Page 46 of The Save

Shar shrugged. "Well, you already said no to Garrett."

"Yeah, I know.” I thought for a moment. “I can't even imagine—" I shook my head, my chest already starting to tighten. "I don't know. That feels terrifying, the idea of letting someone else see me like that, touch me like that.” Yes, I’d slept with Colin, but those moments were more about survival than connection.

Shar's hands were suddenly on my shoulders. "Maddie. At some point you're going to need to let go."

I frowned. "Let go of what?"

"Everything. You hold it all so tightly, and I get it. You're good at what you do. You have a system. Everything is in order, and it works for you. But if you never let someone else take the wheel?—"

"Letting someone else take the wheel would be dangerous. We would crash and die."

She grinned. "Letting someone else take the wheel means you can lie back and have a mind-blowing orgas?—"

"Okay, so you're allowed to shout that across the parking lot, and I can't say penis?"

"Maddie, for the love!"

I laughed. "No. I get it. I hear you." And I did. Intimacy, connection, meant lowering those walls. Letting someone see all my inner workings. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to . . . I just couldn’t figure out how.

"If you let somebody see past the grades and accolades and that brilliant mind of yours, they're going to love what they see."

I cocked my head to the side. "Shar. I don't think thereisanything beyond that." It was a joke, but it also kind of wasn't.

"Oh, there’s something there. And either you're going to figure it out gracefully, or you're going to have a shit storm of a meltdown at Oxford."

"I am not."

"What happens when school is over, Maddie? When you're working and you don’t have that next test to study for or the next scholarship to win?"

"I—" My voice caught as the conversation with Chase snapped into my head.Yeah. Well, my goal is to get them on the ice. Let them do the thing they love. After this, they're not going to have nearly as many opportunities.

Suddenly, the next ten years of my life flashed in front of my eyes—getting the scholarship, studying, earning my degree, then maybe moving on for a master's or PhD, jumping from hoop to hoop to hoop, hopefully discovering something I was passionate about in the process. But would that happen if I couldn’t even find something or someone to be passionate about now?

"What do you always tell Axel and Rory?" Shar asked.

I wet my lips. "That they need to do their laundry more than once a semester?”

She laughed. “The other thing.”

I drew a breath. “That patterns of thinking change with practice."

"Exactly. So . . . You're really good at math. They're not, which means changing those patterns of thinking is going to take practice."

"So are you saying I need . . . practice?”

"Your words, not mine." She dropped her hands and adjusted her purse on her shoulder. "I just want you to be happy. Maybe you need a tutor, too."

Pressure built behind my eyes at the expression on her face. It was a different iteration of a look I knew in my bones. "You're looking at me like my mom right now."

"I’m not—” Sharla sniffed. "How about a good friend. And I’m not the one leaving, by the way."

I deflated a little. "I get it. I'm broken, and you need to fix me while you still have time."

A smile split her face. "It's more like I want you to stop depriving the male species of that sweet, sweet ass."

I threw my head back and laughed, almost stumbling over the parking block behind me. "Perfect. Well, I've got my homework. Find someone willing to tutor me in relationships and physical intimacy?—”

"That'll be easy."

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