Page 105 of Shut Up and Jingle Me
My heart drops out of my ass, and my stomach dips.
He doesn’t say anything—just watches me, chest rising and falling in sharp, visible breaths. The distance between us is maybe a hundred feet, but it feels like miles.
Every unread message, every night I didn’t answer, every excuse I made about “protecting him”—they all hit at once. I want to tell him I’m sorry. That silence wasn’t mercy; it was cowardice.
But my mouth won’t work.
I just stand there at the edge of the boards, hands buried in my pockets to keep them from shaking, while the rink hums with quiet and the world folds down to this—him on the ice, me on solid ground, and everything I broke still hanging in the cold air between us.
“Eli,” I manage. The sound of his name feels foreign in my mouth after a week of silence.
He doesn’t answer. Just slows near the boards, his skates whispering against the ice. The overhead lights catch the faint rise of steam from his breath, and for a second, it looks like he’s trying to decide whether to come closer or skate in the other direction.
I want to make it easy for him, to bridge the space between us, but my legs won’t move.
“I wasn’t—” I start, then stop. The words fracture in my throat. “I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”
He looks up at that, eyes tired in a way they weren’t before. That spark that always lived there—bright and relentless—is gone. All that’s left is quiet exhaustion.
“I know,” he says finally, voice low. It’s not forgiveness. It’s just a fact. An acknowledgement that he’s aware that wasn’t my intent, even if that’s the result.
“I thought if I left, it would… make things easier,” I say, each word landing heavier than the last. “For you. For your season. For everything?—”
Eli’s laugh is small and humorless. “Easier for who?”
I swallow hard. “I told myself it was for both of us.”
He shakes his head, the motion slight but enough. “You don’t get to decide what’s easier for me.”
“I just—” I drag a hand down my face, trying to steady my voice. “Coach said there’ll be a meeting this afternoon. He’s not letting me quit.”
Eli’s jaw tightens, but he doesn’t look surprised. “You tried to quit?”
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “And he said that you tried the same thing.”
He exhales through his nose, eyes still on the ice. “Didn’t work, obviously.”
Something in my chest twists, sharp and deep. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
He glances up, the faintest spark in his eyes. “You think you’re the only one who gets to protect someone? All of this is my fault, Max. If I didn’t?—”
His words cut off, hanging there in the cold air between us, unfinished but heavy enough to hurt anyway.
I shake my head. “Don’t,” I say. “Don’t finish that sentence.”
He blinks, startled, like he wasn’t expecting me to interrupt. “Why not? It’s the truth.”
“It’s not,” I tell him. My voice cracks on the last word. “You didn’t make me do anything I didn’t already want to do. You think I kissed you because you’re reckless or because you pushed? I kissed you because I?—”
I stop. The rest of it burns in my throat.Because I love you. Because I haven’t stopped since that weekend in the storm. Because you’re the only thing that’s felt right in a long damn time.
Eli looks at me like he’s waiting for me to say it, but I can’t. Not when I already said it once and walked away anyway.
He drops his gaze again, tracing the toe of his skate along a crack in the ice. “Doesn’t matter now,” he murmurs. “Coach will do whatever he has to. Probably suspension. Maybe worse.”
The thought of him losing everything because of me makes something ugly twist in my chest, even more than me losing everything. Funny how my view on that has changed over this week. “I won’t let him,” I say before I can stop myself.
Eli lets out another quiet, humorless laugh, and I hate the sound of it. “You don’t get to control that either.”
