Page 24 of Sexting the Coach (Pucking Daddies #6)

Elsie

Weston is quiet as we sit side-by-side, pulling down the laces on our skates. I’m wearing the smallest pair of hockey skates they had, which feel clunky and altogether too-much compared to the figure skate construction I’m used to.

Nausea is still rolling through me. It rose up in my throat the moment I started retelling that story, and it hasn’t gone away yet, constantly pushing.

I swallow it down again and again. In the months following the accident, I would get sick any time I thought about it, but after a while, I was more in control.

Now, I feel some of that control slipping away again.

I can smell Weston’s cologne. Feel his body heat next to me. Sitting here with him reminds me of countless practice sessions at the rink. When I was a kid, my dad would bring Drew and I to the one nearest our place in Denver.

Secretly, I think he always hoped I would be into hockey, too. But the first time I saw a figure skater out on the ice, I knew that I wanted to focus on the delicate sides of the sport. I wasn’t interested in the blood and fighting, in the gruff positioning and explosive nature.

But Drew was. And until the accident, that was enough to keep Dad happy.

“Can I ask you something?”

Weston pauses in pulling off his skate, turns to look at me. “Apparently.”

For a second, I think about pulling it back, resisting the urge to ask. But this question has been swimming in my head from the first moment I learned about it, and I have to know the answer.

“Are you still in love with Leda?”

The laugh that barks out of him is so sharp and fast it almost makes me jump. After a second, when he realizes I’m not laughing, he sobers, raising his eyebrows at me.

“Oh,” he says, straightening up. “You’re serious.”

The flush that rushes over my cheeks is seriously hot, so I even feel it against the backs of my eyes. Of course, he’s still in love with Leda—she’s a gorgeous and successful movie star. Who wouldn’t still be pining after a woman like that? She—

“No,” Weston says, shaking his head. “If I’m honest, I’m not sure I was ever really in love with her to start with. I was young, and she was—well, out of my league, to say the least.”

“Oh, please. You’re a famous athlete.”

“I am—I was—in the NHL. Not exactly the same as being Tom Brady or LeBron James.”

I don’t want to argue with him about the tenants of his fame. “Why do you think you were never in love with her?”

He looks at me for a long moment, swallows, then shrugs and turns back to his skates, working on his right foot laces. “Guess I’m older and wiser now.”

Weston shifts to take his other skate off, and when his skin brushes mine, it sends a scattering of heat over me. I nod and turn back to my skates, turning all this over and over in my head.

He’s not still in love with Leda. That information hums through my veins, along with the way he looked at me just now. Was I imagining the weight of his gaze? It doesn’t help that I’m still feeling high and a little queasy from the conversation on the ice.

I told Weston about what happened with my brother.

Now, Weston is the only person—outside of my family and roommates—who knows about it. When he looks at me, it will be with the full weight of who I am. What I’ve done. The future I ruined.

And as much as I expected him to be disgusted with me, just like my parents—mostly my father—were, he’s not.

When Weston listened to me tell him about what happened, I didn’t hear any of the disdain I expected.

I thought, as a hockey player, he would understand the distinct horror of losing a career to an accident like that.

Of what it must have been like for my brother, for my parents. The loss they went through.

At least a small part of me was sure that Weston would take Drew’s side. My family’s side. That Weston would start to think a little less of me, and that I would feel it every time his gaze landed on me after.

It’s part of the reason I waited so long to say anything about my brother. Part of the reason I never talk about it, and why I ignore the mail from Drew, and why I almost never see my parents. Why it was surprising to me that they were at that gala.

I thought Weston might hate me, too.

But he didn’t.

It’s not stupid. The way you feel is never stupid.

His words roll through me, and I feel their warmth all the way down my legs, fighting against the cool air rushing in off the ice.

Obviously, Mabel and Hattie have tried to tell me that I went through something traumatic, too.

That I’m allowed to feel it and mourn. Allowed to cry when I remember the moment my skate hit Drew’s leg.

The sound of his cries, his pain. And the cold, furious look on my father’s face when he loaded up into the ambulance with Drew.

But I pushed that away. Figured ignoring that pain was just a part of the penance I needed to pay.

