Page 5 of Love and Other Penalties
“Tell me what I got wrong.” Besides what time I needed to get here to lock him out.
“Jade broke up with me,” he says evenly. “I don’t have a girlfriend.”
Perfect!my heart screams, and strangely, my brain agrees.
“And I need to practice.” He clears his throat. “Because the Bobcats just signed a rookie who’s really amazing, and if there’s anything I know about this sport, it’s that anyone can be replaced, at any time, for any reason.”
I blink, because I so wasn’t expecting him to be worried about his starting position. “Oh,” falls out of my mouth.
“So, can we just be adults about this shared ice time?”
I look up at him, noting the way his dark eyes seem to catch every flicker of arena lighting. “What exactly does being adults about it look like?”
“We’ll go halfsies, Kitten.” He gestures to the rink. “I came a half-hour early to do my full-ice drills before you got here, but I can get these put away lickety split, okay?”
He skates backward for a few strokes before I have time to answer, and then he’s stooping to pick up the cones. I watch him weave through them with pure precision, and I wonder how anyone could be better than him.
“Lickety split,” I mutter, because it’s all I have to keep myself from throwing my arms around him and telling him no one will ever take his starting spot. It’s a stupid thing to think anyway, because he’s right.
Everyone is replaceable. I know that better than anyone.
He reaches the end of the ice and turns back toward me with a tall stack of cones. I startle into motion, quickly turning my back on him and starting to gather the cones on this side of the rink.
“We’ll split the ice,” he calls from the sidelines, where he unceremoniously dumps the cones over the boards. “It worked well enough yesterday, I think.”
Yeah, if he counts having heart palpitations and me stumbling every time I thought about him watching me as “working well.”
I say nothing and nod curtly instead, meeting him with the cones I’ve retrieved and letting him continue down to the end to get the rest.
“And how do you propose we mark these alleged boundaries?” The Bobcats play here, but the ice is used for more than hockey, and the lines aren’t currently painted for a game.
He scans down the ice. “I have those cones.”
“I have some tape in my bag.”
We both skate to the side, almost like it’s a contest to see who can mark the middle of the ice first. My heart races as I rip open the zipper on my bag and start digging for the strawberry shortcake athletic tape that Mae gave me last week as a joke.
I’d tossed it in my bag, laughed with her, and forgotten about it. Until now.
Unfortunately, Tomcat steps onto the ice before me, armed with an armful of cones. He starts setting them out, and I follow behind him, wrapping up his ugly neon cones with a strip of cupcakey tape around the tip and then leading to the next.
When he reaches the other side and looks back to me, the arena fills with the sound of his deep, charming laughter. It paints through my ears and down into my chest, rendering me motionless for a moment.
I mean, sort of. I’m skating, so I’m never really motionless.
“Nice,” he says. “It’s a little bit you and a little bit me.”
“And you have a little bit more ice,” I say, reaching the end and ripping off the tape before securing it to the tip of the lastcone. I then toe the cone another couple of feet onto his side of the rink. “This is more the middle.”
“Whatever, Kitten.” He chuckles as he steps over my tape and skates off.
Our line is pretty ridiculous anyway. We didn’t have a physical barrier yesterday, and we did fine. What we’ve done today looks like a battlefield between dessert and sports equipment.
We retreat to our respective sides, and I try to focus on my warm-up routine. But it’s impossible to ignore the sound of his skates carving sharp turns, the rhythmic thwack of his stick against the puck and into the net he’s set up, the way he moves across the ice like he was born to be there.
I steal a glance and immediately regret it. He’s working on some kind of shooting drill, and the controlled power in his movements is mesmerizing. Every stride is purposeful, every shot precise. There’s something almost hypnotic about watching him work, the way his entire body flows in perfect synchronization.
Focus, Ivy, I tell myself.Triple lutz, not triple Travers.
