Chapter 10
Our group was so big that the restaurant had split us in two.
We were seated at two long wooden tables, running parallel to each other so we could still talk to each other as needed.
The tables and chairs had a rustic look, but were heavy enough and obviously only looked weathered on purpose.
The lighting was low and the fake flames on the tea lights scattered across the table helped little in that sense.
Clearly, the ambience they wanted worked best without bright lights.
The young woman who was serving us asked if there was a special occasion. Dom and I shook our heads no in unison, but his mother was more than happy to explain that we were celebrating her son and his skating partner. She slipped in the fact that we were national champions, too.
I was already halfway through a large glass of red wine from the bar, so it didn’t take much to make me blush.
Dom looked even more embarrassed than I felt.
He was red all the way to his hairline. “Dear God, why?” he muttered as he slid down in his chair.
He looked like he would appreciate if the floor opened up and swallowed him.
It didn’t take him long to move on from his embarrassment. The appetizers came out and we dug in. Isaac, sitting on Brandon’s other side at the end of the table, practically inhaled his, but the rest of us ate at a much more reasonable pace.
By the time they were clearing away the dessert plates, I was more relaxed than I had been in a week.
My friends had told me about every remotely interesting thing that had happened to them since they’d started back at university.
Isaac opened up, sharing stories of his own.
It felt completely foreign to me, hearing my brother talk about being at university and going to frosh parties.
He had always seemed so young compared to my friends and I, even though he had only been two grades behind us at school.
Our perception of being so much older than we actually were skewed that, I was sure, but this didn’t seem right.
The way he was sneaking glances towards Kendra in what he must have thought was a sneaky manner was even more unsettling.
Brandon would occasionally join in the conversation, but he kept lapsing into silence.
Dom’s friends had gotten progressively louder as the evening went on and more drinks were downed. Dom would occasionally look towards his parents to see if they were paying attention to what was being said, but for the most part he seemed engrossed in what his friends were saying.
“I hope you all had a good night,” my mother said, resting her hands on the back of my chair when we had finished eating.
“We are going to get going now, but the bill is taken care of.” There was a chorus of, “Thanks, Mrs. Pierce,” before she spoke again.
“Do you want to come home with us, or are you going to take a cab later?”
“I’m going to stay out for a bit,” I said.
My parents left, bringing my reluctant underage brother with them, and were quickly followed out by Dom’s parents.
As Dom and his friends were exchanging goodbyes with them, the sound of multiple chairs scraping against the floor made me wince.
With nobody else around, Brandon asked, “Do you want to come to my place instead?”
I shook my head as I took my jacket off the back of my chair. "No, I think we're all going to the pub down the street together."
“She never comes out to drink with us,” Alexis said, speaking much too loudly as she walked around the table to join us. Kendra and I shushed her in unison, telling her to keep her voice down. “We need to catch up!”
Brandon’s eyebrows furrowed. “Wasn’t that what you were doing for the last,” he checked his watch, “two hours?”
I placed a hand on his arm. “Yeah, but I don’t usually get the chance to do this. I want to stay out. You should come too. It will be fun.”
“What will be fun?” asked Ethan.
“The pub,” Alexis said, her voice only marginally quieter than earlier. It was a good thing we were taking her outside if she had lost all volume control. “You guys should come, too.”
I knew exactly what she was hoping for by inviting them to come with us. But since she had been at the other end of the table all night, I didn’t know if they suspected her motives. From the way Zain agreed, he was completely oblivious or he had similar ideas.
We gathered up our things and made our way around the cramped tables. Once we were outside, a gust of icy wind blew. I grabbed at my unzipped coat before there was a tug on my elbow.
“Hazel, can we talk for a minute?” Brandon asked. His face was half-covered in shadows, but he looked serious.
“Of course. We can talk on the way there,” I said. His tone was enough to feel incongruous with how much I was enjoying the evening. Teasingly, I added, “We can talk inside too, but it’s probably going to be easier to hear outside.”
He looked around at the group that had gathered. “I was thinking somewhere more private.”
The pleasantly flushed feeling I’d had slipped away. “We can walk at the back,” I said. It wouldn’t be truly private, but it was better than nothing.
We let everybody get a few feet ahead of us before he said, “I wasn’t expecting your skate tonight to be so… intense.”
There was that word again. Was it the only word he could think of that wasn't overtly negative? “I’m sorry,” I said out of reflex. “I tried to prepare you for it the best I could, but I guess seeing it is different than hearing about it.”
“You described it as so mechanical and so technical,” he said.
“That didn’t look technical.” I opened my mouth, struggling to form a retort, which he must have noticed because he added, “I’m sure it was very technical.
The edges and spins and whatever you call them.
But the way you were looking at him and he was looking at you…
that didn’t seem like acting. That seemed real. ”
My stomach felt like I’d swallowed a rock with dinner. “That’s the point. We needed to make it convincing. You can’t have a program like that and act like friends.”
“But you said the reason your coach wanted you to skate to that was because people thought you were into each other. You made people think that even before they decided you should use that song.”
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t deny it when it was true.
The intense bond we shared had undoubtedly contributed to how people viewed us.
He would see right through me. But I couldn’t exactly play into his fears that Dom and I had something between us.
Then again, staying quiet probably made me seem guilty.
I desperately wanted to get out of this situation, but I didn’t know how to do it.
Brandon sighed. Shit. I must have taken too long to answer.
We were outside the pub then, standing under the glowing green and gold sign.
The others had stopped, waiting for us before heading in, but I waved at them to go on without us.
When they were gone, I said, “I don’t know how to make you feel better. ”
He looked off into the distance for several seconds before staring down at me. “Can you honestly tell me that there has never been anything between you?”
My mind flooded with memories. When Dom and I had first started skating together and I had gotten butterflies in my stomach every time we grabbed hands.
I’d had a hard time looking him in the eyes without blushing back then.
I had gossiped with my friends about how I was spending so much time with an older boy and doing romantic things with him, even if it was all an act.
Then, without me knowing when it happened he had filled out, his stubble was no longer patchy, and he looked like a man rather than a teenage boy.
I could still recall the first time he’d told me he had a girlfriend.
I’d felt jealous, worried that suddenly she was going to become more important to him than I was.
I met Brandon’s eyes and admitted, “I felt something for him when I was younger. I got really flustered when we became partners and had a crush on him for a bit. But I was young and awkward and nothing ever happened.”
“Nothing?” he asked skeptically.
“Nothing,” I said emphatically. “We have never even kissed. By the time I was out of my awkward phase, I had gotten over my crush. Plus, Dom has never struggled to get a girlfriend. There has never been anyone super serious, but he never lacked for attention.”
If I could have, I would have run away from this conversation.
Everything that I’d once felt was unrequited and, frankly, embarrassing now.
I had never dared to admit any of it to Dom.
I had long since sworn all of my friends who had known to secrecy.
Maybe he suspected I had a crush on him back in the day, since I hadn’t done a good job at hiding it, but we had never discussed it.
Even talking about it could affect our partnership and make things weird between us.
I didn’t dare utter anything that could put us in that awkward place.
It was safer to pretend it hadn't happened.
He asked, “You're saying that you didn’t feel anything that made you want to do this routine with him? I need you to be completely honest, even if it’s not what I want to hear.”
“I didn’t suggest it,” I said, speaking slowly to emphasize every word. “It was completely Mark’s idea, because he wanted us to stand out. Olga was less eager for it, but she agreed with his thought process. Dom and I just went along with it.”
“So, this didn’t come up because you wanted to grind against him? Or vice versa?”