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“Get your fucking head up!”
“Give me the fucking puck!”
“Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Let’s fucking move!”
But I didn’t yell much otherwise—and I definitely didn’t yell at women. Even if the woman in question was infuriating…and sleeping on a fuckingcouch.
Billie didn’t respond to my yelling how I had as a kid, nor how my sisters had. She didn’t jump and cower. Didn’t wilt under the force of my unprovoked anger. Her shoulders straightened, eyes flashing cobalt and bronze—from fury this time—and then, just as quickly, I watched the steel bind itself to her spine, saw the ice descend.
Buried.
Beneath a frosty tone.
“I’ll repeat,” she clipped, “that where I sleep is none of your fuckingbusiness.”
It wasn’t.
But I found I wanted it to be.
Andthatslammed me hard into the mental boards in my mind, cracking my head against the glass, rattling my brain around my skull like I’d just taken a ridiculously hard hit.
But I was a hockey player.
I got hit all the time. I just shook off the impact, mentally straightened my helmet and skated on down the ice.
“No,” I agreed. “It’s none of my business.” A beat. “You’re going to tell me, anyway.”
Her eyes flashed brighter, and she opened her mouth, no doubt to tell me—rightfully—to go fuck myself.
I engaged evasive maneuvers, striding to the desk, picking up a tube with more rolls of that glitter tape stuff—except these ones were printed with cartoon cats on a background of blue that almost matched her eyes. “Where do you get these, anyway?”
Silence.
I spun back to face her, relieved to see confusion had broken through fury. “I-uh…what?”
I held up the roll. “This stuff.”
Her brows dragged together. “Washi tape?”
“Wash—who?”
Suddenly, she was hesitant in a way that wasn’t the Billie Rose I knew. She stepped forward and tugged the tube of rolls from my hand, opening one end and shaking out one of the colored wheels. “Washi tape,” she said, peeling the end back and tearing off a short piece.
She handed it to me, and I took it, feeling the strange stickiness.
“Fancy tape that sticks to paper but is removable without ruining it,” she whispered on a shrug. “I get it with all of my other planner stuff. Online or at craft stores or”—a nod to the tube—“at very special Etsy stores.”
That was a lot of information I hadn’t heard before, but because I had sisters and they had their own addictions to things—though not washi tape—I could process and assess with the best of them. And file it away for future use.
Or, at least, I knew what Etsy was.
“You like stickers and shit too, huh?”
Her nose wrinkled slightly at the addition ofshit. “I like planning,” she said. “It’s a hobby, and it helps me focus, especially when I want to be done staring at screens.” A tilt toward the monitor on her desk. “What I do isn’t not fancy or perfect like some of those YouTubers, and a lot of my stuff got burned in the fire, including some of my favorites.” A breath. “But I had some supplies in my backpack and during a down moment, I hit up the craft store to stock up enough to get me through.”
I watched in fascination as her cheeks flushed.
Stepped closer.
