Her eyebrows drew together with confusion. “Let’s not what?”
“Break up.” I knelt down to her and cupped my face with her hands.
“We have no other choice.” The tips of her fingers tapped against my skin. “Your coach will bench you. Erik will leave me. The New York Rangers are probably thinking about drafting you already, and you haven’t even entered the draft yet. And with a little more training, I could make it past nationals again after three years of not even making it past qualifiers. And I’m pretty sure Juilliard will kick me outbecause I’m too distracted. We can’t risk our dreams for a relationship.”
“Let them kick you out. You hate that school,” I said, my voice thick with anger. “Juilliard’s killing you. You’re not even interested in ballet anymore, and you don’t plan on making it your profession. Why stay?”
“It’s an elite school. Do you know how di?—”
“Yes, I know how difficult it is to get accepted. But you’ve also been accepted to Harvard, Columbia,andPrinceton, Brooke. Juilliard is only beneficial if you want to make dancing your full-time job, which you don’t.” My hands slid down to her wrists, holding them. “Transfer to a different college,mi princesa. Not for me, but for yourself. You can go to NYU, and major in dance or fine arts or something like that. Or you can transfer to St. Trewery. It’ll be so much less stressful for you. You won’t have to work out fifteen hours a day anymore, plus somehow attend classes and find time to sleep.”
Brooke pulled her hands away from my face, from my grasp, and rested them on her lap. Her eyes stayed on mine, though I knew she wanted to look away.
She stayed silent for a while, that beautiful mind of hers working overtime. If there was one thing Brooke hated more than crowds, it was change. Transferring from Juilliard—a place she already knew—to St. Trewery, where she didn’t know a single person beside me, I knew the thought of it scared her.
Eventually, Brooke blew out a heavy breath at the same time as her head nodded ever so faintly. “Do you think St. Trewery would accept me?”
“Definitely.” St. Trewery would be stupid not to take her. Besides, the second they read her last name, she would begranted some sort of extra-acceptance shit. I knew the only reason I got accepted was because of my last name, not because I had good grades.
The St. Trewery hockey team had been doing pretty bad, so naturally, the college accepted anyonegreatwho could potentially help out with that problem. They probably readCarterand were like; “Oh, Reece Carter, that’s the kid who lives in the shadows of his NHL superstar older brother.” Or maybe not, who even knew?
Brooke slid a hand down her face. “Okay, let’s say I transfer to St. Trewery, then what? I have a little more free time and less obnoxious professors. That doesn’t change the fact that your agent thinks I’m keeping you from going pro and that Erik will quit being my partner.”
“I’ll fire Pike.”
“You can’t,” she snapped back at me. “He may be a prick, but last year alone, Pike got ten NYU college graduates into the NHL, most of them into their dream teams. By the time you graduate, Colin will have retired, and even if he hasn’t, that’s not a guarantee the NHL, or more precisely, the New York Rangers would take you. You’d rather die than play for any other team, the AHL, or ECHL.”
She had a point. My agent was my secure ticket into the NHL, into the NY Rangers. Sure, I could’ve asked Colin for help and he would’ve asked his management or whoever to pull some strings or even got me hooked up withhisagent, but I wanted to do this on my own.
It was bad enough that my father used to coach the NY Rangers up until a couple of years ago. And my brother had been one of their best players pretty much since he got drafted. I wasn’t even six years old when Colin went pro.
People already had expectations of me thanks to Dad. If he could coach the pros, surely he wouldn’t allow his son tobe bad at ice hockey, right? And ever since Colin became an NHL player, the spotlight was on me more than ever before.
Any coach I had, no matter how old I’d been, would say the same thing; “You’ll make a great player one day. Like your older brother.”
It wasalwaysme being good because of my brother. It was nevermebeing good because I just was.
If I asked Colin or our Dad for help to get in, I’d never be able to prove that it wasn’t my name that defined who I was.
But despite that, if going pro with no help meant losing Brooke, I’d be plastering my name all over the goddamn country and using my connections to get into the NHL.
No dream could ever be more important than my future together with the girl who’d stolen my heart from way before I could form coherent sentences.
I took a deep breath, let the air linger in my lungs for as long as it took me to come up with my next words. Carefully, but mostly afraid of her reply, I asked, “Do you truly want to break up, Brooklyn?”
Brooke’s eyes widened instantly while filling with tears, lips parting slightly. She sucked in a sharp breath at my question. “No.” Her voice was small, filled with sadness.
I held my hand out for hers which she hesitated to take. “Then let’s not.”
“But—”
“We’ll just have to keep it lowkey for the next two years. You’ll have time to find a better partner or somehow make Erik understand that you’re allowed to have a boyfriend while still being a figure skater. And Pike won’t quit on me for being ‘too distracted.’”
It might not even be two years. If I enter the draft this year and get drafted early, I’d rather quit college and play hockey than attend stupid lectures about stuff that didn’tinterest me. Colin thought that was stupid and irresponsible of me, but I didn’t need a degree.
Besides, if I somehow ended up getting kicked out of the NHL and had to take an everyday job, I could always become a coach like Dad.
3
