Page 35

35

Alana

I had the keys in my hand and the high school ice rink literally had my surname on it, but as I turned on the lights, I still felt like we were doing something that we shouldn’t.

“Fuck,” Liam whispered from behind me.

“What?” I turned to look at him as he looked around the empty rink that used to be his third home.

“Just really weird being back where it all started.”

“Yeah? Bringing back all the good, the bad, and the ugly memories?”

“Something like that. Where exactly did you get these skates from?” He tugged at the pair draped over his right shoulder, his were over his left.

“When I asked if we could use the rink, Dad remembered that he saw them in the garage not too long ago and gave them the all-clear to skate on.” I slid them off his shoulder, sat down on a nearby bench and started unzipping my boots to put them on. Liam knelt in front of me and took over.

“Thank you for this. For today. And for the last week or so,” he said quietly as he loosened the laces on the skates .

“All I did was agree to be your fake girlfriend so your parents could change the broken record. Oh, does your dad know you’re here?” I don’t why I was bringing him up, but it seemed like the kind of thing he would have an opinion on, and I wanted to be prepared, just in case I had to fight him on this issue at all.

“You didn’t have to agree to anything. I’m not questioning a good thing too much because calling you my girlfriend is the best way to round out my year, but you definitely didn’t have to agree to anything. And no, I haven’t spoken to him today.” He carefully lifted one of my feet and put one of my skates on.

“I’m sorry that I didn’t give you the chance to round out your year in the best possible way years ago.”

Liam paused and looked up at me, his green-blue eyes wide.

“I know you are,” he said simply, before resuming putting my skates on.

“Not one bit of you is annoyed at me for denying us the last twelve years? I’m just forgiven?”

He looked up at me again. “I forgave you years ago. No, I didn’t like it, but I forgave you for it by the time I was drafted for the NHL. Things happen for a reason, you know? This week has shown me that we both lived the lives we were supposed to live, and we came back to each other when the timing was right. There is no guarantee we would have made it long-term back then. I might not have been drafted when I was and for who I was. You might not have found the best place to open a business. I might have wanted to move teams more while you were looking to make roots in a city, and that could have added tension .

“There are a thousand different ways that our relationship could have fallen apart because we didn’t know who we were or what we wanted. We were also incapable of really communicating with one another because we were kids. Maybe the fact that we were eighteen and didn’t quite know how to cope with the big feelings, which led to us avoiding them, was a blessing. The last twelve years have been good. They’ve made us who we are and now we can move forward together, knowing we’re capable of the big stuff.” He looked back down and moved to my second skate.

“I hadn’t thought of it like that, actually. I’ve spent a lot of this week thinking I could have spent the last twelve years feeling like I was flying and I’m an idiot for denying us that.”

He secured my skate and then tapped them twice as he looked back at me with a loose grin on his face. “I make you feel like you can fly?”

“Yeah, sometimes you do. But you’re right, it’s only because we lived our lives and made our choices that this feels so right now. Like maybe this could be a forever thing.”

I stood up and made my way to the ice, stopping just before I put my blade down to look down at Liam.

“You wanna break in this ice first?” His eyes dragged up from my skates to my eyes, his gaze was darker now.

“Nah, babe, it’s all yours.”

“It does it for you, doesn’t it?” I teased.

“What, seeing you on the ice? Yeah, it’s hot.”

My eyes flicked down to his crotch; the line of his erection was visible against his sweatpants.

“I might make every day game day,” I said before I slid onto the ice.

I was starting to find Liam’s erection distracting. How he was skating with it, I didn’t know, but he wasn’t showing any signs of slowing down, so I wasn’t going to suggest we call it a day just yet. We still had half an hour before Dad was coming by to clean the ice.

I, however, was exhausted, so I was sitting on the edge of the rink, reading while Liam sped around the ice when my screen went black and then Kai’s face popped up.

Kai hadn’t been in touch enough since we broke up for me to bother blocking his number, so I hadn’t. But I had forgotten that it was still in my contacts list. Out of sheer curiosity, I answered.

“Hey,” I said, injecting my voice with fake cheer. Kai’s eyebrows were drawn together in a way that told me he was annoyed. It wasn’t too dissimilar to how he looked when he realised I wasn’t saying yes to his proposal.

“Hey yourself. How are you?”

The formalities felt forced, and it made me itch.

“Eating, drinking, and baking. Losing at board games, you? How’s Aspen?”

“It’s beautiful. Hey, so a bit of a random question, but do you know Liam Mulligan?”

The itchy feeling morphed into something else. Liam skidded to a dead stop opposite me at the sound of his name .

“Uhhh, yeah I do, why?”

“I think it’s interesting that you personally know one of my favourite sportspeople and failed to mention it in the eight years we were together,” he said angrily.

I took a deep breath. “Well, we weren’t exactly friends while you and I were together. So, I don’t know why I would have brought it up.”

“How long have you known him?” he snapped.

“We were friends throughout our childhood, but I went to Michigan, and he went to Harvard, and we stopped speaking until recently.”

