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“He fought tooth and nail to get to the top of the guide dog list to get Charm and even used some of his inheritance from his nonna to pay for her,” Artie continued, picking at the zipper of the athletic jacket he was wearing.
Nibbling on my lower lip, I finally voiced what I’d been thinking since meeting Artie and seeing the dynamics their pack had. “Enzo can’t roll you up in bubble wrap and keep you inside forever—that’s no life to live.”
It made me claustrophobic just to think about it, but then again, my own habit was to run away when the walls felt like they were closing in on me.
“Don’t I know it.” Artie’s chuckle was dry as he shook himself and straightened. “So, now that I’ve told you something deep about me, it’s your turn.”
There were so many things I wanted to do other than tell him something more intimate about myself. Then I remembered the whole point of this exercise—the reason why Eli had kicked us off of the ice for the day—was to build the relationship between Artie and me.
Paired skating took trust. A fact that I had neglected to think about when I brought it up that day when Enzo dragged me into their apartment.
And trust was… definitely not one of my strong suits.
Why does it matter? A voice whispered in my mind. Just give him something surface level, just like you’ve been doing.
I opened my mouth to tell him a silly story about my adolescence in Minnesota—when everything got marginally better for me—but instead of that I blurted: “My da was a drunk and my mam left me with him for six months and when she did come back for me she died in a car accident.”
The words tumbled out of me in a confused jumble, blending together into almost one long word as I sucked in a deep, steadying breath once I’d finally gotten them all out.
Then they were immediately followed with: “Don’t tell Leith or Enzo about that.”
I couldn’t look at him. My face burned at the admission—one that I rarely ever told anyone outside of the members of my family.
Silence hung in between us, long and heavy, until I felt him slip his hand in mine.
We’d held hands often since starting our paired skate practice, but that always felt perfunctory—almost clinical in nature as we moved through the motions of the choreography.
But now the places where our fingers touched warmed inexplicably. Comfort radiated off of the omega as we sat together, the silence not so awful anymore as I eventually gathered enough courage to finally look over at him.
Artie’s eyes were already on me and I found them to be soft. I always worried that if I told people about my past that they would look at me with pity in their eyes.
All of the doctors and nurses had when I woke up in the hospital after the accident and it was the way that all of the adults in the incredibly small town in Minnesota that the dads brought me to looked at me as well.
But Artie’s smile, while empathetic, held no note of that teeth-gnashing, skin-grating, awful stare that grown adults used to give me when they learned about how my mam had died.
“You never told Leith about it? In the three months you were together?” he asked, giving my fingers a gentle, encouraging squeeze.
“How much of that has he told you about?”
Because I had told Leith about it—at least the annotated version of it.
It was a bit hard not to when there had been a handful of nights when I woke up screaming. Instead of riding through the aftershocks of the nightmare on my own, he’d caressed and cuddled me, whispering sweet nothings while I babbled incoherently about the accident and how alone I felt.
Artie shrugged, and as if sensing the shift in my mood, he scooted in closer until our legs pressed against one another, thigh-to-thigh, knee-to-knee, and calf-to-calf.
I’d been soothed by an omega before—by Aurelia more times than I could count. She’d been the one, after all, that had cradled me close at night and kept the nightmares at bay when I was little. Aurelia was an older sister and a second mother all wrapped up in one. No one in our family would have survived without her after the accident, and no one had to grow up as fast as she had.
Her touches had always been soft and maternal, making me feel drowsy as if I was about to fall asleep.
But this felt different. The combination of his closeness and the tart of his citrus scent made each one of my tense limbs practically melt at his touch as he answered my question. “Just the basics. Whatever we could pull out of him. The man was a mess for the first couple of months after we met.”
Guilt coiled low in my belly, but Artie’s words weren’t an accusation, but a fact. I had hurt Leith four years ago, if not by leaving him asleep in my hotel room with just a note, then by not being honest about my panic over the feelings I felt for him.
“I don’t talk about my Mam much and I talk about my Da even less. Sometimes I wish I could forget everything about that time and just start when Maxim and Alexei Peterson brought me to Minnesota to live with them,” I told him honestly, thinking of Brynn’s head injury that had stolen parts of her memory for almost a year. “Sorry, that’s probably more than you want to hear from me…”
After my hasty apology, Artie was quiet for a moment and I watched his nose scrunch with what I was now recognizing as indecision before he spoke again. “Sometimes I wish that my eyesight would just hurry up and go away.”
Sucking in a lungful of his scent, I found it to be tinged with a sour note, like the smell of unripened oranges pulled off the tree too soon. “Why?”
