Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
JAMESON
“Tell me we’re not at the Rebels practice facility for the reason I think,” she says as we come out of the tunnel and her eyes fly toward the ice rink. The only lights are the ones above the rink, everything else, including the stands behind us, is cast in dark shadows.
“I can’t do that,” I say as I drop the hockey bag from my shoulder to the ground. She jumps at the noise, and I steady her with my hand on her lower back. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
She takes a deep and ragged breath. “I’m not skating,” she says, looking down at her feet.
I reach over and tilt her chin up so she’s looking at me. “Let’s just put your skates on and see how you feel about it then.”
“I’ve done this all before, Jameson. I’ve tried.” She looks away, then back at me again. “I can’t.”
I cup both sides of her face in my hands and tell her, “I know you can do this.” I pause. “You’ve never tried with me here. I’m not going to let you fall.”
She sits on the bench and I kneel at her feet. She gazes down at me with those big blue eyes, and she looks absolutely terrified.
“I can’t take away the fear,” I tell her. “But we can work through it. I won’t let you go, I promise.”
She gives me a small nod, and it feels like a Stanley Cup-level victory. I hold her heel in one hand and use my other to unlace her snow boot before sliding it off and resting her foot on my thigh. When I lean over and unzip my hockey bag, she gasps.
“Are those . . .”
“No,” I say. “They’re not your old skates.” Morgan told me that Lauren still had them, but I didn’t want her to have to wear the same skates she was wearing when she fell. Since apparently they have the same shoe size, her cousin helped me get a new pair fitted and broken in for Lauren.
“Okay.” The word is hesitant, but she nods.
It only takes me a minute to get her figure skates laced; then she sits there like a statue while I sit next to her and lace up my hockey skates. When I turn toward her, she’s staring straight ahead, her eyes darting around the rink in an anxious staccato pattern.
“Hey,” I say, looping my arm around her lower back. “We’re going to be just fine.”
“I’m not worried about you,” she lets out a nervous laugh as she looks over at me. “You could do this with your eyes closed and your feet tied together.”
I laugh, and it seems to break a little of the tension. “Exactly. And I’m going to hold on to you and we’ll go just as slow as you want. C’mon. You almost made the Olympic team.”
“Yeah, well—” She clears her throat. “I didn’t.”
We’ve both had to walk away from the sport we loved, but at least for me it was a choice—her dreams were ripped away from her. “It’s the big dreams that hurt the most when you have to give them up.”
“Do you miss it?” Her words are a whisper in this wide-open, silent space.
“Every day.”
“Did you ever want to go back to playing?” she asks.
I shake my head. “It wouldn’t have been worth what it would have done to my family. Jules and Audrey needed me there after my dad left. And I needed them. We’re all each other has.”
“You’re a good man,” Lauren says quietly.
“Mostly.” I give her a little wink, then stand, using my arm that’s encircling her back to raise her up with me. “Let’s skate.”
She lets out another shaky breath. “I read somewhere that bravery is being scared, but doing it anyway.”
I try to step us forward, but she stands with her skates firmly rooted in place.
“Do you trust me?” I ask.
She looks up at me, her face pale and her eyes huge. “This isn’t about trust, Jameson. It’s about fear.”
“The reason you’re still afraid,” I say softly, “is because you haven’t been back on the ice again since you got hurt. You’re letting the what ifs consume you. But what if you can do this? What if everything is okay?”
“What if I don’t want to?”
“I think that if you didn’t want to, you wouldn’t have let me put those skates on your feet. Let’s just step out onto the ice. We don’t have to move. And you can hold on to me the entire time.”
“You’d like that,” she says lightly.
“Indeed, I would. You want a helmet?”
She looks back up at me. “If you’re not going to let me fall, I guess I don’t need one, right?”
“I’m not going to let you fall.”
I step through the door onto the ice, and when I turn around, she’s standing there looking at the shiny white surface like it’s going to eat her alive. I put one hand on either side of that doorway and leave just enough room on the ice for her.
“Step right out here and hold on to me.”
I know she’s terrified of falling again.
And in this moment, I’m fucking terrified of falling too.
Not literally, but of falling for her. Because seeing her hurting like this is killing me, and I don’t know any other way to help her get to the other side of this fear except to walk through it with her.
