Page 21

21

Liam

T he 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 skating at 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 ride to 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 of Twilight . 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.

It always felt like I’d read more books than I actually did because of those car journeys.

“How have you already finished two books when we’ve only been back four days?” Other than outside the bakery when she was waiting for me, I hadn’t seen her reading once.

“Other than the first night, you have gone to sleep much earlier than me. I wasn’t joking when I said that I was more of a one a.m. bedtime kind of girl, so while you’ve been having fun communing with Morpheus from eleven p.m., I have been downstairs sipping a hot drink and getting lost in the pages of a book. Or two.”

I smiled at the Greek mythology reference. Where Lenny had books, I had Greek mythology. I’d downloaded so much information into her brain about the whole genre, she probably had just as much knowledge as I did. If not more because she retained information better than me, and once she knew something, she never forgot it.

“What have you been reading?” I asked. Her face lit up and she took a deep breath before launching into her spiel, her fingers lacing through mine still over her shoulder.

“Well, the first was a thriller that kept me up way later than I anticipated because I couldn’t stop reading, which I guess is what you want. It involved stolen identities and a mystery boss, and it ended up being the ultimate long con. I thought it was super obvious what all the plot points were going to be and the twists it was going to take, but it managed to keep me guessing. I was surprisingly happy with how it ended, and you know how much I resent endings sometimes.”

“You wonder why some people even bother with the rest of the book if they haven’t figured out how they are going to finish it properly,” I reeled off. It had been a recurring theme in our car discussions.

“Exactly. Anyway, the other one was a romance novel. Friends pretending to date to save a Christmas tree farm. It seemed suitably festive. I had no idea it was going to end up mirroring my life so closely when I decided to bring it home with me.”

I noticed that she was still calling Westchester home. She’d lived in Michigan for over a decade and yet, she was still calling this place home. I still called it home as well, but that was because I felt at home here more than I ever did in the places hockey took me. Yes, my parents were still here, but my bones just felt at peace in Westchester. Although now that I was thinking about it, I had felt a sense of calm wash over me the moment I heard Alana’s name called out for a coffee and found her at the airport. A calm I hadn’t felt since she left. A calm I didn’t even know I was missing until it came back to me.

“The verdict on that one?” I asked, rather than dwell on thoughts of home.

“It was great. I loved it. I think I might make it one of those books that I always re-read when this time of year comes around. It feels like a delicious hot chocolate, a blanket, and a fire on a cold winter’s day.” She sounded so at peace, surrounded by all these people skating.

“Sounds perfect.”

“It was. Speaking of sounding perfect, I’m hungry and if I remember correctly, this rink is stacked with food and drink trucks so we must be able to find something decent to eat. Let’s get off the ice now while you’re still on two feet, number seventeen.”

She extracted herself from my side, leaving a coldness in her wake before she slipped out of the masses and skated to the exit. I waited for a gap in the crowd and followed her.

“I know you don’t know what the hell you want to do with your life now that you’ve retired, but I think you’d be a good coach. I mean, I wasn’t a total newbie, and I didn’t need to be coached in the ways of ice hockey, but you did make the whole skating thing a lot easier. I felt safe. I think that’s a good trait to have, being a calming presence or something,” she said as I joined her off the ice.

I hadn’t considered coaching yet. It didn’t feel like that was where my skill set lay. That and I wasn’t the best loser. I had no idea if I’d be capable of picking a team back up after a loss. I typically needed to fester in the disappointment for forty-eight hours and ever since college, I needed to do that in solitude.

But Lenny was being completely sincere right now and I thought maybe she was on to something. I had no idea how to even start getting into coaching, but I felt like I could do anything with her believing in me.