Page 21 of My Last Dance

“Which leaves me with you.” He stared at me. “The toughest girl I know, who is secretly a giant softie.”

“I don’t think I’m a nice person though, I—”

He shook his head. “The career I havebecause of you…” He nodded. “That says otherwise.” He looked like he wanted to say more, but he rolled his lips together. “All right, go to sleep, Piper. Things will be better in the morning, I promise.”

“What if it’s not better?” I asked, because with how things were going, I couldn’t see them ever improving.

“Then you get to tell me you told me so.”

I blew out a sigh.

“See, I know you love doing that.” He paused. “Wait, so Patty Boy isn’t coming back to Chicago?”

“I don’t know, prolly not.” I tucked my hands under my cheek. “Why?”

He frowned up at the ceiling like this presented a major problem for him. “I’ll need to find a new trivia partner.”

My face cracked. “What?”

“Yeah, we’re trivia partners at O’Callahan’s,” he explained. I stared blankly at him. “Yeah, ya know, that old Irish bar in Lincoln Park? We crush it every week. He kills it at music, I kill it at sports. We’re the dream team.”

“Are you serious right now?”

“Yeah.” His eyebrows slammed down. “We’re on a 30-week winning streak, you don’t joke about stats like that, Piper.”

A laugh involuntarily popped out of me. How the hell did I not know that? Then again, there were probably a lot of things I didn’t know about Richard. He had an uncanny ability to make you feel like you truly knew him, when really, he was hiding a whole other life.

“The Titanic,” I whispered sleepily.

“Huh?”

“You’re the glacier.”

He cocked an eyebrow up. “How hard did you hit your head earlier? Do I need to be waking you up every two hours?”

“No, it makes perfect sense,” I mumbled, feeling sleep overcoming me. “You’ve got a whole bunch that you hide beneath the surface.”

Staring at the ceiling, his mouth gaped open for a second, like he was struck speechless.

“Kappy,” I whispered sleepily.

He glanced over at me.

“Do you ever wish we could go back and get it right?” I’m not sure what made me ask it. I could blame it on delirium from lack of sleep, but maybe it’s just that the nighttime has a way of making us admit our true wishes, even if only to ourselves. And at that moment, I wished more than anything that he wasn’t across the room. I wished that he was in bed beside me, holding me.

But as his silence stretched on, my heart ached in my chest. It felt all wrong that we were just strangers with shared memories, but that’s what we were. He wasn’t mine. He never was.

Regretting my question and thinking he wasn’t going to say anything else, I let myself drift to sleep, but right before I was pulled under, I heard him murmur, “All the time, Piper. All the time.”

SECOND PERIOD

5. RICHARD CHARLES KAPPERS THE THIRD

2008

My first meeting with Richard was like a smack in the face—quite literally.

Patrick and I, both around fifteen-years-old, had just started training at Centre Ice. I was minding my own business, stretching out in the lobby, getting prepped for off-ice lifts, when a soccer ball smacked the side of my head, hard.

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