Page 16 of You, Again
I couldn’t speak for Vinnie, but I was too shocked to move.
We’d been here before.
Sure, it had been almost twenty years ago, but I was positive neither of us was looking for a repeat.Icertainly wasn’t. Any second now, he’d back up, swipe his hand across his mouth and make some ridiculous joke to right the balance. But he didn’t.
He softened his lips and molded them to mine, tilting his chin as if testing a new angle. And suddenly, this felt real.
Oh, no.
Oh…no.
I pushed out of his arms, sucking in a gulp of air.
Holy shit.
My heart beat like a drum, and my mouth was bone dry.
“I think—I think we’re good now,” I rasped.
Vinnie’s shell-shocked expression gave way to something unreadable. He scratched his nape and stepped aside.
“Yeah. Uh…what time is practice?”
“Thursday at three.”
He nodded and tried a smile that never reached his eyes. “Cool. See ya, Nol.”
I froze in place as the door swung shut behind him, willing my heartbeat to calm the fuck down.
Did that happen?
It wasn’t real. I knew that, but he didn’t pull away. He lingered, he pressed closer, he…he kissed me.
Reality check: Vinnie was a notorious prankster. He was always doing something to push boundaries—make you laugh, make you mad, make you stop taking life so damned seriously. Silly was his fallback language. If lighthearted pranks and teasing kept some uncomfortable parts of the past at bay, I was all for it.
But I was still confused. Very confused.
* * *
Teenagers were a notoriouslytough age group. Spiked testosterone levels often led to excess energy, rough play, bouts of misguided anger, and frustration. If you factored in school, friends, family, social media BS, and hormones, you were dealing with human powder kegs one spark away from blowing a fuse. And that was just on the ice.
“Pass the puck, Kinney,” I called out.
“I was open. You could have passed to me,” Jason Umboldt growled, holding his stick in the air as he skated the blue line.
“You weren’t open,” Kinney argued. “Max was all over you.”
“Like a flea. I could have shaken him off, no problem.”
“Hey!” Max snarled, charging forward.
I blew my whistle and raised my arms in a universal “Stop fucking around” gesture, prepared to dive between the two sixteen-year-olds. “Cool it. Let’s try it again and—”
“Yo, what did I miss, Coach?”
Ten awestruck teens spun in a comical one-eighty, their mouths agape as Vinnie Kiminski glided toward us, his signature cocky grin locked and loaded. My brain took an unwelcome inventory, noting that his black workout pants hugged his quads and his muscular chest tested the seams of his pullover. He was big all over…almost twice the size as when we were the same age as these kids—sixteen and seventeen.
I used to be as in awe of Vin then as they were now.