15. Rinkside Reparations
RINKSIDE REPARATIONS
SUTTON
Not even hockey can neutralize the whisper of regret chasing after my skates.
Icy casualties swirl in the air with every glissade across the rink, and I’m figuratively standing on the edge of a bad memory, the cardboard box of every Lake-related fantasy in my mind branded with a DO NOT OPEN label after that failure of a night.
I wish I could ease the cardboard flaps open and dig around like a rabid animal, pilfering something—anything—that distracts me from my internal tug-of-war.
I knew in my heart that I couldn’t act on my impulses. Lake may not have been as wasted as I thought, but I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if she regretted kissing me. Hell, she might not even remember what transpired at two a.m. in my living room.
I haven’t spoken to her at all today. I practically sprinted away from my problems and filled the black hole of loneliness in my chest with algebraic formulas that won’t mean anything in the long run.
Whoever thought an eight-a.m. math class would be regularly attended by drained college students was truly delusional.
Apparitions of my teammates’ silhouettes linger long after they whiz across the ice, and my vision is washed in an achromatic palette, starting with the pewter walls and extending to the halogen lights that emit little to no heat in this arctic tundra.
My breath shreds the silence; Lake is stuck between my incisors like a piece of gristle that won’t budge.
Luckily, I’ve managed to get my shit together enough to ace Coach’s drills.
Unluckily, my friends have taken it upon themselves to tease me about what Lake and I got up to after the party, and my frustrations have been slow-cooking since their interrogations began.
The more I deny, the more I spur them on.
Every time I think I’m getting somewhere with her, something happens to set us three steps back.
I’ve never been a particularly impatient person until now.
I don’t want to come off uninterested, because that’s a grave underestimation, but I don’t want to come off like some horny teenager who only thinks about sex either.
There is no perfect balance. And Lake—she deserves perfection.
Anticipation fizzing in my stomach, I get a second wind while I’m barreling toward the goal with the puck in my possession, and I jerk my arm back at just the right angle—with just the right amount of willpower—to hurl the disc into the lower left corner of the net.
Foster breaks into a desperation butterfly to deny entry, but my torque outmatches his flexibility by a millisecond. He slowly lowers to the ice with a groan, and I hear Coach yell his approval from the sidelines.
This is the first time Coach’s reassurance doesn’t make my heart swell with pride. I’m numb to everything around me, ensconced in a windowless prison where we run the same technique over and over again until it becomes habitual.
And the only person who just so happens to jailbreak me out of my self-inflicted depression walks into the rink with a notebook tucked to her chest and her hair in a professional ponytail.
All the guys halt in their tracks at the sight of Lake Capitano strutting around like she owns the place.
She’s magnetic. Someone who sweeps through unapologetically and disrupts the mundaneness of everyday life.
A singularity who absorbs all the attention in a room whether she intends to or not.
Once you cross paths with her, you won’t want to go back to your dull, uneventful routine.
Dressed in a leather jacket and black jeans that sculpt every inch of her mile-long legs, there’s surprisingly no sign of a hangover plastered across her face. She’s as fresh as a daisy, whereas the rest of the team looks like they’ve been to hell and back.
My brain goes fuzzy at the sight of her, similar to the first hit of a muscle relaxant when you’ve been high on adrenaline.
Coach beckons everyone to the side, and I make sure to take my sweet time as I slog over rather pathetically on my skates.
Am I happy to see her? I’m always happy to see her, but…but I feel like she isn’t happy to see me. Fuck, what if she’s disappointed that I didn’t make a move? What if she does remember last night? Remember how I sat at her feet like a goddamn dog refusing her generous scraps.
I try not to hold eye contact. I throw her fleeting glances here and there, enough so she knows that I’m acknowledging her presence.
“Guys, Miss Capitano is going to be watching the rest of practice. I expect every one of you to be on your best behavior while we have a guest in our midst. Do I make myself clear?” Coach gruffs, flared nostrils exhaling mist into the frosted atmosphere.
“Yes, sir!” we all shout in unison, some with more enthusiasm than others.
What Lake observes is going to end up in an article whether we like it or not, so it’s in the team’s best interest to give her something good to write about.
No slacking, no complaining, no indication that we aren’t the school’s best athletes.
I’ve played in front of scouts before, and I’ve never been this nervous.
Maybe because nothing has ever mattered as much as she does.
Not by a long shot.
When the swarm of hockey players disperses, I stay behind, choosing to confront the awkwardness before it has the chance to spread. I purge all my unspoken grievances as if they’re one continuous river dumping into an estuary.
“Hey,” I greet, my voice slightly muffled through the clunkiness of my helmet.
A genuine smile splits her cheeks. “Hi.”
“You, uh, you look good. I mean, you always look good. I just…” I sigh. “You don’t look like death.”
So much for laconism.
“Thank you? I think?”
Leaning against the side opening, my legs suddenly feel weaker than usual, and the fact that I’m standing on a slippery surface isn’t going to bode well if I can’t keep my cool.
It feels like there’s a length of wire caught in my throat. “You don’t look hungover,” I rephrase.
Idiot!
“Hmm? Oh, yeah. I have a high alcohol tolerance. Takes a lot to knock me off my feet. I can thank my rebellious years for preparing me,” she explains with a chuckle, the tip of her nose pinkening from the cold.
I want to laugh, but my pessimism is at an all-time high right now. Blighting. I’m as stiff as cooled sap expanding in the center of a deciduous tree.
