16. Erica #2
“It’s part of the song. You have to scream ‘What’s going on’ at the top of your lungs.”
I mouth half the words. I keep it small, controlled, safe.
Jeremiah watches me do it, his hands tightening around mine to let me know he won’t leave me hanging.
“It’s okay,” he says. “Nobody’s here. Just us.” He tips his head toward the booth. “And Martín. But he’s not paying attention to us.”
I glance up at the glass. Martín has his own headphones clamped over his ears now, head bobbing to something entirely different, eyes on some panel of switches, completely checked out of whatever two idiots are doing on the ice below him.
Nobody’s watching. Nobody’s listening. For the first time since I was nineteen years old, I’m not looking over my shoulder in fear.
The chorus hits again, and I open my mouth and let it all the way out.
It comes out cracked and off-key and too loud, my voice bouncing off the boards and the empty seats and coming back at me from six directions at once, and Jeremiah whoops beside me, wildly and gloriously off-key in his own right.
We’re spinning now, center ice, faster than either of us has any business going, and screaming the same four lines over and over. We scream, and scream, and scream, and it’s so cringe and the best kind of cathartic.
I don’t know when the laughing starts. I don’t know when it stops being singing and starts being just noise, pure and unfiltered.
Jeremiah’s laughing too hard to finish a lyric, and I’m laughing too hard to breathe, and we’re still spinning, hands locked, and every single thing I’ve kept locked down comes pouring straight out of me.
It is, without exaggeration, one of the best moments of my entire life.
We slow down eventually, dizzy, gasping, still holding both hands. The song fades out on a last ragged chord, and Jeremiah pulls me in against his chest to stop the spin, both of us laughing too hard to stand up straight, and presses his mouth to my temple.
“Happy twenty-five years, America.”
For a second the rink goes quiet except for our own breathing, loud and uneven. Then the next track clicks on. Slower and mellow. More of a looping, melancholy, weeping sound.
Jeremiah’s head comes up. “Oop. That’s not on the playlist.”
“What?”
“That’s not right.” He cranes his neck toward the booth. “Hang on. Let me get Martín to fix it. Probably some shuffle glitch, I told him upbeat the whole night. It’s a party.”
I look up at the booth. Martín isn’t there.
“I got this,” Jeremiah says, already skating for the exit gate. “Let me just cut it…”
“No. Leave it.”
He stops. “You sure? It’s kind of a mood killer.”
“I like this one.”
He studies me for a second, head tilted, then returns back to me slowly, skates scraping a lazy arc across the ice, and something in his expression shifts. Softer. Unguarded.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Then he closes the distance between us and folds me in against him, one hand flat against my spine, the other wrapped around mine and tucked against his chest, and we barely move, just a slow rock side to side, blades hissing soft against the ice.
“You have a game tomorrow,” I say into his shirt, half a question.
“I do.”
“And you spent the night before it teaching a woman with zero balance how to fall down professionally.”
“Best use of an off night I can think of.” He says it easy, like it isn’t a whole confession.
His chin comes to rest on top of my head. I can feel him breathing, his chest rising against my cheek. Warmth soaking through the thin cotton of his shirt. His heartbeat sits right under my ear, nearly as steady as it should be for a man who plays professional hockey for a living.
Mine, I think, and the word arrives so fast and so complete that it startles me. At least for tonight. At least for right now, in this rink, under these lights, he’s mine.
I know what I am. I know what happens on the eighteenth, what I came to this city to do, what happens to a man like this once he finds out what’s actually underneath the trailer-park backstory and the good one-liners.
None of that changes what’s true in the next thirty seconds, in the warm, quiet truth of this exact moment.
I have never in my life been held like this. Not once. Not by anyone.
Something behind my ribs, something I’ve kept locked down since I was nineteen, gives way all at once, and the floodgates open completely.
A full, ugly, shoulder-shaking cry, the kind that comes with sound effects, hiccupping and wet and completely without my permission, right there against Jeremiah Precio's chest.
He freezes.
