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Chandler had been hoping for more, but when Belle yawned and stretched instead, she figured she wasn’t going to get it.
“Hey, can I maybe skate with you this morning? If you need the ice to yourself, I don’t–”
“Of course, you can,” Belle interrupted. “If we leave now, and I check on my dad real quick, we can have at least an hour out there before anyone else shows up.”
“Yeah? Want to run through our free program?”
“Which one? The one Cat had us running or the good one we came up with?” Belle teased and got out of bed.
Chandler chuckled and asked, “Where does your coffee live?”
“At the Ice Park.”
“You don’t have any here?”
“I do, but I don’t have any milk here. And your ratio is, like, seventy-five percent milk and twenty-five percent coffee, so…”
“You’re making me coffee when we get there. And it’s more like eighty-twenty, but the other way around.”
“Sure, it is,” Belle replied. “I’m going to brush my teeth. Do you need me to take you to your hotel and meet me at the Ice Park for our skate?”
“Yeah, I need clothes.”
“Okay. Give me five, and we’ll head out.”
It wasn’t exactly what Chandler had been hoping for. They hadn’t had a conversation about them waking up in the same bed, with Chandler’s hands on Belle’s body and Belle’s on hers, but it wasn’t awkward, and that meant something. Belle’s truck was old but reliable, according to Belle. Chandler didn’t mind that she wasn’t sitting in a luxury SUV, but Belle seemed to feel a little embarrassed by the fact that her car didn’t have GPS or Bluetooth. Chandler told her that she didn’t care and hoped Belle would believe her.
When they got to Chandler’s hotel, Belle dropped her off, and Chandler hurried up to her room, wanting to shower and change as quickly as she could because she wanted to have as much time to skate with Belle as possible. She got to the rink and found Belle already on the ice, so she quickly changed into her skates and joined her.
“Want to start our morning with a race where I kick your ass?” Belle joked.
“No,” she replied. “What if we start by working on that dance sequence in the middle? We got it right, but I still think there’s some improvements between the–”
“What the absolute fuck are you doing here?”
Chandler turned to see her sister standing by the bleachers with her hands on her hips.
“Cat?” she asked.
“Yes. What are you doing here, Chandler?”
“What are you doing here?” she asked back and skated over but kept a nice distance between herself and her sister.
“I took a red-eye to get here because Mom was worried.”
“What? Why was Mom worried?”
“Because she called your trainer, who said you gave him time off, and your nutritionist to check in on you, and he said you left and didn’t tell him when you’d be coming back. She’d called me already, but I had told her that you’d asked for a break. Then, we had fought because you skated with Belle and not solo, so I was still on my break. She called me again, though, and told me she wasn’t sure what they were paying for if you weren’t going to take your career seriously. I went to the apartment, thinking you might be there with Belle, since you’re obsessed with her, obviously, but you weren’t. Her shit was gone, too, and Antonia said you told her you were coming here last night, so here I am, tracking you down and telling you to get your ass home so we can bring Justin there and get you back on track to make the damn team, like I’m running after a toddler and not my almost twenty-seven-year-old sister.”
“Cat, it’s early. Do you maybe want to not yell at us?” Belle asked.
“This is between me and my sister. You are no longer employed by my family, so you can fuck off.”
“Cat!”
Belle skated over to Chandler’s side and said, “Maybe I should go.”
“No, you shouldn’t. Cat should.”
