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As soon as Grey walked away, Duke turned to me with wide eyes. “What the hell happened to him?”
“Language,” I said tersely. Gracie was always listening now, and she was beginning to pick up words here and there.
He rolled his eyes. “You know what I mean. He’snicenow,” he whispered while looking around to make sure no one could hear him. “Having kids did that to him?”
I bounced Gracie a bit and made happy faces at her while talking to Duke. “He was always nice, wasn’t he, Gracie girl?! He just had a few bad years there when he and his wife, Jules, weren’t together.” I cut him a look. “How did you not know that?”
He snorted. “I think you’re forgetting how I was as a kid.”
“Egocentric?” I jabbed.
He smirked and leaned back in my dad’s office chair. Gone was the usual playfulness in his eyes, and instead, he looked serious. It was the determined look that I always fell for; the look that made all the women of Detroit, both young and old, fall for him as well.
“No,” he answered. “The only person I ever paid attention to around here… was you.”
My heart hammered against my chest. I had no clue how to respond to that… Because the truth of the matter was that he was the only one I ever paid attention to as well, and as much as my heart loved hearing him say that, I knew I needed to ignore it. I couldn’t allow myself to get sucked back into him. It was too easy for him to come back here and say all the right things like nothing happened between us at all. I couldn’t forget how it ended the last time I let my guard down around him.
I cleared my throat and put on a bland smile, trying to swallow down my attraction to him. “Well, I guess I always did beat you, so how could you not pay attention to me?” I turned to Gracie on my hip then. “Let’s go watch the skaters, yeah?”
She clapped her little starfish hands happily, so I added a little bounce in my step as I moved back into the East side rink.
… I could feel his eyes on me the entire way.
5.Claire
My thoughts were still preoccupied by Duke by the time I sat down for dinner with my dad and Addie.
I mentally flipped through multiple ways of asking my dad why Duke was back and how long he’d be sticking around, but I had to be careful not to come off as too interested. My dad would have a field day if he suspected I still had a thing for him, which was totally not the case. I wanted to avoid him.
“You ready for the Timbit camp to start up next week?” my dad asked across the dinner table.
I looked up at him, thankful for the distraction from my thoughts. “Yeah. Can’t believe I’ll be running it. Feels like a different life ago when I was enrolled in it…”with Duke,I mentally added. That’s where we met: the summer Timbit kiddie camp (named that way because it was sponsored by Tim Horton’s) at the rink. It was the reason my dad originally put me in hockey skates as a kid. I was a figure skater, but he wasn’t sure what to do for childcare in the summers, so I started up in hockey. I was conveniently forced to choose only one sport when I turned eleven, which was when kids aged out of the camp.
The camp consisted of running skating drills all morning– pretty sure just so the instructors could tire us out– then we’d head upstairs to the workout room to do some off-ice workouts. We’d then have lunch in the lobby or outside and we’d spend the rest of the day playing games on the rink’s black top parking lot or on the baseball fields next door to us when they were open. Sometimes they’d give us free time, other times the instructors would organize races or games, like capture the flag or water balloon fights. It was honestly a blast most of the time. Usually, my whole summer revolved around my rivalry with Duke. We were the two fastest skaters every summer, so every drill was a race, every workout was a competition, and every game meant a chance to win. During those years, we pretended to hate each other, but we definitely respected one another as competitors.
I guess my dad’s mental train of thought was going in the same direction as mine, because then he cleared his throat and added: “So, Duke is back.” He scooped some mashed potatoes onto his plate and I could feel his gaze on my cheek, studying me.
I tightened my grip on my fork. “I noticed,” I said tightly.
“You didn’t have to be quite so mean to him today,” he tested.
I stuck out my jaw at him and Addie fixed him with a glare of her own. She was the only person I confided in when I was younger, so she knew the whole story.
“She took the boy’s crutches and left him stranded on the floor,” he complained to Addie.
She turned to me with a satisfied smile. “Nice work.”
“Thank you,” I smirked.
Dad rubbed a hand over his eyes. “You two will never get married, eh?”
Addie gasped. “What the fuck?”
“Language, jeez,” my dad lamented.
Addie’s blue eyes bugged out at that. “Oh, so you and all the hockey guys can say ‘fuck,’ but I can’t? Fuck that, Dad.”
“Agreed, fuck that,” I added.