Kind of like I’ve been doing in the wake of Josh’s death.
She moves one hand to the top of the boards and tentatively steps over the threshold. When her blade hits the ice, she grabs my sweatshirt frantically, like she’s going down even though she’s completely steady on one foot.
“Wrap your arm around my waist.”
She does as I ask, then slowly steps her other skate onto the ice and her other arm wraps behind my back. We stand there for a moment, just breathing.
“How’s it feel to be back on the ice?”
“Give me a minute to get used to the idea,” she says, but she loosens her grip on me as she rests her forehead against my sternum.
I keep one arm firmly planted on top of the boards and wrap my other arm around her back, anchoring her to me. She’s taking deep breaths, and I can feel her heart pounding. I’m afraid she’s going to work herself up and talk herself out of this.
“Eyes on me.”
She tilts her head back until she’s gazing up at my face.
“What do you think about moving? I’ll go backward, slowly. You just hold on.”
She gives me a little nod, but the minute we move, her eyes fly shut.
“Look at me, Lauren,” I say, and when she opens her eyes, they’re the prettiest shade of Robin’s egg blue.
“Breathe with me.” I take some slow, deep breaths as we move across the ice at the slowest pace I can possibly set.
When we make it to the other side of the rink, she’s still looking up at me, and she’s breathing normally again.
“That wasn’t—” She twists her mouth as she thinks. “—as bad as it could have been.”
“A ringing endorsement for my skills.”
She gives me a small smile. “You sure this isn’t just one big plan to get me pressed up against you?”
“Trust me, Lauren. This is tame compared to the plans I have for you.”
Her cheeks heat with an almost instant flush and her eyes widen in surprise. She swats at my arm, but I keep her held tightly against me. “That’s not how friends talk to each other, Jameson.”
I know she doesn’t actually believe I just want to be her friend, but if it’s what she needs to tell herself for now, I’ll let it go.
“I suggest you don’t squirm like that while you’re pressed up against me.”
She instantly stills, one hand on my arm and one at my hip. “And why not?”
I turn us so her back is against the boards, then take her hands and place them so they’re resting along the top.
“For exactly the reasons you’d think.” And then I skate away, taking a lap around the rink, because if I don’t get some distance from her my body’s going to try to take over, and I’ve promised myself, and her, that we’ll take this slow.
When I return, she looks remarkably comfortable compared to the woman who stepped out on the ice with me five minutes ago.
“So here’s the thing,” she says, sliding her skates backward and forward beneath her while she grips the wall.
“Part of why I was so terrified to get back on the ice after my accident—beyond never wanting to experience another concussion or the lingering headaches—was because it was a perfect landing.”
This feels like a big admission, but I don’t understand why. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, that triple axel was textbook perfect. I landed it the same way I always did, the same way I’d landed it hundreds of times before.
And in that moment at Nationals, the landing felt perfect.
I have no idea what happened, why my skate slipped out from under me, why my head crashed into the ice. None of that should have happened.”
I skate forward until there’s barely any space between us.
“My skating was on fire that night,” she continues. “My jump was perfect. And I still got hurt. A nick in the ice? Overly fatigued muscles? My blade slipping? Who knows what caused it. If it was entirely out of my control, how can I prevent it from ever happening again?”
“So what you’re telling me is you had complete control of every part of the jump and performed it perfectly and that whatever went wrong was out of your control?”
“Yes, exactly.” She wraps one arm around her ribs, hugging herself, and holds onto the wall with the other arm.
“You can’t let what is impossible to control control you, or you’ll never grow. It’s called a freak accident because there’s no way to predict or prevent it. But freak accidents don’t happen over and over.”
I put my hands on her hips and pull her toward me gently, then spin myself around so I’m behind her, cradling her body in mine. I keep my hands on her hips, but dip my head down and ask, “How do you feel about actually moving again?”
“I feel . . . less scared than before. But only if you don’t let go of me.”
As long as I’ve known her, she’s the woman against whom all other women have been measured.
And no one else has even compared. I am a goner for her, and have been since the very first moment we met.
I thought I’d lost her, but now that she’s back I have every intention of keeping her—no matter how slowly I have to take this until I’m certain she’s ready.
“Believe me, Lauren, there’s no way I’m letting you go.”