Page 17

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

paige

Nate’s confession is a bomb to my thoughts, destroying any response I might’ve had as I sit here and stare at him, numbly.

Unable to comprehend what he just said.

Save for the aggressive drum of my pounding heart, there is no other noise in the room. Silence like I’ve never heard, the kind that sits in the untouched parts of the mountains, descends upon us. Even Snowball has stopped his exploration of the Christmas tree. The ornaments still. As if he, too, has been stunted by shock, sensing a change in the air.

Nate watches me with concentrated focus, leaving his words to sit between us. Letting me slowly digest them as the debris begins to settle—both of us holding our breaths, waiting to see the aftermath.

As a self-diagnosed chronic overthinker, I have spent many, many, many hours over the last two years trying to figure out what happened to make Nate walk away from me.

I was so in love with you, it was destroying me.

Those are not the kind of heartfelt declarations found in movies, not the words girls dream about hearing from their crush.

This sounds painful. It sounds awful.

“I don’t understand,” I tell him softly when words finally find me again, as pain lacerates my chest. Each short inhale I’m able to take feels like barbed wire tightening around my skin. Digging deeper and deeper with each breath.

I have run through and exhausted countless scenarios about what it could’ve been to make Nate leave. Everything from my intense dedication to our sport to having rancid body odor has circulated my list of possible causes.

But never in any of my thousands of scenarios did I think Nate left me because he loved me.

Not just in love. So in love, I was destroying him.

I suck in a sharp breath. “You just said we were so happy together. But that doesn’t sound like you were happy at all.”

Nate starts to reach for me, then stops. His outstretched hand hovering between us.

“Can I touch you?” he asks gently, slowly lowering his hand. Big, blue concerned eyes rove over my face. I don’t even know what my expression looks like right now, but it’s enough to make Nate want to comfort me. When I feel like I’m the one needing to comfort him. “I will explain, I promise, but will you let me hold you while I do?”

I should say no, he doesn’t get to say words like that and think he can hold me after. Not when I feel so raw. But the concentration in his face has faded to something so earnest, so poignant, I feel my gut clench at the sight. Like he’s a book finally ready to be opened.

I should say no.

But I don’t.

Mutely, I nod yes. Not caring about what I should do, choosing what I want instead, I crawl into Nate’s lap so we’re facing each other. Needing his touch, my legs hooked around his sides. His arms come around my back, as mine go to his neck. Both of us holding each other close. As if we’re enough to keep the other from crumbling.

I try to focus on the feel of his body against mine instead of my constricting chest. To know that whatever he’s going to tell me is in the past and that we’re okay.

Because I need us to be okay.

The longer I spend with him snowed in here, the more intimate we become, the more Nate Ford is starting to feel a lot less like my rival, and a lot more like someone I don’t want to leave this cabin without.

Someone I’ve missed more than I can put into words.

“I’ve never been happier with anyone in my life than when I’m with you.” His rough voice is soft as it fills the room.

Some of the pressure eases off my chest. Maybe this has all been my ears playing tricks on me and he hasn’t actually said— “But it’s also when I’ve been the most miserable.”

And the pressure is back. Coiling tighter around my entire body. “Because I was destroying you.” I can’t get the dark, ominous word that inflicts so much pain out of my head. Knowing I was the cause of such pain.

Why did I think being this close to him was a good idea? I start to pull away, but Nate tightens his arms around me, preventing my escape.

“You weren’t destroying me, Paige,” Nate refutes, emotion coating his words. “I was destroying myself.”

My brows pinch together, throat thick. Still not understanding.

“Do you remember that promise you asked of me? The one from six years ago?”

It seems like such a ways back to remember, but I know exactly what he’s talking about.

Promise not to fall in love with me.

I think I’m the only person with an attraction to men who could look at Nate and ask him that. Demand that. Need that.

All to protect myself.

It wasn’t just because of his devilish looks, more clean shaven and less tattooed back then but no less dangerous when it came to flashing me a smile. It was him. His presence alone stirred up enough butterflies in my stomach, I’m surprised I didn’t get carried away in the air.

From the first moment I met Nate, back when we were two kids who had no idea what they were about to go through together, he made my heart flutter in ways no other boy ever could. A flutter that only seemed to intensify over the years, building and building until I couldn’t take my attraction to him.

Couldn’t handle how I would go home and spend more and more time thinking about him, and the way he made me laugh or smile or just exist in a way that stole my focus away from figure skating. From all the routines I had to run through, either from videos or memory.

It didn’t matter. I never got to them.

Nate always stole my focus.

Distracting me from goals much bigger than my feelings.

So I had him sign a contact, with a stipulation about not dating your skating partner.

I made him promise not to fall in love with me.

Boundaries that served as reminders for me. To keep my focus in check.

I… I didn’t think it actually mattered to him.

Not looking away from his waiting stare, I slowly nod, that day flashing before my eyes. “You kept avoiding it,” I remember. “I had to keep pushing you to answer.”

