Chapter 19 Thea
THEA
“You don’t look sick to me,” I tell Patty.
She and Muriel are sitting in the front row, right by the ice.
Patty has on a gorgeous white fake fur coat and is sipping from a bedazzled red thermos. It smells like peppermint schnapps with a little hot cocoa added.
She gives a light, very fake cough. “It’s just a tickle.” She takes a dainty sip. “But I don’t want to do anything to make it worse.”
I look from her to Muriel, who is also in fake fur. Hers is Cookie Monster blue. She’s also wearing a yellow bucket hat with a large purple bow.
“You both have a tickle in your throat?”
Muriel coughs hard. “Must be going around,” she says. “You’ll have to team up with Josh again. We can’t possibly play today.”
Andi and I had spent this morning trying to figure out a way to put skis on the ladies’ grocery carts so they could be out on the ice of the hockey rink with us for Peppermint Puck-A-Palooza.
But we couldn’t find the carts. Muriel and Patty have stashed them somewhere.
And then we’d been informed the Coffelt twins were pulling out of today’s events.
They’d also suggested that Josh and I team up again, and Nora had assured me that she and the judges were fine with that.
Uh, huh.
Nora knows about me and Josh.
I think Patty and Muriel suspect.
They’re playing matchmaker and…
I wish it were that easy.
“Come on, Hot Wheels, let’s get you in your cart.” Josh skates up next to me, addressing Muriel with a grin.
Muriel shakes her head and sips from her own sparkly hot pink thermos. “Can’t do it, I’m very sick.”
Josh lifts a skeptical brow and glances at me. I roll my eyes.
“You’re scared of playing a little hockey with plastic candy canes?” he asks Muriel. “What if I tell you that I played hockey in a rec league all through high school and college?” he asks.
Muriel perks up. “Did you now?”
“We have snow and ice in Nebraska,” he says. “Makes more sense for me to play hockey than all these boys down here in Louisiana.”
Muriel cackles. “It does, doesn't it? And yet here we are in a little town on the bayou with an ice-skating rink and a hockey team.”
I look down at Josh’s feet. “Where did you even get skates?”
He lifts a foot. “Beckett.”
Of course. Makes sense that the guy who actually plays hockey and gets paid for it might have an extra pair or two lying around.
“That was nice of him,” I comment.
“See?” Muriel says. “I am leaving you with a very capable partner.”
Patty elbows her, and Muriel coughs.
It is possibly the fakest cough I’ve ever heard in my life.
Josh looks at me. “We’re partners again, huh?”
Even standing this close to him is hard on my heart rate. I had prepared myself for seeing him today, probably even talking to him at some point. But I’m not sure I can be his partner.
I look back at the two older ladies who are very settled into their seats in their cozy coats, sipping hot chocolate.
But I don’t really have a choice.
“I guess,” I say.
He gives Patty and Muriel a wink and says to me, “Then it’s just you and me.”
I narrow my eyes. “Did you plan this with them?”
He turns to face me. “I have no idea what you mean.”
I look at the two older women who are volunteering nothing. “Did you ask them to sit this out so we had to be partners?”
“I didn’t. But I’m not going to say I’m upset about it.” He looks at Muriel and Patty. “No offense.”
“If you were upset about being her partner today, you’d be a dumbass. And you’re not a dumbass,” Muriel says, taking another swig of cocoa.
He shrugs and looks at me. “You can’t argue with that logic.”
Jingle bells ring out, and Nora’s voice comes over the mic.
“We have a last-minute change, everyone. Muriel and Patty are feeling under the weather, so Josh and Thea will be partnering up again. We’ll…
figure out the points somehow, later. Josh and Thea, we need you at center ice with Max and Mitchell. ”
I find Nora across the ice from us.
She’s decked out in an oversized hockey jersey from the local team, the Rebel Rebels—of course—paired with leggings, a sparkly Christmas garland around her neck with a gigantic whistle attached, and a headband with reindeer antlers on her head.
I shake my head.
Someday, Nora is going to dress the way Muriel does now. I just know it.
Maybe I can be the Patty to her Muriel. I slide a look at the older women again. There is something very appealing about just doing whatever the fuck I want to. In faux fur and sparkles.
“You ready?” Josh asks.
Fine, I can do this. This event is very fast-paced, and it’s not like we’re going to have time to talk.
We are literally on the ice, being watched by everyone.
We have fifteen minutes, so we can’t mess around—not like that stopped us yesterday during the obstacle course, but today we’re going to focus.
