AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“True,” the other girl said. “They could have anyone. It's hard to imagine why they would even fight over a girl. Maybe if she was—”
“Right here?” I asked, swiveling on my blades and sending up a little spray of ice fragments. I skated backwards. OK, I was showing off. “You know that I can hear you, right? You could at least wait for me to skate off before you have this conversation about how I'm not good enough for them.”
“At least you know it,” the girl who was clinging to the wall said.
The two of them giggled as if that had actually been funny.
“Do you know her?” the girl with the sweater cleavage asked. “The girl they were fighting over? We saw a photo of the fight but she was like, so grainy.”
“Who could even really see her with the guys in the frame anyway?” The girl suddenly hit a pit in the ice and came to a stop, turning to grip the wall with both hands as an oh-shit look came over her face.
I gave them a look and turned to skate away.
“Oookay,” Cleavage said, since her friend was still focused on clinging to the wall for life. “Someone is jealous.”
I started to skate off, wondering why that had bothered me so much. It was another moment that felt like an echo, like something from my past that I couldn’t even remember.
It had stung. Like maybe I’d heard that accusation of jealousy, of being unworthy, before.
Suddenly, I collided with a rock hard chest. Strong hands wrapped my arms, holding me upright. A crisp and clean scent wrapped around me.
Behind me, the girls let out a little squeal, and I knew even before I looked up into a big, hard jaw and tousled dark blond hair that I’d just run into Sebastian.
“Hey,” he said, frowning down at me as if he’d come to find me. “What are you doing here?”
“What am I doing here?” I asked.
“You’re supposed to skate on the team side,” he said, jerking his head at the other rink on the other side of the arena. The professional rink was on the opposite side. “Not here with all the trash that wandered in trying to get a glimpse of the team.”
His lips curled up at the corners, just faintly. The way that filled me with longing.
“I see too much of the team,” I told him dryly, skating back out of his reach. He let his hands fall to his sides.
“Is that so?” He patted my purse, which was slung over his shoulder. I hadn’t noticed until now. “Well, you’re going to get robbed leaving your stuff around. I’ll keep it safe for you.”
He turned around and skated off, a thing of beauty as always. I stared after him in shock for a second. The girls were whispering together, but they barely registered for me now.
“What are you doing?” I hissed as I skated after him.
He pulled my purse off his shoulder as he skated up to the gate and stepped with perfect ease onto the black mats, transitioning to a walk. “Saving you from being robbed. How naïve are you?”
“Pretty naïve,” I shot back, “but not naïve enough to trust you.”
All the hurt and frustration I’d felt watching them watch me spilled out now.
“Ouch,” he said. “Luckily for you, I don’t need the two hundred dollars you can probably access with your ATM card, your Costco card, or an unreasonable amount of lipgloss.”
“Did you look through my purse?”
“No, of course not.”
He was still holding my purse and walking far too quickly ahead of me. I strode along as quickly as I could. It was hard to feel remotely graceful and non-ridiculous when walking on skates, although Sebastian made it look good, the asshole.
“Someone did start going through your purse,” he told me without looking back. “That was what brought me onto the ice. I had them removed—”
Why did that feel like an understatement?
“And then I grabbed my skates so I could bring your purse to you and tell you not to be an idiot. But then I overheard those girls.”