“Right about the time you broke up with me. Are you doing this to spite me?”

That caught me off guard and I physically recoiled at the suggestion. “Am I doing what to spite you?”

“Dating my favourite hockey player.”

“Did you not say he went down in your estimations when he retired earlier this year?” Liam was now next to me, close enough that I could feel his body heat, but far enough that not even his shadow was on my screen.

“I said that in the heat of the moment when the announcement came. The team could actually do with him this season. I forgot how key he was to some plays and Teddy could do with the support.”

“Sure, if you say so.”

I heard Liam try to stifle his laughter at just how little I knew about his former team. Why would I? Any update I received about them came mostly because someone wanted to tell me how Liam was doing. If he wasn’t on the ice anymore, what use were those updates to me?

“Do you even like hockey? How can you be with a man like that when you don’t like hockey?”

“The same way I can have a father who’s a hockey coach and not like it. It’s not their entire lives so they know how to talk about other things. Besides, Liam’s always known I’m indifferent to the sport, so it’s not a problem.”

Kai flinched at the mention of just how long I had known Liam. “How did you even reconnect with him?”

“We bumped into each other at the airport.”

“And you’re already all over each other?” The distaste was thick in his tone. I hadn’t looked up the pictures of us that had ended up online, but I was pretty sure that none of them would display that much, if any, of us being all over each other. There would be hand-holding at most.

“He’s not a stranger. We were friends for fourteen years and it picked up where we left off. Whatever narrative you have concocted in your head isn’t true.”

“It all seems very convenient,” he spat. Liam scoffed and when I turned to look at him, I could see how annoyed he was.

“Kai, I wasn’t holding out on you. We didn’t talk for years and now we do. That’s it. I’m sorry that you couldn’t use me to get a meeting with the Golden Boy, but it was physically impossible until about a week ago, and you and I are no longer in contact with one another.” Or at least we weren’t until this call.

“Seems like you’re doing a lot more than talking,” he sneered. A noise that sounded an awful lot like a growl came from the man standing next to me .

“Yeah, we’re dating. Now, do you need anything else or did you just call to express your annoyance about who my boyfriend is?”

“Boyfriend? That quick?” Now he looked horrified. It took him nearly six months before he started calling me his girlfriend.

“So that’s a no on needing anything else then? Well, this has been fun Kai, but Muller might pop a blood vessel if he has to listen to anything else, and I’d rather he didn’t go out on the ice, no matter how much other people wanted him to.”

Liam skated so he was in front of me, but behind my phone, his hands cupping my calves before they ran up to my thighs. His thumbs settled in the crease of my hips, and I felt a low pulse in my core. He smirked at me, and with my free hand, I cupped his erection, knocking the smirk right off his face.

“His nickname is Gunner,” Kai said. I’d forgotten he was still on the phone.

“To hockey people, yeah sure. But he’s Muller to me.”

Something hit me then. He wasn’t always called Gunner. His first ever hockey team when we were in elementary school called him Muller and I’d told him that it was dumb and would never catch on. Until one day in our freshman year of high school, I had used it as a joke and realised it wasn’t quite as dumb as I’d previously thought, so I started using it full-time.

And the hockey team called him Gunner from then onwards.

“Look, Kai, not that this conversation hasn’t been thrilling, but I’m gonna go because I have Liam Mulligan on an ice rink and that is much more interesting than this.” I hung up before he could respond and then clicked on his contact and blocked the number .

“He seems nice,” Liam said, his thumbs sweeping up and down my hip crease.

“You can park the sarcasm. He was a good boyfriend. I guess his ego is feeling a little bruised because I went from him to his favourite hockey player. Hey, how come everyone stopped calling you Muller?” I asked.

“How come you always tell people that your name is Alana when they try giving you a nickname? Or when they follow my lead and try to call you Lenny?” he countered.

“Because my name is Alana.” And I hated nicknames. My name wasn’t that long to say in full.

“Don’t know if you’ve noticed Len, but I hardly call you that.”

Of course I’d noticed. I hadn’t been called Lenny for over a decade and I would have told anyone who would listen that I didn’t miss it. But I did. Because it was his name for me.

Liam paused the movement of his thumbs. “It’s yours,” he started. “The first time you called me Muller, I knew I would never let anyone else use it again. I made up some story about how I felt like it was messing up my game and well, you know how us sportspeople are.”

“Superstitious little fucks,” I huffed. “Well, same here. My name is Alana unless you happen to be my brother. Or you,” I finished quietly. He pressed a kiss to my forehead and the movement shifted his cock harder into the hand I still had hovering over the area. “It’s cold in here, how are you still this hard? You didn’t play like this, did you?”

“No, it calmed itself down and the cup did a lot of the work. This right here is all your fault. Your ass in these leggings when you’re skating is the best visual. I didn’t get to fully appreciate it the other day.” His hands moved around to cup the top of my ass.

“We should get out of here. You good to go?” I squeezed my hand around him once more for good measure, and he groaned in my ear.

“Yeah, let’s go home.”