We’re going to get this event done, then we’ll build a stupid gingerbread house, and then we’re done.
Merry Mayhem will be over.
Josh will go back to Autre.
And I will start working on getting over him.
Sure. That seems simple enough.
“Sure.”
We skate to center ice and join Max and Mitchell. They grin with excitement.
“Mitchell, you guys will be green, Josh and Thea, you’re red,” Nora instructs.
This event is more or less like billiards on ice.
Kind of.
Peppermint Puck-A-Palooza is basically a game that Nora made up.
Of course. Nora is the mastermind behind everything Parks and Rec does, but when it comes to hockey, she’s even more over-the-top.
She might’ve had some help from Andi or Everly, maybe even Beckett, but Puck-A-Palooza is basically what would happen if hockey and billiards got together and had a baby.
And the baby had hockey pucks ten times the usual size, and there were seven pucks for each team—so fourteen pucks on the ice at once—plus two white pucks that we’re supposed to use to hit the pucks into the nets.
Oh, and we’re using giant plastic candy canes instead of hockey sticks.
But sure, it’s just like hockey. And billiards.
“Get ready, get set, go!” Nora shouts.
There’s no confetti canon for this event since the confetti would make skating over the ice very difficult, and I can tell that bothers Nora a little bit. She really likes her confetti canon.
There’s also no puck drop like in hockey. We just all skate off and start trying to hit a white puck into our colored pucks.
Beckett and Sutton played earlier, along with Sam and Ashley. Beckett scored more points than anyone ever has for this event, as should be expected of a semi-pro hockey player, I suppose.
The team here in Rebel is only an FPHL league team, so minor minor league. Still, he gets a paycheck for playing hockey, so that puts him ahead of anyone who does it just for fun. A little anyway.
Truthfully, our team sucks, and they’re having trouble putting butts in the seats. If our resident billionaire—my cousin, Dane—didn’t own the hockey rink and keep it running, the rink would’ve been shut down a long time ago, and the team would be long gone.
I let Josh take the first couple of shots, and he does get a puck into the net, but I’m no slouch on the ice.
Sure, it might be unusual for a Louisiana girl to know how to ice skate, but we’ve had the ice rink here for a few years, and Ruth wanted to take lessons, so I did it with her.
I can skate, and I actually love hockey, so I skate after the white puck that Josh just sent sailing.
I send one of our red pucks into a side net, and Josh skates over to give me a high five.
“Good job,” he says with a grin.
“Thanks. You, too.” I glance behind him. “Max and Mitchell both play youth hockey, by the way.”
Josh grimaces. “Dammit.”
I laugh. “Technically, we’re still competing against all of the other teams. It’s all about how many times we can put the puck in the net in fifteen minutes. Just focus on that.”
“It’s actually really hard to focus on anything. I want to kiss you so badly.”
My eyes widen. “Josh, stop it.”
“Nobody can hear what I’m saying out here.”
“Still, you can’t say stuff like that. It’s way too hard for me not to react, and we can’t do anything about it anyway.”
“I talked to Violet. Did you two talk?”
No, we didn’t. On purpose. “Can we discuss this after?”
“Will you discuss it with me after? Or will you disappear?”
That’s a fair question. I actually planned to disappear. Spending time with him, in close proximity, is way too hard.
“Fine, we can talk after.”
“I’m going to hold you to that. Otherwise, I might have to make a scene,” he says with a little half smile.
“You’re threatening me?”
“Is hearing that I’m falling in love with you and am determined to find a way to make this work a threat, Danger?”
His voice is low and gruff now, and the look in his eyes is one that I would very much like to see for the rest of my life.
I take a deep breath. It’s shaky, and I feel like it doesn’t actually give me the boost of oxygen or clarity that I need. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Trust that your sister loves you. Tell her the truth.”
“You didn’t tell her everything?” I ask. But I already know the answer. He wouldn’t do that to me.
“I told her that nothing could happen between her and me. Because there’s someone else. But I’d really like it if you’d claim me.”
His words hit me directly in the heart.
He spent two years hung up on a woman who never would claim him. A woman he changed his entire life around for. I know now that he’s happy about those changes, even if things didn’t work out with her, but she didn’t want him, even when he gave her everything.
He’s letting me take the lead here with my sister, and I appreciate that, but I know what it would mean to him if I took a risk for him.
“Are you guys okay?” Max and Mitchell have skated up to us, concerned looks on their faces.
I’m not sure I am okay, but I nod. “Yeah, we’re fine.”
“Are you sure? You’ve scored like two goals in ten minutes.”