Chapter Five
LAINA MANAGED TO KEEP it together for the first three periods.
She read the morning story without her voice cracking.
She helped Lotty glue macaroni to a paper plate without bursting into tears over the glue stick.
She tied four shoelaces and mediated a dispute over the red crayon, which was the same red crayon that caused a dispute every single day, because five-year-olds had very strong feelings about the color red, and Laina Blackett Barrymore was a professional who could absolutely handle a crayon dispute even when her personal life was in shambles.
She kept it together through all of that.
But by the time the lunch bell rang and the classroom emptied out, Laina was alone at her desk with twenty finger-painted self-portraits drying on the windowsill and the faint smell of Elmer's glue in the air, and that was when she got the call from Aunt Trisha.
And the fact that Troy's aunt already knew...
I heard from Troy.
Even now, she was still like a brick around her husband's neck, but he was just too honorable to say it to her face.
Even now, he could only speak the truth to his relatives but never to her, the woman who never had what it took to become his wife.
Laina had thought last night was perfect, but now...
Now she knew it was just a mistake, and that she...she still wasn't good enough for him. Not now. Not ever.
Oh no.
She pressed her palms flat against the desk and squeezed her eyes shut, but the memories came anyway. His hands on her waist. His mouth on her throat. The sound he made when she whispered his name, and the way her body had arched into his like it had forgotten they were supposed to be over.
Stop it.
But her body didn't listen. Her body hadn't listened since the day she met him, and it certainly wasn't going to start now, when it could still feel the press of his fingers on her hips and the ghost of his mouth below her ear.
She had let him. That was the part that made her feel terrified and foolish at the same time. She had let him hold her and touch her and kiss her, and she had told herself it was real. That the burned dinner and the way he looked at her and the way he said her name meant something.
But Aunt Trisha's call had made everything clear.
It wasn't real. It was guilt. It was responsibility. It was Troy being the good man he had always been, too honorable to tell his wife to her face that last night had been a mistake.
Nothing has changed. Nothing.
He still couldn't speak the truth to her. He still went to his aunt instead. And if Aunt Trisha knew about last night, then she also knew what Laina had been too blind to see.
That she wasn't enough. That she had never been enough.
So when she got back home, she would tell him. She would find a way to make it clear to both of them that their marriage had to end.
Yes.
Exactly.
She spent the rest of the afternoon going over the words in her head, arranging them carefully, practicing them the way she practiced everything. By the time Marlon pulled up to the school, she had rehearsed her speech fourteen times and was fairly confident she could deliver it without crying.
She was wrong about that. But she didn't know it yet.
TROY COULDN'T REMEMBER being this nervous in his entire life.
Not during rookie year, when he had stepped onto professional ice for the first time and the arena had been so loud he couldn't hear his own heartbeat.
Not when the Waymakers won their first championship, or when he won his first MVP award, or when he had walked into a courthouse with a girl he'd known for three weeks and said I do while she beamed at him in a white sundress and sneakers.
None of that compared to this.
He stood in the middle of the kitchen in a navy apron he didn't know they owned, his sleeves rolled to his elbows, his forearms still dusted with flour from an incident he preferred not to revisit.
Behind him, the counter looked like the aftermath of a very small, very localized natural disaster.
There was smoke residue on the ceiling. The oven was open because something inside it had made a sound he didn't trust, and the fire extinguisher Laina had brought with her from the apartment was standing in the corner like a silent, judgmental witness.
His heart slammed against his chest as the front door opened, and his wife walked inside their home.
She stopped dead in her tracks.
Her bag slid off her shoulder. Her lips parted. And for a long moment, she just stood there in the doorway, her gaze moving from the apron to the counter to the dining table to the smoke stain on the ceiling and back to him.
"W-What's all this?"
Troy forced himself to meet her eyes. He was six foot three. He had spent twelve seasons being hit by men whose sole purpose was to put him through a wall. He had once played an entire period with a cracked rib and hadn't flinched.