Just like Weston’s been ignoring his pain.

“We’re both kind of messed up, aren’t we?” I don’t realize I’m saying it until it’s out of my mouth, and Weston is turning to me, his mouth open in an amused shock. Apparently, I’m full of ridiculous conversation starters tonight.

When I turn to face him, it hits me again. He’s so handsome. It was true the first time I saw him, and it only becomes truer the more I get to know him. Every time I’m treated to a new expression from him, it makes my brain fizz up with happiness, like I’m unlocking him one piece at a time.

His strong jaw, messy hair. The ever-present backward hat on his head. How heavy those blue eyes are when they catch mine.

“…yeah,” he finally chuckles, looking away from me, shaking his head. “I guess we are. Makes sense though.”

“What does?”

“I mean,” he clears his throat, glances at me, shrugs. “We get along. If things were different, it might be nice to have this thing for real.”

He immediately stiffens, like it’s something he didn’t mean to say.

My mouth goes dry, my heart thudding far too hard in my chest. Before the nausea was only simmering inside me, but now it’s full force again, sticky and climbing right up my trachea like boiling tar.

If things were different. If I was born twenty years earlier, or him twenty years later. If I didn’t work PT for this team. If our entire relationship wasn’t just a ruse to keep HR off his back, to keep Karlee from suspecting him of foul play.

If things were different, Weston would want me. Would want this.

“Elsie?” he asks, and I realize I’ve gone completely quiet, practically catatonic.

I swallow and look up at him, knowing I should say something.

There’s a subtle panic on his face, and I want to soothe it away from him, but I don’t know what to say.

And I hate the feeling I get that he’s about to take back what he just said.

Call it a mistake, just like what he said after the first time we were together. “I—”

But I’m saved from this moment by another voice cutting through the space, echoing against the swaths of empty bleachers and the wide-open ice in front of us.

“Hey!”

We both startle, turning to look at the man who’s marched down to the stairs and to the ice, looking disgruntled. He’s wearing a jacket that reads SVY Security Systems, his mustache a perfect frown. When he talks, it moves, almost like a cartoon character.

“Hey, man,” Weston says, taking a small step so he’s between me and the security man. “What’s up?”

“You the ones stuck in here?” the guy asks, gesturing up toward the doors. “We got them open. GM says to get you out pronto—they’re going to lock up again when the system goes through its reboot.”

“Oh, right,” Weston says, and together, he and I walk to his car. There’s a weird silence between us, but I can’t think about anything other than the fact that I could throw up at any moment.

When we pull up outside my apartment, I’m a little stunned and silently grateful.

We should talk—that’s obvious, based on the weird feeling in the air right now.

But I’m worried that if I stick around and try to have a conversation with him about this—about us—I’m going to throw up in the interior of his very nice sports car.

So, I open the door and stand up, swinging my legs out and relishing the cool night air as it hits my face. Before I shut the door, Weston leans forward, tipping his head up to catch my gaze.

“Elsie, wait,” he says, “I’ll walk you—”

But I can’t be around him right now. I can already feel the blood draining from my face, the saliva pooling in the back of my mouth. Everything feels tingly and light.

“Sorry, Weston,” I whisper, before I slam the door and turn, running through the lobby. The doorman waves to me, his brow wrinkling as I sprint past, trying to give him a quick wave back but mostly focused on keeping everything in until I get to our floor.

The elevator takes forever, but, thankfully, doesn’t stall. When it opens, I run to the front door, practically fainting with relief when Mabel throws it open.

“Where the hell have you been?” she asks, but I blow past her, running inside, heading for the bathroom.

“Elsie?” Hattie asks, running to the door. I catch a glimpse of her bunny slippers as I drop to my knees in front of the toilet. “What’s going on? Is everything okay?”

I open my mouth, but words don’t come out. Instead, I just lean forward, heaving and throwing up, hard, into the bowl.

Hattie and Mabel are there in a second, holding my hair, rubbing my back, telling me everything is going to be okay. But I know them well enough to know that even as they’re saying that to me, they’re definitely giving each other oh, shit looks where I can’t see them.

And oh, shit is right.