Instead of, I don’t know, continuing the conversation like a normal person, I blurt out the scattered thoughts in my head, inadvertently abandoning the tactical retreat I had stowed away for this exact moment. “You’re not mad.”
Her expression pinches with confusion. “Why would I be mad?”
Oh, maybe because I rejected your advances last night and was a total idiot.
Realizing that this is more of a sit-down conversation than one I can accomplish in passing, I take off my helmet and shake my hair out, letting my restless fingers fidget with something while I essentially relive the most embarrassing moment of my life.
“You—last night. Nothing happened,” I explain, albeit weakly. My pulse is performing loopy little figure eights.
Maybe I should have let sleeping dogs lie.
I mean, I’m making a bigger deal out of this than it should be, right?
She didn’t walk in here like there was bad blood between us, nor did she walk in here to be confronted with a practically nonexistent problem at one in the afternoon.
I’m bringing my personal life onto the ice—a big no-no, by Coach’s standards.
I expect her to suddenly backtrack her happy attitude, but to my utter surprise, there’s no trace of hostility anywhere. She’s too good for me—for this place. A white-tailed dove sitting pretty in a barren wasteland. She’s more addictive than an aphrodisiac, and I can’t shake free from her allure.
Her smile never dips; it makes heat blossom behind my navel.
“You think I’m mad because we didn’t have sex?”
Now that I’m hearing it out loud it sounds ridiculous.
I set my helmet down. “Yes?”
Lake grabs my gloved hand, and despite the high-density foam padding that separates us, her touch still sends tingles up my now-sweaty palms. “I could never be mad at you. You were right to put a pin in things. I wouldn’t—I don’t—want to be drunk the first time I kiss you.
I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable. You were doing something in private, and I was creeping on you like a pervert. ”
So she does remember.
I muster the bare bones of a smile. “In your defense, I was hardly in private. I shouldn’t have done that when you were sleeping in the next room.”
“I don’t know, I think I’d be offended if I wasn’t hot enough to jerk off to,” she jests, giving my hand one of her patented squeezes—the kind that’s reassuring in ways words could never be. She’s the first ripple of relief in my stagnant waters of worry.
“I’m sorry things keep interrupting us. I don’t want you to think I’m purposefully avoiding you, because that’s so far from the truth. I wanted to kiss you last night. So badly. And every time I think we’re getting somewhere, the universe throws a wrench in our plans.”
“Whoa, hey. You don’t have to apologize for anything. We’ll find the right time, okay?”
Humiliation prickles up the back of my neck. “Shit. I totally went Spiral of Self-Doom on you, didn’t I?”
“Sort of, but it’s cute.”
Evading eye contact because I’m sure my cheeks are redder than the goddamn numbers on a scoreboard, I shift my focus to my teammates—all of whom are partaking in a practice game that favors the offense. I know my break is going to be over in a minute once Coach finds me dawdling by the sidelines.
I love my team to the moon and back—save for a certain cheating someone—but I’d be lying if I said that Lake’s presence doesn’t fill my aching heart in a different way. I would carve her name into my chest if I could.
“You gonna light a fire under our asses in your article?” I ask.
The public has always been in favor of the Mustangs for as long as I can remember.
It’s like we can do no wrong, even if we, objectively, do wrong.
I hate the mindless worship. I hate how we’re exempt from accountability just because we play on a D-1 team.
We’re no better than anyone else at this school, and if people realized this sooner, maybe we wouldn’t be harboring a shit stain of a person all because he has a fast skate time.
She drops my hand—whether it’s voluntary or because someone saw us, I have no idea. “With the Frozen Four coming up, I feel like I don’t have to,” she says.
Right. The Frozen Four Championship. Arguably the thing that should be occupying my mind right now instead of a budding romance.
I don’t want to get Lake in trouble because of a conflict of interest. The Mustangs haven’t won the Frozen Four in years.
Honestly, it’s been so long that I’m surprised we’re still hogging a place in the spotlight.
With our current stellar winning streak, we have a great chance of dominating the regional semifinals.
The game is only a month away—one of the many reasons why Coach has been so hard on us and so adamant about organizing extra practices.
I must have adhered quite the oh, fuck face, because she quickly tacks on, “You guys are looking good this season. You have nothing to worry about.”
“Not for my lack of trying,” I mutter under my breath. “I’ve been so distracted this season. I haven’t been protecting the net or blocking shots. It’s like my brain times out the minute I step onto the ice.”
Because of you.
I’ve never been particularly obsessed with perfection, but right now, my team is relying on me. They’ve worked day and night to step up their game, and I may be the thing holding them back.
Nobody was supposed to bear witness to my not-so-internal freakout. Especially not the girl who needs to think I have everything together.
Lake’s lips gnarl into a frown. “You shouldn’t be expected to carry so much press—”
The unexpected soundtrack of “WAP” by Cardi B starts blasting through her phone’s speaker—disrupting the very peaceful ambience of the rink—and she scrambles to answer the call without drawing any more attention our way.
Judging by the canyon between her brows, she wasn’t expecting it.
She jams her thumb between her teeth and gnaws on the keratin. “Hello? This is she. Uh-huh. Yeah. Okay. I’m on my way.”
A quick re-pocket of the device and her face screams worried. Unease cradles low in my belly.
“Is everything okay?” I ask, more than ready to pack up my shit and go with her—wherever it is—despite complaining about my struggling team synergy moments before. I’ve never seen her so shaken.
“It’s my brother. He got suspended from school for fighting.”