his face as he pulled items out of the bags.
"That's a lot of avocados," he said.
"I didn't know how many we'd need."
"For four days?" He lined them up on the counter, and I winced. I’d ordered eight avocados. "We'd have to eat two a day."
"They're healthy."
"They're going to go bad." But he was smiling. "It's fine. We'll make guacamole."
I didn't know how to make guacamole. I didn't say that.
Red kept unpacking. He put things in the refrigerator and the pantry like he'd done this a thousand times. He probably had. He'd kept his father alive for years on meals he'd planned and cooked himself, while I'd been eating out of containers someone else prepared.
"So," Red said, closing the refrigerator. "Salmon tonight?"
"I'll handle it."
"Joel." He leaned against the counter, arms crossed. "I told you, I can cook. It's not a big deal."
"And I told you I've got it."
He studied me for a moment, and I didn't like what I saw in his face. It wasn't annoyance or frustration. It was patience, and underneath that, understanding.
"Okay," he said. "I'll be in the other room if you need me."
He left. I stood alone in the kitchen with my salmon and my eight avocados and absolutely no idea what to do next.
I opened drawers until I found a knife, then more drawers looking for a cutting board. I pulled up a recipe on my phone. Simple enough: season, heat pan, cook four minutes per side. I'd landed quad Lutzes in international competition. I could cook a piece of fish.
The pan was too hot. I knew it the moment the salmon hit the surface, the sizzle too aggressive, smoke already rising. I reached for the dial and my hand caught the pan handle, knocking it sideways. The salmon slid across the surface and landed half in the pan and half on the burner.
Smoke billowed up, and the smoke detector started shrieking.
My chest constricted hard as if someone had reached inside and squeezed. I tried to breathe and the air wouldn't go down, just sat in my throat. My heart stuttered.
I needed to turn off the stove, but my hands weren't responding.
The alarm kept screaming. Sweat broke out across my back, my face, my palms. I grabbed the counter to stay upright, and my fingers were tingling.
In my head was my father's voice, clear as if he were standing beside me: Coffeys don't do this.
I'd been eight years old, on the bathroom floor with my heart trying to escape through my ribs, and he'd stood in the doorway and told me to get up.
So I'd gotten up. I'd learned to feel the edges of it coming and clamp down before it could take hold.
Eighteen years of catching myself before I fell, and now I was falling anyway, in a kitchen full of smoke, because I'd wanted to prove I could do one normal thing without help.
The noise stopped.
Silence hit like a slap. I blinked and Red was at the stove, a dish towel in his hand, the window open behind him. Smoke was drifting out into the evening air. The pan was off the burner.
I was still gripping the counter, my knuckles white.
"Hey," Red said. "It's okay. It's just salmon. You're okay."
I opened my mouth to tell him I was fine, that I didn't need him to manage me. What came out instead was a sound I didn't recognize, something broken and wet, and then my face was wet too.
I was crying. In front of him. Over salmon.
I swiped at my face, but the tears kept coming and my breath was still hitching. I turned away from him, hunching over the counter like I could hide what was happening if I just made myself small enough.
"Don't," I said. My voice cracked. "Don't look at me."
Red didn't listen. He never listened.
He stepped closer, his hand landing on my shoulder, and I flinched, but I also turned into him like my body knew something my brain hadn't caught up to yet. My forehead hit his shoulder, and I stayed there, face hidden against his shirt, shoulders shaking.
"Leave me alone." I was still crying. "Red, I said—"
"I heard you." His arms came around me, pulling me in tighter. "I'm not going anywhere."
I tried to pull away. He tightened his grip, not enough to hurt, just enough to make clear that leaving wasn't an option. His hand came up and smoothed over my hair, a slow stroke from my forehead to the back of my skull.
I stopped fighting. The tears didn't stop, but the force behind them guttered out, leaving me empty and wrung out. Red kept holding me. He kept stroking my hair. His lips brushed my temple, not a kiss exactly, just contact, just proof that he was there.