Chapter 24
NOW
Paloma
“And how is therapy going?”
“Fine.” I roll my eyes. “I told you last time we talked that it’s going fine, and I haven’t even had my third session yet. Can you relax?”
“When it comes to you?” Alessia hums. “No.”
I’m sitting at the kitchen counter, indulging in a bowl of sugary marshmallow cereal for dinner while chatting on the phone with Alessia. It’s an adjustment, but I feel . . . calmer. Happier in my own skin, a feeling I’ve chased away for years now.
“What about swimming again?” she asks.
“Oh . . . no, I haven’t,” I confess, swirling my spoon in the now-colorful milk.
“Maybe you should.” There’s a long pause before she huffs a sigh. “Talk to Dr. Sutton about it, yeah?”
“I already did,” I mumble. “She said I should.”
“Then you should, Paloma.” She sighs again. “You can’t deprive yourself of joy like this anymore. That’s one of the rules.”
“I think you just made that up—”
“Maybe,” she says. “I’m just looking out for you. Now that you’re letting me.”
There’s a smile on my lips that she can’t see. She’s the only one on this earth who knows everything. The good, the bad, the messy. The depths of my self-hatred and anger and fear. She saw me at seventeen—lost and scared, half dead in the eyes. And she never let go of my hand.
It was me who pushed her out.
“Maybe we can get dinner or something next week,” I offer, feeling all at once shy and excited.
“Yeah?” I can hear the smile in her voice. “I’d like that.”
We hang up soon after, and I settle comfortably at the table, opening my laptop to do my assignments due tomorrow.
The front door opens, hitting the wall with force.
“You’re not the boss of me.”
The sound of my roommate’s annoyed yell—followed by our front door slamming—jolts me from the book I’m reading at the kitchen table.
“Wanna fucking bet?”
I swear I know that voice. I peek around the corner—only to be shocked by the sight of Toren Kane in my apartment, fuming mad, cornering my roommate in our living room. I step toward them, but neither one looks up from their heated standoff.
“Back off,” I snap.
His ring-adorned hands tighten to fists at his sides as he towers over her.
Only, when I shove into him to push him away from my roommate, Lily grabs his wrist with both her hands—keeping him there, looming over her.
“Stay out of this, Blake.” Toren snaps, eyes never leaving my roommate. She’s not scared, matching his huffing anger breath for heated breath. “This is between me and Lily.”
“You can’t tell me what to do,” she spits. His eyes lock down across her body and back up.
Toren’s in his usual all-black ensemble, tattoos on display with a short sleeve shirt and jeans.
A large black motorcycle helmet is at his feet like he dropped it there, with a faded sticker of swirling blues and yellow on the back.
Lily, on the other hand, is dressed in a tight navy zip-up and leggings, an elastic headband keeping her auburn hair back in the slouching ponytail it’s currently tied in.
With her cheeks still pink from the cold, or exertion, it’s clear she was doing something athletic.
“Like hell I can’t. You’re running around a busy-ass town with your headphones in blaring,” he snaps, but his words are still quiet. Where Lily shouts, Toren doesn’t raise his voice a notch over speaking volume.
“So?” I ask, crossing my arms, still halfway between them even if neither of them wants to look at me.
“So?” Toren laughs, but there’s no humor in it. He turns to me then. “Lily can’t hear out of her goddamn right ear, and she doesn’t wear her hearing aids.”
My eyes flare. “What?”
Lily looks more furious than embarrassed and stamps her foot like a little rabbit. “That’s private!”
“Not when you’re running with headphones in,” he growls out. He shakes her off, arms flexing like he wants to pick her up and toss her over his shoulder. She’d probably go flying halfway across the room. “You wanna run all by yourself? Wear the fucking hearing aids.”
“She’s fine.” I step down, a little reluctant to get in between them. Not because I’m scared of either of them, but because the energy between them is dangerously palpable. “She wears them all the time.”
I’m lying through my teeth. I didn’t even know she had a hearing problem.
Toren rolls his eyes at me and I catch sight of his bruised eye and butterfly tape across a cut there—one he didn’t have in practice.
“Sure, she does. And I’m a fucking saint,” he says, before taking his helmet in hand and storming out. Only, just at the doorway, he snaps his fingers at her, looking over his shoulder. “Wear them.”
Lily is angry—furious rather than hurt by anything the towering defenseman has done. But she watches him with a quiver in her lips as he leaves, like she wants to ask a million questions and beg him to stay all in one breath.