But standing in front of his wife in a flour-dusted apron with a platter of incinerated chicken behind him was, without question, the most terrifying thing he had ever done.
"As it turns out," he said, "I'm just as good as you at burning things."
She choked back a laugh. Her hand flew to her mouth, but the sound had already escaped, bright and startled and real, and something in Troy's chest cracked open at the sound of it. How long had it been since he'd heard his wife laugh? How long since he'd been the one to make her?
"And tonight," he continued, keeping his voice even, "you'll need to prove that you're just as good as I am at eating burnt things."
Laina slowly walked forward and took a look at the disaster on the table.
There were two plates. Candles that had already melted halfway down because he had lit them too early and hadn't known candles could melt that fast. A bowl of salad that actually looked edible, beside a platter of chicken that was charred on the outside and, she suspected, completely raw on the inside.
Two glasses of wine, poured unevenly. A basket of rolls that were either severely overbaked or had been purchased that way on purpose, and knowing Troy, it could genuinely be either.
"The, um, wow..." Her gaze drifted to the stove, where a small pot sat with its lid askew and something deeply unfortunate inside. "Are those...boiled eggs?"
She didn't know it was possible to mess up boiled eggs, but somehow, her husband had actually done it. The shells had cracked and the whites had leaked out in strange, bulging formations, and they looked like tiny explosions frozen in time.
Troy Barrymore, who had once been named the most disciplined athlete in professional sports, had been defeated by boiling water and a carton of eggs.
"Laina..."
Oh, how he was saying her name.
The way he always said it. Low and quiet and careful, like he was holding something precious between his hands, something he knew he didn't deserve to hold but couldn't bring himself to put down.
She looked at him. Really looked at him, for the first time since she'd walked through the door.
He was still the most beautiful man she had ever seen.
She hated that. She hated that it still caught her off guard, after seven years, the sheer physical fact of him.
The sharp line of his jaw. The way his shoulders filled the doorway.
His dark eyes, intent and focused, watching her with the same concentration he'd once given to a puck moving at ninety miles an hour.
But there was something different in those eyes tonight. Something she hadn't seen before. Something that looked almost like...fear.
Troy Barrymore was afraid.
Of her.
Of this.
Of the answer she was about to give him.
She didn't know where or how to start. All those things she had promised herself during lunch, all those firm, clear words she had rehearsed fourteen times in her head on the drive home...
They were gone. Every single one.
But when she turned to face him, she didn't get a chance to say another word.
He had already hauled her close, his mouth covering hers, and then somehow...
It was happening all over again.
But this time was different from all the others.
His kiss was slow. Not desperate. Not hungry.
Not the urgent, almost-angry collision of two people who couldn't stop wanting each other.
This was something else entirely. His hands cradled her face, his thumbs resting against her cheekbones, and he kissed her like they had all the time in the world.
Like he was learning the shape of her mouth for the first time.
Her fingers curled into the front of his shirt. She could feel his heart hammering against her knuckles, fast and hard, and it stunned her. The great Troy Barrymore. The man who had never once shown fear on the ice. And his heart was pounding like he was terrified she would push him away.
She didn't push him away.
She pulled him closer.
His hands slid from her face to her neck, then her shoulders, then down her back, drawing her against him until there was no space left.
She fit against his body the way she had always fit, her head tucked under his chin, her hips against his, and when she heard the low sound he made against her hair, she felt it vibrate through her entire body.
They were in the hallway. Then on the stairs. His hands were pulling her shirt over her head, and her fingers were fumbling with the buttons on his, and the apron was somehow still tangled around his neck, and she would have laughed if she could breathe.
His mouth traced the line of her throat. She gasped, her head falling back, and his arm caught her waist to steady her.
"Troy..."
His name came out broken. Half whisper, half plea.
He lifted her. She wrapped her legs around him, and the feel of his hands under her thighs, the muscles in his arms tensing as he carried her weight effortlessly, the sheer, overwhelming size of him surrounding her...
Their bedroom. Not the guest room. Theirs.
He laid her down on her side of the bed, and the mattress remembered her shape, and so did he.