“Because I knew I’d already be breaking my promise to you if I made it.”

I always honor my promises.

That’s what he said to me in bed.

“I thought,” Nate continues, “that I just had to wait two months. Until we were at the Games and won gold.”

Because that’s all I ever talked about. I couldn’t have anything else in my life outside of skating until I won gold. I was a fiend, hungry for that excellence. That pinnacle of achievement.

“But we didn’t win…” We were so confident we would.

While everyone around us was nervous, Nate and I were calm. Collected. Knowing that the two of us always made magic together on the ice. Nerves had no place between us.

But as flawless of a routine as we skated, we were always the people to beat and more than a few pairs had our number that day. And we came up short.

I’d never been so defeated in my life. Never felt a loss so much.

My singular, most important goal had just slipped through my fingers.

“We didn’t,” Nate confirms. “But I thought, well, I had already waited six years. I could wait another four.”

Something changed during those next four years. Not just with Nate.

But with me.

“You became a different person entirely after that,” Nate tells me, not unkindly. Rubbing his thumbs on the dimples of my back. Like a balm to soothe his words. “Skating had always been the most important thing in your life, but for the next four years, it felt like it became the only thing in your life.”

It was. The realization washes over me. I had always put it first, often sacrificing other important things to carve out more time to skate, but I didn’t care. I was on a path of redemption. My life became nothing but eat, sleep, and skate—severely neglecting the first two items of that routine.

It was destroying me.

I was destroying him.

I was destroying myself.

But before I can say anything, Nate continues, still rubbing circles on my back. My tense body waning under his touch. “It was intense, Paige, but nothing I couldn’t handle. If you were going to put yourself through hell, then so was I. And on the tougher days, I remembered the look on your face when we lost. Your pain was my pain, and I knew I’d do whatever it took to get you that gold.”

He gives me a small smile that doesn’t reach his heavy eyes. “Don’t get me wrong, I wanted that medal just as badly, but it had always meant something different for you. Had always been your biggest focus for so long. I just kept thinking, if we win, I could give you your life back. I could show you that there was more to life than skating.”

There’s a but to this story coming. My hands tighten around his neck, bracing for the blow.

“But those four years were so hard. My feelings for you, which were already pretty consuming, became so vehement I felt like I was drowning with no one around to throw me a life vest.” Nate’s face becomes ripe with emotions I’ve never seen, at least not to this degree.

So open and visceral and consuming.

A hammer clangs against my chest in response.

“Spending those long hours with you?” he continues, his touch the only thing keeping me grounded right now. Which feels ironic for what he says next. “Holding you close, feeling you pressed against me? Knowing I had pieces of you but not in all the ways I wanted? I always thought I was a strong man, but I wasn’t strong enough to ignore the way my love grew for you. How every day you claimed another piece of my heart I desperately tried to protect. It was the most torturous ecstasy I had ever tasted, to the point where I felt like I was becoming addicted. To you, to the pain. In ways I didn’t know how to survive.”

I feel like I’m suffocating, as memories I’d long since locked away resurface. The tender way Nate used to watch me, how sometimes I’d see a flicker of devastation when he thought I wasn’t looking. How sometimes he’d grimace when he got too close, pulling away like I was caught on fire.

I just thought he was tired. We were pushing ourselves so hard. I was pushing us even harder, to the point where Vytas tried to step in and get me to take a breather.

I didn’t know he was going through all this, felt all this.

“How could I not have known any of this? That you felt like this?” My voice feels lost, vacant as I grapple for something sturdy to hold on to.

I always thought I knew Nate better than myself, but now I’m questioning if I even knew him at all. If I ever paid close enough attention.

I try to swallow, but my throat has only gotten thicker with emotions I can’t decipher.

Nate’s touch becomes too much.

I can’t take it, scrambling off his lap like I’m caught on fire. Shooting to my feet, my hands run forcefully through my hair.

“How were you supposed to know if I didn’t tell you?” With no malice in his tone, Nate climbs to his feet as well. Watching me with concern as I pace in front of him.

“Because—” Because it’s love.

Love, the thing people write sonnets about and go to war for.

The thing people spend their whole lives looking and hoping and praying for.

The thing that inspires and creates and fills.

An emotion that feels so heavy and serious and unmistakable.

So how did I not see it?

Cole’s words fly back at me.

You’re so fucking selfish, Paige. Do you even see anything outside skating? How do you expect anyone to give a damn about you when you’re too wrapped up in your head?

“Paige?” Nate’s voice feels distant, like he’s on the other side of the mountain instead of right in front of me.

I struggle to draw a breath, my chest past the point of working.

“ Paige!”

I feel his thick, strong hands around my arms, keeping me upright before I see his face. Those wide, blue concerned eyes trained on me.

“Breathe,” he instructs softly.

Such an easy thing that feels so hard to do. But I try, one short inhale that gets longer each time. Pushing away the words of a man who has no business being in this conversation. Even if he might be right.

