Girls from school, from the rink. Girls whose names I barely knew.
Nothing.
I kept trying anyway, growing more desperate with every passing minute. If I could just make myself feel something, then this awful certainty clawing at my chest would disappear.
My thoughts slipped straight back to the boy from the rink.
Dark hair damp with sweat. Flushed cheeks. The grin he’d flashed after hitting the ice.
Heat rolled through me so suddenly that I sucked in a breath.
For a long moment I lay frozen in the darkness, my heart pounding hard enough to hurt.
I knew what it meant.
That was the frightening part. I couldn’t even pretend to be uncertain. The answer had arrived before I was ready for it, and it wasn’t going away.
By morning I had a plan.
Skate harder. Think less. Keep it hidden.
I followed that plan for so long that eventually it stopped feeling like a choice.
Then Dean Foster smiled at me from the other side of a rink.
And I was still watching him.
No tightness existed anywhere in the way he carried himself. Even resting between passes, his body stayed open and unguarded in ways mine never had.
I curled my fingers harder against my knees.
This changes nothing.
It can’t.
Dean launched into another jump. I watched him take off, land, then skate away.
And when he disappeared behind a group of skaters, I found myself looking for him again.
Fourteen-year-old me would have known exactly how dangerous that was.
Chapter Two
Dean Foster
I didn’t easeonto the ice. I drove straight into motion.
Cold shot up through the blade and into my legs, clean enough to clear the stale feeling left behind by ten hours on planes and buses. My body woke up fast once I started moving. I’d never understood the skaters who needed twenty minutes of careful stretching before they trusted themselves to jump.
I trusted my body.
Usually it returned the favor.
“Show-off,” Ethan Miller called from the gate.
I pushed deeper into the edge without slowing. “You say that like it’s criticism.”
“That’s because it is.” He stepped onto the ice beside me. “Objectively, I hate everything about you.”
