Page 30 of Looks Real Good Now
The loss of his hand made my hand feel cold, but I didn’t slip or fall. In fact, I felt fine. I knew I could take it from here. I used to be good at this. Dad had put me on the ice the moment it was safe to and taught me and Liam at the same time. Aaron had joined us at some point but hated it and immediately lost interest. At some point, Liam latched onto hockey, and Dad latched onto that, and I moved on to cheerleading because the fact that I could do the splits had to be put to use somehow. But I’d still been on the ice a lot. And as I moved forward, muscle memory kicked in and I felt stronger. I found my centre of gravity and stability on my blades and was able to put power behind my strides.
And so, I started to chase Liam.
Except this was Liam and he moved quicker than me, so before I had even made it three-quarters of the way around the rink, I could sense him behind me.
Just like muscle memory was propelling me around the rink again, muscle memory also made me brace for impact, but still stay loose, when I knew Liam was close.
Sure enough, as he reached me, his arm wrapped around my waist, scooped me up, and carried us forward.
“Going to have to try harder than that to catch me, Len,” he said into my ear before carefully putting me down on the ice, making sure I was secure on my blades again before letting me go.
“What do I get if I catch you?” I asked.
“The satisfaction of knowing that you’re a better ice skater than me,” he suggested.
“That does not sound like a good enough win, but sure, I’ll take it.”
“Stick to the very inside so we don’t piss other people off,” he said as he pushed himself just ahead of me.
I nodded. “You get a two-second head start, so you better put those ice skater quads of yours to good use.”
He smiled and drove off his left leg, putting so much distance between us with just the one move that I regretted giving him two seconds. One would have sufficed.
There was no way I was going to catch him.
21
Liam
The thing about Lenny was that she had always been a better skater than me. She played down her ability like she did with most things, but I knew it wouldn’t take her long to find her pace on the ice once she got used to being back on skates.
It took ten laps around the rink for her to catch up with me. Which was probably for the best because it took about that long for my body to let me know that it was not fit for long bouts of skating anymore. My knees started aching and my quads were beginning to protest from exertion.
Lenny wrapped her arms around my waist once she reached me.
“Tag, you’re it,” she said, sounding breathless. As she spun around in front of me, her eyes were a sparkling caramel and she had the brightest smile I’d ever seen on her face, causing the corners of her eyes to crinkle.
“I see you’ve found your grounding on the ice,” I said, shifting so that she was now by my side, one arm still around my waist. I looped mine over her shoulders and we started skatingat a more leisurely pace.
“And I see you’ve lost yours. There is no way I should have been able to catch you.” Her tone was teasing, and her other hand hit me playfully in the chest.
“You were always a better skater, if I remember correctly. For a long time, before you became my goalkeeper, Rob used you as a way to get me to move faster on the ice.”
“Oh shit, yeah. I forgot about those sessions. Dude, you used to get ruined by me. I was so fast on that ice, I could skate circles around you.”
“You really did make me a better skater. I learned how to be nimble on that ice because I used to have you skating circles around me before you switched to back-springs and school chants. I can’t believe you told guys you weren’t good on the ice just so you could protect their egos. If they couldn’t hack it, that was their problem, not yours.”
“Yeah, that may be true, but when you’re young and trying to find love, you make all kinds of concessions. And then with Kai, I just kept it up because I wanted to use the rare time I had away from the bakery to be off my feet as much as possible. Skating, skiing, being made to go outside in general, really got in the way of me relaxing and resetting by a fire in a cosy knit with a bunch of books.”
“Wow, I really ruined your holiday plans by demanding that we go out on dates, didn’t I? How many books did you bring back with you?”
“Like ten. I’ve finished two so far.”
It was then that I remembered that Lenny was a quick reader. A scarily fast one when she wanted to be. Her dad was her rideto and from school and when we turned sixteen, and I got my licence, it became me. Both her dad and I had hockey practice after school, and although there was a period in the school year where our practices aligned, a lot of the time they didn’t, so Lenny spent a lot of time at the rink waiting for one of us to be done so she could go home. She finished a lot of books during those practices. Thick ones, too. Ones that would have taken me weeks to even find the motivation to want to read. She read them like it was nothing, and she loved it.
Rob would always ask her about what she was reading on the rides home. Sometimes, it was the classics. Then there were a lot of werewolves, which then became a lot of vampires, which then became regular re-reads ofTwilight. Even though Rob had no idea what her obsession with that book was about, he always asked if she learnt anything new from the re-read. And was always interested in the answer.
When I started doing most of the driving, I also took over asking about her reading. Even when the books started to take a steamier turn, she still gave me a breakdown and left me feeling every bit the horny teenage boy I was. Who then took out all that sexual tension in the shower.
