Chapter 18
Iwoke up to the warmth of sunlight on my face.
I enjoyed it for a moment before the confusion hit.
To ensure I could get the deepest sleep possible, my father had helped me install blackout blinds and blackout curtains in my bedroom the week I moved into my apartment.
Especially on days I had to get up at the crack of dawn, I tried to force myself to bed early to get enough sleep.
That wasn’t a problem in the winter, when the sun had set before dinner.
The summer was another story. When it was light past nine and not truly dark until even later, I had a hard time getting to sleep.
I always had. So waking up to the sun, while nice, wasn’t something I was used to.
How tired was I when I got home to have forgotten to close my curtains?
Everything came flooding back to me then. I hadn’t gone home at all.
My eyes shot open. Sure enough, I wasn’t in my room. This wasn’t my bed, and that bookcase in the corner wasn’t filled with my books.
I braced myself before I rolled over, but the other half of the bed was empty. The sheets were rumpled and a corner of the pillow was propped up on the headboard. I reached out, feeling the temperature of the sheets. They were cool to the touch. He must have been gone for at least a few minutes.
I rolled back over and looked over the side of the bed.
My clothes were nowhere to be seen. “Crap,” I muttered.
I pulled the sheet up to cover my chest when I sat up to look at the floor on the other side of the bed.
Sure enough, my clothes were strewn across the carpet between the bed and the door.
Intermingled among them were several pieces of much larger pieces of clothing.
Not knowing how much time I had before he got back, I hurried out of bed to grab my underwear. I had one arm in my shirt when I heard the door opening. I yanked my shirt down my torso as hard as I could while calling out, “One minute! Just give me a minute!”
The door shut again and I hurried into my pants.
God, was I really going to have to do the walk of shame?
These people all knew who I was. They all knew of my repeated denials that there was anything between Dom and me off the ice.
Fucking hell, they had heard Brandon’s accusations that Dom and I had been secretly hooking up this entire time.
This wasn’t exactly going to make us look truthful.
I guess it was too late to be worried about that.
“Okay,” I said, furiously combing through my hair with my fingers. I probably looked a mess. Judging from the mascara marks on the pillow, I probably had raccoon eyes. I certainly had morning breath and bedhead, with no way to fix either of them.
Dom walked into the room—his room—in nothing but a beige towel.
His still wet dark hair was rumpled, sticking up in every direction.
His muscled torso and arms were drier. Not that it kept me from staring at his muscles again.
I knew he was in fantastic shape. He wouldn’t be able to lift me so easily otherwise.
But now I knew what those muscles could do to me off the ice.
Heat swept over me, particularly between my thighs.
My body remembered what he had done the night before.
“Hey,” he said. He sounded as awkward as I felt. His left hand rested on the place his towel overlapped, as though he was worried it was going to come undone and leave him exposed. That was exactly what I wanted to see, although I knew I shouldn’t.
“Hey,” I said. My arms felt awkward hanging at my sides, so I tried crossing them over my chest. Did that make me seem too closed off? I uncrossed them and shoved my hands in my pockets. I don’t know if that was any better.
“So, about last night…” he trailed off.
“Yeah,” I said, just for something to say. “It was… something.” God, I sounded like an idiot. I was saying words, but none of them actually meant anything. I was worried about saying the wrong thing. For once, I had no idea what Dom was thinking.
“It was,” Dom said, latching on. “It was good… great, even. But I don’t know if we were thinking things through.”
That was an understatement. “We definitely weren’t,” I agreed.
“It was great, but I don’t know if this is going to change things.
” Did I want it to change things between us?
Did he? My body was humming with tension, ready to jump him again for a repeat of last night.
That wasn’t smart, though. Morning breath was the least of my problems.
“We can’t let it change things,” Dom said. “Not now.” His fingers tightened over the towel, brushing against his lower abs in the same place I had rocked against him only hours earlier.
The words “not now” finally got my brain on the right track.
We had the Winter Games hanging over us.
That was the unspoken obstacle we were staring down.
The thing we had been working towards for eight years together.
We’d been working to get to this point even longer if you counted the years we were skating without each other.
If you counted them, I had been building to this since I was three years old.
I had dedicated everything to this year for so long.
There were no second chances, so there was no room for errors.
But it also meant that the decision of what this meant for us was out of my hands.
“Right,” I said, trying to push the disappointment at his statement down. “That will probably be best. We have to be smart about things.” The acknowledgement didn’t make the voice in my head pipe down.
