Page 5 of The Love Dare
Tyler will never forget the night Alexandru caught him sneaking around the family rink. Five years vanish in a blink as the memory comes surging forward.
He lay in bed, trying to shut his ears to the moans traveling through the paper-thin walls of this freaking dump they called a home. Yeah, it was better than their car, which was where they had been living before she met the sleazy car salesman doing he doesn’t even want to know what to his mother in the other room. The guy would be gone in a matter of months, Tyler had no doubt, and who the heck knew what would happen after that. They’d moved to Dallas with the asshat, the place like a foreign country compared to Minnesota, his real home.
God, he missed the cold.
The thumping and panting and shrieking got louder. Tyler stuffed his hands over his ears. Unable to take a moment more, he suddenly jumped out of bed, grabbed the beat-up old skates from his floor, and snuck out the window. A few days ago, he stole his mom’s phone to look up the location of the nearest rink. It was about a mile and a half away, but screw it, he needed the escape. He ran, praying he had the map right in his mind. For a few minutes there, he was absolutely positive he was lost. Then he turned two more corners, and there it was, like a freaking mirage.
He shimmied open a window and climbed inside.
Hockey had started as a way for one of his mom’s old boyfriends to get him out of the house—the guy had shoved a pair of his old skates, about five sizes too big, into Tyler’s arms and pointed toward the local pond, which was frozen over—but it didn’t take long before he was hooked. The guy was long gone, but the skates remained. And with every passing year, they fit just a little bit better. In fact, tonight Tyler had only needed to stuff one pair of socks in each boot before lacing them up as tightly as he could. He borrowed a stick from behind the register and some soda cans from the trash.
Stepping onto the rink felt like stepping into an alternate universe. He flew too fast for the real world to catch up. Here, there were no hardships, no worries. There was just the cold nip against his skin and the hot rush within his veins. He got lost in the burn, lost in the slap of wood against aluminum, again and again, as he raised his stick, imagined an inner demon, and sent it soaring.
A sudden bright light flooded the rink.
Tyler tried to run, but the second he hopped the wall, a strong hand grabbed him around the back of the neck. He braced himself to be rejected the way his father had done, cast out the way his grandparents had done, mocked the way hisclassmates had done, dismissed or beaten or cuffed. Instead, the dark brown eyes meeting his defiant look were intrigued. The large man who’d caught him told him to stay put. When he returned two minutes later, it was with a brand-new pair of skates that were just Tyler’s size.
“Put these on,” the man said, his voice deep and commanding with an accent Tyler couldn’t place. Then he tossed a little black disk onto the ice. “And use a puck this time.”
They played hockey.
For hours.
Tyler would spend the rest of his life wondering why he had chosen that moment to actually listen to a direct order, and be forever grateful he had. When dawn came, it was more than a new day. It was a new life. Because instead of seeing a thief, or a miscreant, or an idiot, Alexandru looked at him and saw potential—potential Tyler has no intention to waste, especially not tonight with a trophy on the line, the trophy he knows his mentor has coveted since the moment he took over this junior team.
Tyler plays lights out. He’s faster than ever, sharper than ever, all over the ice. He scores once in the first, then again to start the third, with an assist to Alex in there too.
With thirty seconds left in the game, it’s tied. The other team shoots. They miss. The puck slaps into the boards. He scoops it up and sends it toward Alex, who’s ready near center ice. Their eyes meet. Alex has always been the leader, the playmaker. He’s got one of those magnetic personalities that can’t be taught, the sort that makes people want to follow him. Tyler has none of that. But he’s an assassin, and with ten seconds left on the clock, a closer is exactly what the team needs. So he pushes off his defender and cuts past the block from their left wing. The puck is there waiting by the time he gets into position. Before the other team even sees it coming, his stick is swinging down hard. Theslap reverberates across the sudden silence in the arena as the crowd seems to collectively hold its breath. A second stretches into a year as the puck soars and?—
The net flutters.
The buzzer sounds.
Game!
Tyler rips off his helmet and screams. Bodies slam into him from all sides as his teammates rush the ice.
“We won!” Alex yells, grabbing him by the cheeks, shaking him. “We actually fucking won!”
They crow like maniacs up to the rafters. He’s not sure how long they spend out there celebrating. Time passes in a blur. Hugs and handshakes. Trophies and speeches. But when they’re finally done and back in their sweats, he does know one thing. No one is waiting for him on the other side.
There was a time when his mother was his greatest cheerleader, not so long ago he can’t remember it. A time when she rearranged her shifts to make it to every game. A time when her arms were the first ones he sought after a victory. A time when her softly spokenchin up, babywas all he needed to hear after a defeat.
But that time is over.
It took him a while to realize what was happening, why she was behaving so differently, why she seemed so out of it. Then he caught her once with some new guy and a needle in her arm. Drugs weren’t anything new. He’d seen her high before, but not like this. The next time he was alone in the house, he found her stash and flushed it down the toilet. She screamed like a banshee when she found out, like someone possessed. And he knew then, like the flip of a switch, that he was no longer her number-one priority.
She got better at hiding her stuff, so he switched to other techniques. Lectures. Silent treatments. Screamingbattles. Punishments. Anything he could think of to make her understand everything she was missing. And this is his latest attempt. Maybe when she sees the trophy on the shelf, she’ll realize what the drugs cost her.
Probably not, but it’s worth a shot anyway.
Tyler weaves quickly through the congratulatory crowd outside the locker room, around a corner, and down an empty hallway toward the exit. He’s in search of an unlocked door when a lone figure stops him. She’s sitting on a bench with her knees curled into her chest, holding a paperback about an inch from her nose, so absorbed in whatever the pages hold she doesn’t even hear him coming.
It brings him right back to the first time he ever saw her, sitting on the bleachers in the Rusu family rink, her head buried in a book, completely unaware of the world around her in a way he found so utterly foreign and so instantly fascinating at the same time. To him, reading had only ever been a punishment, a necessary evil. Words swarmed across the page. Letters jumped in and out of their places. The longer he stared, the more everything shifted in a never-ending scramble his dyslexic brain was helpless to decipher. But this girl smiled as if she had a secret and eagerly turned a page before pushing her thick turquoise glasses a little higher up her nose.
I know what you’re thinking, Alex had said as he cut to a sudden stop by Tyler’s side, jolting him from a somewhat mortifying daze.That my sister is so lame. It’s the books. I tell her all the time. But she’s cool. I promise. If she comes out here, she’ll probably kick our butts. She’s freakishly fast on skates. It breaks my dad’s heart that she doesn’t want anything to do with hockey. But with my luck, she’d end up in the Olympics or something, so it’s better for me that she’s such a nerd.
His embarrassment at being caught staring quickly turned to something else, a sharp pinch he’d been unable to process untilafter she beat him to the puck six times in a row with a smile on her face. The meaning hit while he sat undoing his laces with the musical sound of her laughter still ringing in his ears—disappointment.
