Page 39 of A Loser by Christmas
“About what?”
“I don’t know. Corruption in hockey?”
“Hockey isn’t corrupt. It’s a business. And it’s the best game?—”
“In the world?”
Calum smiles, but here’s the thing about watching him so closely—I see it slip. That makes me work even harder to replace it with another. “Might get you off the hook if you did it naked.”
He laughs, and that’s so much better. “Where am I staging this naked protest?”
“I don’t know. On Tower Bridge?” I reach out to run a finger across a bare bicep. “You’d stop plenty of traffic.”
“Give it up, Valentin. I have.” He draws in a long, slow breath. The cloud of his exhale is faint. So is his answer. “Just gonna focus on having this time, yeah? Cram as much as I can into this Christmas. I’m lucky to have it.” He meets my eyes and repeats an order. “Focus on your win.” He moves on by giving a pep talk to a duck egg. “And you focus on growing.” That egg might not have anything viable inside it. That doesn’t stop him from acting as if it’s full of potential. “You do that, and you’llcrack that shell, no problem. There’s no rush, little duckie. You hatch when you’re good and ready. But when you do smash your way out, you’re gonna see something so amazing.”
I think he means this city all dressed up for Christmas.
His gaze slides in my direction. “Send me the video when it hatches?”
“Ifit hatches.”
He holds the egg between his thumb and finger the same as the day I met him. This morning, he studies the shell as if trying to see what is inside it. “You think it won’t?”
I sit up to face facts, my blankets slipping. “Maybe the mother could tell there was no point hanging around. That it wasn’t worth her time. That’s why she paddled away rather than sticking around to take care of it.” I tug open a porthole curtain. The glass is frosted. “I might not have kept it warm enough. I was busy the week before the show started.”
“You were already here?”
I nod. “Setting up. Someone has to stay on site overnight, but I was busy during the day ferrying boats between the yard and here.”
“Is it far away?”
“The yard? About an hour by water. That’s quicker than for some shows when we need to use a boat transporter. Still took me away for chunks of time. I set timers, but I don’t know if I did enough.”
“You did.”
He’s certain. I can see it. Calum being nakedly impervious to the cold should probably snag all my attention. I’m snagged instead by his conviction.
In me.
“No surprise there,” he tells me. “Because apples don’t fall far from the trees they grow on, do they?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that you had a role model who made sure you got taken care of after your—” Perhaps his brain only now catches up with his mouth. He stutters. “I-I don’t mean that your mum abandoned you like your egg.”
I can’t speak while he pieces together my past to reveal a different picture.
“Can’t have been easy.”
I croak. “For my grandparents, because they ended up having to raise another baby?”
He chews on a soft lip. “I was thinking it can’t have been easy for your dad to hand you over to them.” Calum’s focus is on the egg, big hands cradling it with so much care that something deep in my chest clenches. “Of course, that makes sense. Your dad... He was older than your mum?”
I nod.
“He didn’t have family left to step in and help him?”
“Not after the first year.” I scrub a hand through my hair, my fingers snagging on sleep-warm tangles. “I don’t remember.”
