Page 69 of Holiday on the Rocks
Royce yelled from behind me. “Rachel, you can’t make people be happy. You’re not vodka.”
I was losing patience. “Warning to all, I’m having a moment where I just really need some therapeutic stabbing. Don’t push me.”
Lexi did a little jump. “There she is!”
Our crew got skates, and I found a chair sitting on the ice across the rink. Perfect. I planted my butt in it and watched Rachel laugh and hold hands with Evan while I pushed images of hot Levi from my cerebrum.
Rachel and Evan; the perfect pair. She was the sun to his shine. The cheese to his macaroni. The dirt to his gutter. The booze to his hangover. The vomit to his party. I should probably stop here, you get it.
My eyes skipped over to Lexi skating hand in hand with newly divorced Kristina who was laughing her ass off. She was Kristina’s answer. Isn’t it weird how one person being put into your life can flip the script? I pulled on my gloves and inhaled the crisp Christmasy air and watched our crew for ten minutes in peace.
Then my chair moved.
I looked over my shoulder as Levi’s chuckle hit my ears.
“What are you doing?” I held on. “You stop this right now or I’ll tell Lexi on you!”
I felt his breath on the top of my head as he laughed. “I know you really don’t want to sit in a boring chair. You need a little thrill.”
His words cranked my tummy tight. “No, I don’t need a thrill. I’m an adult, and I don’t want any of that.”
“Wasn’t it Hemmingway who said when you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead?”
I held on tighter as we picked up speed. “You quoting Hemmingway is shocking enough to provoke death. But I don’t need thrills or fun.”
“Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”
Good question. With that he whipped the chair, and I sailed across the ice while screaming with laughter. By the time I slowed he was right behind me and whirled me in the other direction but even faster as I clung to the chair. “Stop it!”
He skated over, placed his hands on the chair beside each of my legs and leaned down. “You don’t want me to stop. Do you?”
I needed to stop all of it. My brain had the clarity of a muddy water after a storm.
“You ready, pretty girl?”
I went sailing past the Christmas tree and suddenly wondered why my ladies weren’t stopping the shenanigans. I turned my head, and the girls were entering a little gift shop next to the ice rink. That was when my chair was pushed again, but this time to the end of the ice arena and behind a wall.
I stood and planned to walk away, but the intelligent organ inside my thick skull stopped working. It had too many tabs open and just froze up, leaving me standing there chewing on my lip.
He took a step closer. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“I’m sorry about what happened in the alley at Wienerlicious.” The corner of his mouth turned up. “Now there’s a sentence I never imagined coming out of me.”
I nodded at the eyes that held the promise of forbidden pleasures. Forbidden pleasures I knew were over and done with but still made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
“You’ll always make me crazy. But we agreed to a day of closure. We both have our lives to get back to.” He grabbed me by the front of my coat and pulled me to him. “So this is it.”
Relief washed over me; we were on the same page. This was what I wanted. Farewell Allie and Levi forever. Adios. Au revoir.
Forever. Yes, I’d leave Colorado and never see him again just as it was supposed to be.
While I waited for a sense of calm to fill me, it did not. Instead, a rigid strain in my upper chest cavity arrived.
The flirting, my flirting, the kisses, and longing to be as close to him as possible was something I had to release into the universe and move forward with a new sense of peace in my life.
THIRTY-FOUR