“Right,” Dom repeated with a single nod. His face was still closed off. “We weren’t thinking straight last night. It was just the culmination of years of being told we had chemistry.”
Was it? Maybe it was. I assumed the chemistry had led to the unspoken sexual tension that had been building, but maybe we had been primed for it.
“I blame Mark,” I said. “He is the one who has been telling us to act like we’re into each other.
We had orders to look at each other like we wanted to rip each other’s clothes off. ”
Dom was still grasping his towel as if his life depended on it. That was probably true. If he were fully naked in front of me again, my self-control would vanish instantly. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Yeah, Mark put the idea in our heads.” He didn’t sound confident for once.
My stomach flipped. He knew as well as I did that Mark had only been pushing for that in the last few months. We had been getting questions for the last few years. And every time I’d truthfully stated that nothing had happened, my mind had temporarily wandered to what it would be like.
I didn’t know if I could sound believable agreeing with him, so I repeated my early assertion. “We can’t let this make things weird between us.”
“Absolutely,” Dom said. He sounded relieved that I was sticking to the line.
Whether it was because it was the smart thing or he wanted to keep last night as a one time thing was anyone’s guess.
“We will just go back to business as usual on Monday. But that means that we can’t let anyone know that this happened.
No one.” He stressed the last two words.
The way he emphasized it was a little offensive. I wasn’t planning on broadcasting it, but he made it sound like a dirty secret that had to stay hidden.
My silence must have tipped him off because he said, “I’m just trying to think about what would happen if people knew. We would never hear the end of it. And if you told your friends and things got back to Brandon…”
The unspoken end of the sentence hung heavy in the air between us.
If it got back to Brandon, it would confirm every fear he’d had that the tension wasn’t just skating chemistry.
Worse, he would feel justified in the insults he’d hurled my way on the night we’d broken up.
“What about Wyatt, Ethan, and Zain?” I asked.
“What about them?”
“Do they know that I’m here? What if one of them says something?
” I knew that there had still been people in the basement when Dom had pulled me down the stairs and into his room last night, but I couldn’t remember anything more specific than that.
There had probably been people in the kitchen too, for that matter.
I had been too focused on what had just happened and what I wanted to be doing to him.
Dom’s face paled. After an uncomfortable silence, he mumbled, “I don’t know.”
“Which question is that an answer to?” I asked.
“Both,” he said slowly. “They might know that you slept over. We weren’t exactly hiding that you came into my room in the middle of the night.”
I tried to remember who had been around.
Most of the people had left the party by the time Dom had kissed me, but not everyone.
Any of them could have seen us in the living room.
No matter where they were in the house, they would have needed to walk past us if they were trying to leave.
And while we hadn’t been kissing in there long, it must have been obvious what was about to happen for a while beforehand.
That wasn’t even getting into anybody who had still been in the basement when we went downstairs.
I could vaguely remember hearing some voices from where the beer pong table was set up, but I couldn’t remember more than that.
“There were people downstairs when we came down.”
Dom ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know who it was.” He couldn’t meet my eyes. “We’re going to have to hope they didn’t pay attention. Or that they were super wasted. Or that they don’t know us well enough to care.”
That seemed like a lot of ways things could go wrong, but I didn’t see anything we could do when we didn’t know who it was or what they saw. “Let me know if you figure out who it was. If not, I guess I’ll see you on Monday.”
He seemed relieved that he didn’t have to find a way to kick me out so he could get dressed. “Okay,” he replied. “I’ll see you Monday.”
I grabbed the rest of my things and hurried out of his room.
If I hesitated, I was bound to do something stupid.
I waited at the bottom of the staircase, listening for anyone upstairs.
I could hear the water running through the pipes, presumably because someone was showering, but no voices or footsteps.
Hopefully, that meant that all of Dom’s roommates were still asleep.
As I was trying to prepare myself, the water shut off.
I squared my shoulders and dashed up the stairs, hoping to get out of the house before anyone was walking in the halls.
I slipped on my boots before reaching for my coat from the remains of the previous night’s coat pile, which was down to only one other coat and a couple of stray scarves and hats.
“Fuck!” The curse slipped out as my heel got stuck in my boot.
My shoulder thudded against the wall and I tried to regain balance.
I must have been louder than I thought, because I heard a male voice call, “Hello?”
Shit. Ethan had heard me. Instead of answering, I unlocked the front door and stepped outside.
I had to get out of there before somebody saw me.
The thought of someone seeing me and knowing what had happened was too much.
Better to get home as fast as possible, so I would only have to deal with judgement from myself.