Page 64 of Fake Skating

“What?”

I looked at him, propped up in the hospital bed wearing a blue gown and his glasses, and the tears were back because what the hell did that mean? I’d been pacing around the ER waiting room for hours, trying not to cry while worrying and missing him and regretting and overthinking, and now this?

“I thought you were just having shoulder surgery!” I said, aware my voice sounded perilously close to hysterical, but I couldn’t help it. My heart started racing and my body was instantly on fire as the best friend I’d ever had watched me react to his news. “Is there something else—”

“No— shit —relax,” he interrupted, his dark eyes moving all over my face. He looked stunned by my reaction, and then he said, “I was just kidding about the dying thing.”

“You were kidding about the dying thing ?” I said (yelled), smacking his forearm as I gritted my teeth and tried containing my anger.

“Hey, you can’t hit a patient—”

“You seriously think that’s funny? I have been literally falling apart since he made me break up with you and then my dad, my awful, terrible dad, calls tonight and tells me that you didn’t stop sending postcards but he threw them all away, so I never knew and thought you ghosted me, which means I kind of ghosted you, and just when I find all of this out, I see your body lying still on the ice like you are dead—how can you do this to me? How can you joke about this?”

I wished his collarbone weren’t broken because I needed to punch him square in the chest.

“What the fuck ?” he said under his breath.

Angrily.

I raised my eyes to his face and he said, “Who the hell made you break up with me?”

Oh.

Oh no.

Had I said that?

Out loud ?

“Dani.” He looked like hockey Alec as he waited for my answer, his intense eyes flashing as he demanded everything just by saying my name in that tone.

“Wait. No, no, no ,” I said quickly, shaking my head and fake smiling like it was all a funny misunderstanding. “It’s not—”

“Tell me what that means, Collins,” he said.

“Nothing—I, um,” I stammered helplessly. “It’s not—”

“Tell me,” he said through clenched teeth, his eye contact aggressively intense.

“You don’t understand, I have to—”

“ Tell me, for the love of—”

“Benji, okay?” I yelled, digging my hands in my hair, frustrated and scared and so damn tired. “He said he wouldn’t press charges if I broke up with you, but I need you to—”

“He did what ?” Alec yelled back.

“Listen,” I said, holding up a hand as I desperately tried to get him to hear me, to understand that he couldn’t go off about this. “I need you to be cool. You can’t freak out because—”

“You broke up with me because Ben Worthington told you to?” His eyes narrowed and he pinned me in place with his stare. “Are you saying you did it so I wouldn’t go to jail?”

“I mean, I highly doubt there would’ve been jail time—”

“Collins,” he snapped impatiently, his eyes all over my face.

“Yeah…?”

He tilted his head, paused for a long moment, and then said, “So if I’d never hit Benji, would you have ended things with me?”

No, never, not in a million years.

“Well, no,” I admitted, but quickly added, “But it did happen, Alec, and I agreed to—”

“Then we’re back together,” he said definitively, like he was making an official proclamation. “Starting now.”

“What?” He had to be out of his mind or missing the point of what I’d done. “No, we’re not. You can’t—”

“Yes, we are,” he said boldly, looking slightly less angry but just as intense.“Have your feelings for me changed?”

I swallowed, not wanting to answer that. “Alec—”

“Answer the question.”

I said, “It’s not that simple—”

“Answer the question, Collins,” he said. “ Have your feelings changed for me?”

“No,” I snapped, but then I took a deep breath and confessed, “Not one bit.”

His jaw flexed and he swallowed.

“Then this is that simple,” he said, his voice getting quiet. Quiet, yet the only thing I could hear in the world when he said, “We’ve made everything so fucking complicated since you moved back, but the simple truth is that all I’ve ever wanted is you—period.”

I shook my head, knowing I needed to dissuade him while at the same time wanting to lock those words in a box under my bed so I could reread them every night before falling asleep.

“I wanted you in fourth grade, when you launched me off that water pillow and broke two of my ribs,” he said, his eyes narrowed on me behind his glasses like he could still seeus at the lake.

“I wanted you in sixth grade, when I drove over your foot with my dad’s ATV.

I wanted you when Mr. Pockets got hit by a car and you cried as hard as I did, I wanted you when you kissed the shit out of me in the shed, and now, God help me, I want you when you shattered my fucking heart to keep me from ruining my own future. ”

My hands were shaking as he looked so unbelievably… serious .

Alec Barczewski was never serious.

Not like this.

“Better and worse don’t matter with us—they don’t—because it’s all fucking better with you. And what the hell is simpler than that?”

I sucked in a breath, feeling like I was drowning from how badly I wanted to give in, to just let go and fall into the magic of his words.

“But Benji could still—”

“Fuck Benji,” he interrupted, his eyes on me as his left hand reached under the bed rail and started moving around, his fingers searching for something. “Benji can’t touch us.”