There is only one way to find out. Once my breathing has returned to a semi-normal pace, as normal as it can be in a situation like this, I focus back on Nate.

He’s still holding my arms, a pillar to draw strength from.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” It’s an answer I’m not sure I want to face, to have it challenge another thing inside myself. But for once, I don’t back away and hide. I don’t run. I’m choosing to face my problems head-on. To work through them, and not around. “After we won gold, why didn’t you tell me?”

“Would you have been receptive if I did?” Nate asks cautiously. “That if I told you I loved you then, it would’ve done anything other than rip us apart?”

At first, I get offended, welcoming the reprieve from other heightened emotions coursing through me. Of course I would’ve been receptive?—

Except I wouldn’t have been.

Out of all the human emotions, love has always scared me the most.

I’m an adult who bears the bruises of an abandoned childhood. Of knowing how sometimes love causes the greatest pains. Leaves the deepest scars.

Not to mention the fact that after winning gold, I was spiraling.

I had just achieved what I had set out to do my entire life and the elation from that accomplishment only lasted as long as it took our plane to touch back down in New York. Plighting me with an existential crisis I wasn’t prepared for.

A simple question that echoed in my head, consuming my every thought. What now?

It wasn’t a question I was ready to answer, wasn’t ready to face any changes to a life I had spent practically two decades crafting.

If Nate would’ve told me then, I would’ve crumbled. Would’ve tossed his declaration, his love aside because I wouldn’t have been ready to hear it. Wouldn’t have been ready for another change.

I force myself to draw a shaky breath. My pacing draws to a halt as I look at him, as his gaze tracks mine. Reflecting my turmoil back at me. “So you left.”

Nate flinches at my words, like I punched him instead, and I wonder if he can still hear the sound of my apartment door closing behind him as he walked out that day. If the sound still keeps him up late at night, like it does for me. A ghost haunting my apartment.

He takes a step toward me.

I retreat back.

I can’t have him touch me right now.

Nate’s Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. “I left.”

“Did it help?” I cross my arms around my waist, hugging myself. “Did putting distance between us help you?”

If it did, I’ll be thankful. The idea of Nate suffering because of me is too much to handle. Cutting me in places I didn’t even know existed.

“No.” Nate takes a step toward me. And this time, I don’t back away. “I’m so sorry I left you, Paige, but I didn’t know how else to stay. I’ve always put you before everything, and I thought maybe if I put myself first, get these feelings back under control, that maybe distance would temper them enough to where I could be around you even if I couldn’t have you.”

“But you stayed at Charmed.” If being around me was that bad for him, why did he stay? He could’ve gone anywhere. Clubs and organizations would’ve flocked to have him.

“What can I say? I’m a masochist.” He tries to smile as he shrugs but falls short. “Even though it hurt, I couldn’t stand to not see you every day, and I thought maybe from afar it would help. So I asked Stassi to be my partner.”

“I always wondered how you convinced her to skate without Ivan.”

After his back injury, everyone thought Stassi would retire with him. The pair had been inseparable their entire lives. I don’t think they ever skated with anyone else. So we were all shocked when she stayed on to skate with Nate.

I hated her for it a little, even though I tried so hard not to project what I felt for Nate onto her. But there were moments I slipped up over the years, much to my chagrin.

“She did it as a favor to me, for helping Ivan get his head out of his ass back when they were dancing around their feelings for each other.”

Because they are both normal, emotionally intelligent people who don’t run away from their feelings.

God, I wonder what Nate and I’s lives would have looked like if I was a more put-together human, with not as much trauma.

“Don’t do that,” Nate tells me.

“Don’t do what?”

“Don’t put us in their shoes.” Untangling my arms from around my waist, Nate grabs my hands and gives them both a squeeze. “We don’t have the same story. And that’s okay.”

“Is it? Because I don’t even know where we go from here. I don’t know what you want from me now. How you could still want me.” I try to tug my hands free, but Nate holds on. Not letting me escape. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I did that to you. I?—”

My throat gets clogged as tears prick my eyes, sliding down my cheeks.

Without a second thought, Nate’s pulling me into his chest, holding me as tight as our bodies will allow. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he repeats over and over. One of his hands slips into my hair while the other sneaks under the hoodie I’ve stolen from him.

Anchoring me to him.

“It’s not okay,” I protest, my words muffled against his shirt since he won’t let me pull away. “Why are you even consoling me? You should be making me feel like shit. Go on, I can take it.”

Nate laughs, the sound vibrating against my chest, even if it sounds a little sad. His fingers tighten in my hair, tipping my head back so I can look at him again. “Because I love you, Paige Montgomery. I’ve never stopped. And I’ll take every trial, every mistake, every stupid decision I made just to be here with you.”

More tears start to fall. Nate loves me. Not loved in the past tense. But still does.

“The question is”—his fingers tighten around my hair, like I’m about to slip away forever—“where do we go from here? Where do you want us to go from here?”