“You okay, Lily?” I ask, stepping toward her. My words seem to break the trance that Toren Kane’s presence put her in and she nods.
“I’m fine.”
She steps to the sofa to sit down. Her hand comes up to touch her right ear, before untucking her hair to hide it.
My chest squeezes. “Is there a reason you didn’t want to tell me about the hearing stuff?” I ask, settling myself at her left side.
“It’s embarrassing.”
“It’s really not.” I slump a little more comfortably. “You can’t hear out of one of your ears?”
She nods. “Since I was a kid.” She taps again on her right ear.
I want to ask her how Toren knew such an intimate detail, but I keep quiet.
The closest I get to broaching the subject is, “So you guys know each other well, huh?”
Lily bites her lip, thinks for a long while, but eventually nods. After his strangely impassioned reaction to her during the five minutes we dared to enter practice together, followed by this? Whatever is between them feels intense.
“It’s why I talk so loud,” she says suddenly. “At least, sometimes. People say I get loud, and I don’t know it. And if I ask you to say something over and over again, it’s . . . yeah. So, I’m sorry. I probably should’ve told you.”
She’s embarrassed, cheeks pale more than flushed—like this is some intimate secret she would’ve kept forever.
“I’m glad you told me,” I say, though she didn’t tell me. Not really. Her shoulders relax. “And Toren knows because . . .”
“We’re friends,” she blurts, before her eyebrows furrow together. “Or. Well . . . we were. It’s complicated, I think.”
If anyone can understand complicated, it’s me.
“I get it. You know, no one knows this but . . . Bennett? The big goalie? He and I dated before, freshman year.” The words are an offering, hard to push through my lips at first. I’ve never done girl talk before.
But it feels like maybe Lily hasn’t either.
“I was in love with him, and he loved me. But . . .” I clear my throat, “A lot of things happened, but it was mostly my fault. I hurt him a lot.”
At this, Lily nods. “So you had to leave.” She says the words with simplicity, as if that was a given. As if my actions make perfect sense.
“Yeah.”
“I bet that hurt you, too.”
The pain in my chest never eases, a permanent knife I refuse to withdraw. “It did.”
Lily nods slowly, chewing hard on her lip, her brow furrowed. “I had to do that once. And it hurt a lot . . .”
She touches her hand absentmindedly over her chest, rubbing lightly. “It still does,” she says, barely a whisper.
I nod. “I wasn’t ready to be with him, I think, back then. But . . . I am now. At least, I’m trying to be.”
I take her hand in mine across the flat of our sofa.
“But maybe don’t tell anyone that. You’re the only person who knows.”
Her eyes blow wide. “A secret? You told me a secret? Just me.”
“Yeah.” I laugh as she jerks me upright, grabbing my hand in both of hers.
“Cause we’re friends, right?” She asks, eyes twinkling. There’s a slightly manic look in her eyes, but beneath it is fear.
Fear I know well, because I’ve been that girl. The one who wanted friendship so desperately she would’ve bent herself into every shape to capture it.
So I nod quickly, squeezing her hand in mine a little tighter. “Of course we’re friends, Lily.” I bite my lip for a minute before adding, “I have a weird idea—do you have a swimsuit?”
· · ·
An hour later, we’re seated on the ledge of the empty pool. The facility is only open for another half hour, but it’s plenty of time.
Lily looks adorable and ridiculous in equal measure in a fancy one-piece swimsuit I’m worried to ask the price of, with a high swinging ponytail of perfect auburn hair.
She keeps biting her lip and looking over the pool ledge like the Creature from the Black Lagoon will rise up and pull her down under.
“You swear you’ve swam before?”
“Mmhmm,” she says, still staring down. “But maybe we can start in the shallow end.”
I smirk. “Yeah—Lily? This is the shallow end. You’re what, five feet tall?”
She grimaces. “More or less.”
“You’re not going to be able to touch with your head above the water. So if you can’t swim, just tell me—”
“Can I just sit and watch you for a little?” She settles into the cold water of the shallow end with a shiver, scooting her butt to rest against one of the ladder rungs. “I just wanna spend time with you. Forget the swimming lessons.”
A laugh bubbles out of me and my body feels instantly lighter.
I loop my pigtail braids in my hand and pull my swim cap on.
“All right. Why don’t you use my phone.” I arrow my head toward where it lays atop my sweatshirt in the messy pile behind her, “and time me? Just don’t drop my phone in the pool. ”
She decides to sit with her feet in the water, lip between her teeth as I tell her my password and she opens the clock app. “Ready?”
“Ready.”