“What are you doing?” I asked, watching his hand fumbling all over the rail panel. “Alec.”

“Trying to get this damn bed rail to go down,” he said. “I know there’s a button somewhere because I saw the nurse hit it.”

“What?” Maybe the painkillers they’d mentioned were kicking in. “You probably shouldn’t—”

“I’m confessing that I’ve loved you forever, and it doesn’t work for me to be confined to a bed and for you to just, like, stand there,” he said, “listening and looking at me like I’m crazy.”

I bit down on my lip because it was a terrible time to laugh, but suddenly—instantly—I was filled with so much happiness that it didn’t want to be contained.

I smacked his hand out of the way, pushing the release latch so the rail went down. “So what does work in this scenario?”

“Collins, you fucking goddess,” he said, his mouth sliding into that boyish grin I loved. “I was thinking something like this.”

I don’t know how he did it, but one unexpected hard tug on my shirt with his good hand and I fell forward, closer, half sprawled out on top of him.

“Alec!” I squealed, then got lost in uncontrollable cackling when he used his legs to somehow maneuver me fully onto the bed with him.

“Well, hey there,” he said, grinning as I pushed at my out-of-control hair and scrambled into a sitting position. “It feels good being back together, doesn’t it?”

“We aren’t back together,” I replied, giggling. “Not until I say we are.”

He swallowed and his tone went softer, deeper, when he said, “Then say it, Goldilocks.”

“Fine,” I replied, a thousand thoughts going through my mind, all of them happy. “We’re back together.”

“Okay, so listen, I’m gonna need your help,” he said, his dark eyes making my stomach weightless as they dropped down to my mouth. “I need to kiss you like… two days ago, but I can’t really move my upper body, so—”

“Enough said,” I managed, my heart fluttering as I leaned over him and leaned in, my eyes never leaving his.

But as soon as I got close, he reared up, his lips finding mine as if he couldn’t wait another second. He was hands-free, his mouth the only weapon at his disposal, but he didn’t need anything else, dear God .

I set my hands on his hard jawline, wanting grip because I was under attack.

“Danigirl,” he breathed against my lips, licking into me and stealing my breath, delivering white-hot, wide-open kisses that I felt everywhere.

The sound of his unsteady breath made my chest burn, and when my fingers found their way to his thick, hockey-mussed hair, I dug in and tugged because what else could I even do?

He grunted—in such a good way—and nipped my bottom lip, sending shocks through my entire body—

“The doctor is in the building so it’s time to take you— ahem ,” I heard, and when I jerked back from Alec and turned around, nearly falling off the bed, a nurse was walking into the room.

With Alec’s parents beside him.

And my mom.

And my grandpa.

I could die.

“Busted,” Alec muttered, and I could hear the smirk in his voice, but I wasn’t about to look at him as I jumped off that bed.

“Who lowered the bed rail here?” the nurse asked, his eyes narrowed.

“She did, Dan,” Alec said, pointing at me and making my mom—and his parents—grin.

And he was full-on smiling, beaming like a happy toddler.

The shit.

“Young lady, he’s got pain medication in his IV, so he’s a fall risk,” the nurse said with a scowl, but he also looked like he was messing with me. “These rails need to be up.”

“Yes, but,” I said, noticing on his badge that his name was actually Dan, “he told me to do it.”

“I’m impaired, though,” Alec said, slowly shaking his head like I was the problem. “On account of the aforementioned pain medication.”

“You’re suddenly a smug little shit, aren’t ya, Charleston Chew?” Grandpa Mick said.

“Charleston Chew,” I repeated with a snort, falling into unstoppable giggles at the smart-ass nickname.

“No,” Alec said, pointing at me.

“If you two are done canoodling,” Dan said, “we’re gonna go get your bones put back together.”

Alec mouthed canoodling to me with that irrepressible Alec Barczewski smile on his face, and I totally lost it.

“You good now, kid?” Grandpa Mick asked me after they wheeled Alec down to pre-op, tugging on one of the many hairs that’d fallen in my face over the course of the stressful hospital visit.

Was I good? “Good” didn’t begin to describe it.

Because on top of everything else, just before they whisked him out of the room, I was able to quickly blurt to Alec what I’d learned from my dad about the postcards.

“So I never stopped writing to you, and I’m so sorry I wasn’t there when you needed me,” I finished in a rush as everyone in the room waited for me to shut up so they could get my boyfriend to surgery.

I expected Alec to look pissed or shocked, because I was still very both of those things when I thought of what my father had done, but he shrugged .

Alec shrugged—with the most adorably sleepy smile—and said, “Looks like we’ve got a lot to catch up on when I wake up, honey.”

So back to the question. Was I good?

I nodded, wondering how it was possible to be this happy. “Never been better, Grandpa.”