Page 46 of Crack the Ice

God, I never meant to hurt him. This is what I was trying to avoid.

“Why didn’t you force me to listen?” His voice breaks in the middle. “Why didn’t you tell me before it got that far? We could have done something, figured it out together. We could have–”

“Everyone else in my life had already lost something, Maverick.” The words painfully scrape out of me. “It was my turn. It was my turn to watch something die. It was my turn to hurt the way you all did.” Tears stream down my face. I should stop. I should leave it here, but I can’t. I’m too far gone. “That was my burden to carry. And I don’t regret handling it that way.”

I suck in a lungful of air, wiping my nose with the back of my hand.

“I’m not some problem to fix, Maverick. I wanted you, my best friend. The only man I’ve ever loved.” I dig my nails into my palms hard enough to leave crescent-shaped marks before I let the rest out. “But that man was too busy playing Mr. Fix-It for everyone else to even realize the woman he claimed to love was drowning.”

“Yes, I ran. Yes, I made that decision for you. But I did it because I didn’t want to put you in a situation where you had to choose. Me or the life you’ve always wanted. Me or being the dad you were always meant to be.”

He looks at me with fresh eyes, darting over my face like he’s doing the math, tallying the damage of each time he chose someone else over me. His fingers tangle in mine, and he squeezes before the most broken “I’m sorry” I’ve ever heard falls from his lips.

The pain in it has me leaning into him, resting my forehead against his chest. I’ve done enough hurting for the both of us to last a lifetime. But to finally be seen, even like this, even when I didn’t mean for him to find out any of it, the pressure in my chest loosens in a way I don’t have words for.

“Can you take me home, please?” I whisper. His grip tightens once again, as if he lets me go, we’ll go back to being strangers. I don’t want that, but I don’t know how to be anything else. I want things I can’t have when he’s around, and that’s not fair to him or to me.

His silence makes me squirm.

“Please, Maverick. I can’t do this right now.” I try again, and that jolts him into action.

“I can’t,” he chokes out. “I can’t let you out of this car thinking for half a second that you don’t mean the fucking world to me.”

He tilts my chin back so that I’m looking at him. His eyes swirl with so many different emotions that it makes me dizzy.

“I’m so pissed at you right now.” A tear slides down his face, getting lost in his beard before he squeezes my hand. “And not because you can’t have kids or make me a dad.” He shakes his head, tongue running across his lips.

He’s silent for a minute, staring at something out the windshield, lips rolling against his teeth like he’s mulling the words over one at a time. “Fuck Cecilia, there’s so many other ways to make that happen.”

My breath catches in my throat. Other ways? This wasn’t a deal breaker for him? My eyes flutter closed. I can’t open that door. There’s no guarantee that he wouldn’t change his mind, decide that one day he wanted his own kids, and then I’d be out on my ass, again.

He turns me further until I’m forced to straddle him, his hands cup my cheeks, and my hands wrap around his wrists in response.

“I’m pissed you held this inside. Pissed that I’ve seen you with Cade and Lily, even Mia and Cam and the rest of the rink rats, who follow you around like you’re their fucking north star, not knowing how painful it must be to be around them. Why the hell would you let yourself hurt that way in silence?”

My chest rattles with the force of my inhale. Every birthday party, every diaper I’ve volunteered to change, every tiny hand curled around my finger—I’ve kept all of it, locked up tight in my mind, memorizing the kind of moments I know I’ll never have of my own.

“I love those kids, Mav.” My voice comes out steadier than I expected. “All of them. Yeah, I wish things were different. But that doesn’t stop me from loving them. No one other than you knows about this, so it’s not like they give me their kids with the intent to hurt my feelings.”

I blow out one final breath. “You deserve to have everything you dreamed of, Mav.” My voice shatters on his name, my eyes falling to my hands as I pick at the skin by my thumbnail. “You finally have it, what you wanted.”

His hands tighten over my hips. “Not all of it, no. I don’t have you.”

“I don’t fit in that picture.” The words taste like ash on my tongue. “And that’s okay.”

He shakes his head. Tear-stained cheeks that mirror my own have me reaching up and swiping the ones getting ready to fall.

“Like I said, I won’t survive losing you again, Mav. You have to be okay with us being just friends.”

* shit

SIXTEEN

MAVERICK

I like to think I’m relatively hard to catch off guard, but here I am, staring at the woman who’s occupied every free thought of mine the past six years, while my heart feels like it’s been put in a shredder.

I took her and our budding relationship, years of friendship, secrets told in the dark of my backyard, for granted, never once thinking there’d come a day she wouldn’t be there. Much less that I played a role in that.