Page 46 of On the Line

She takes a deep and ragged breath. “I’m not skating,” she says, looking down at her feet.

I reach over and tilt her chin up so she’s looking at me. “Let’s just put your skates on and see how you feel about it then.”

“I’ve done this all before, Jameson. I’ve tried.” She looks away, then back at me again. “I can’t.”

I cup both sides of her face in my hands and tell her, “I know you can do this.” I pause. “You’ve never tried with me here. I’m not going to let you fall.”

She sits on the bench and I kneel at her feet. She gazes down at me with those big blue eyes, and she looks absolutely terrified.

“I can’t take away the fear,” I tell her. “But we can work through it. I won’t let you go, I promise.”

She gives me a small nod, and it feels like a Stanley Cup-level victory. I hold her heel in one hand and use my other to unlace her snow boot before sliding it off and resting her foot on my thigh. When I lean over and unzip my hockey bag, she gasps.

“Are those ...”

“No,” I say. “They’re not your old skates.” Morgan told me that Lauren still had them, but I didn’t want her to have to wear the same skates she was wearing when she fell. Since apparently they have the same shoe size, her cousin helped me get a new pair fitted and broken in for Lauren.

“Okay.” The word is hesitant, but she nods.

It only takes me a minute to get her figure skates laced; then she sits there like a statue while I sit next to her and lace up my hockey skates. When I turn toward her, she’s staring straight ahead, her eyes darting around the rink in an anxious staccato pattern.

“Hey,” I say, looping my arm around her lower back. “We’re going to be just fine.”

“I’m not worried aboutyou,” she lets out a nervous laugh as she looks over at me. “You could do this with your eyes closed and your feet tied together.”

I laugh, and it seems to break a little of the tension. “Exactly. And I’m going to hold on to you and we’ll go just as slow as you want. C’mon. You almost made the Olympic team.”

“Yeah, well—” She clears her throat. “I didn’t.”

We’ve both had to walk away from the sport we loved, but at least for me it was a choice—her dreams were ripped away from her. “It’s the big dreams that hurt the most when you have to give them up.”

“Do you miss it?” Her words are a whisper in this wide-open, silent space.

“Every day.”

“Did you ever want to go back to playing?” she asks.

I shake my head. “It wouldn’t have been worth what it would have done to my family. Jules and Audrey needed me there after my dad left. And I needed them. We’re all each other has.”

“You’re a good man,” Lauren says quietly.

“Mostly.” I give her a little wink, then stand, using my arm that’s encircling her back to raise her up with me. “Let’s skate.”

She lets out another shaky breath. “I read somewhere that bravery is being scared, but doing it anyway.”

I try to step us forward, but she stands with her skates firmly rooted in place.

“Do you trust me?” I ask.

She looks up at me, her face pale and her eyes huge. “This isn’t about trust, Jameson. It’s about fear.”

“The reason you’re still afraid,” I say softly, “is because you haven’t been back on the ice again since you got hurt. You’re letting the what ifs consume you. But what if youcando this? What if everything is okay?”

“What if I don’t want to?”

“I think that if you didn’t want to, you wouldn’t have let me put those skates on your feet. Let’s just step out onto the ice. We don’t have to move. And you can hold on to me the entire time.”

“You’d like that,” she says lightly.

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