“Hey. Hey, hey, whoa.” He pulls back enough to look at me, hands coming up to frame my face, thumbs already swiping under my eyes.
“What happened? Was it the song? I can turn it off…”
“It’s not the song.”
“Did I say something? Do something? Because I will absolutely apologize, I just need to know what for.”
“Jeremiah.”
“Because I really thought this was going well, and if I somehow ruined a hockey rink birthday party, that’s a new personal low.”
“Jeremiah.” I laugh, wet and hiccuping, which does nothing to convince him I’m fine. “It’s not the song or anything you did wrong.”
“Then what?” His thumbs are still moving, gentle, useless against the steady leak of it, his brow pulled into a knot of genuine alarm. “Talk to me. Please.”
“I’m not sad.” The words come out thick, half-laughing, half-sobbing, an absolute mess of a sentence.
“I’m happy. I don’t… I’m not sure I’ve ever been this happy.
Ever. In my whole entire life. And it’s just.” I gesture vaguely at all of it, the rink, the empty stands, his hands still cradling my face. “It’s a lot.”
He goes still again, studying my face, and I watch the alarm drain out of him slowly, replaced by something that cracks his whole expression wide open.
“Happy tears.”
“Happy tears.”
A laugh punches out of him, relieved and a little wrecked around the edges. “You scared the life out of me.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.” He wipes both thumbs under my eyes again, careful and unhurried, cupping my jaw reverently. “I’m happy too. Just so you know. In case that wasn’t obvious from all the screaming.”
“It was obvious.” I press my palm flat against his chest, right over that too-fast heartbeat, and feel it kick harder under my hand. “Very obvious.”
“Good.” His hands settle around my face, thumbs resting just below my cheekbones like he’s memorizing the shape of me.
And the noise of the rink, the fading song, the distant hum of the ice compressors, all of it goes soft and far away, like someone turned the whole world down to a whisper just for this.
“I really want to kiss you right now.”
My pulse trips over itself. Every single thing in me goes quiet at once. The cold, the ice, a lifetime of careful distance, all of it gone, replaced by his thumb tracing one slow line along my cheekbone and his eyes not moving off mine for even a second.
“What are you waiting for, Zesty?”
Then his lips slant over mine and he’s kissing me, slow and unhurried.
One hand slides from my jaw into my hair, fingers curling loose against my scalp. The other flattens against my back and pulls me in until there’s no cold air left between us at all, and I forget, entirely, that we’re standing in the middle of an ice rink.
I forget the skates, the empty seats in the dark, the fact that gravity still technically applies.
There is only this. His mouth, warm against mine.
The scrape of his jaw. The unsteady thud of his heart under my palm, no longer trying to catch up to mine, just matching it, easy, like it always meant to.
I rise up onto the toes of my skates, chasing more of him, and he makes a low sound against my mouth that undoes something in my chest.
His thumb traces the curve of my jaw. His mouth moves like he’s committing mine to memory, deliberate, again and again, and every time I think it’s slowing down it only deepens, pulling a soft sound out of me I’ll unpack later.
Every nerve ending I own lights up at once. It’s majestic. There’s no other word for it.
I don’t know how long it lasts. Long enough that my knees have gone soft and unreliable. Long enough that when he finally pulls back, just far enough to breathe, I chase him half an inch before I catch myself.
His forehead comes to rest against mine.
Neither of us says anything for a long moment.
Our breath comes out in twin clouds between us, and somewhere, the last slow chord of the song fades to silence, leaving just the two of us and the hum of the empty rink and his thumb still moving in slow, absent circles against my jaw like he isn’t ready to stop touching me yet either.
“Happy birthday, America,” Jeremiah says again, quieter this time.
I open my mouth to say something clever. Something about how he’s definitely living up to the nickname Zesty. Or how he’s been unfairly holding out on me and I’m entitled to compensation.
But it all sounds stupid in my head.
So I don’t say anything at all. I fist my hand tighter in the front of his shirt, pull him back down, and kiss him again.