“Are you glad I came? Can I see the ice?” Cassy fired away, tilting her head and blocking my view with the perfect five-year-old timing of someone who hadn’t realized she’d just saved her uncle from spiraling.
I pulled myself back to the moment. “I love that you came, Sweet. And yes, let’s go see the ice.”
She slid down and grabbed my hand, tugging me forward. Abby trailed behind with my bag. But my thoughts didn’t come along with me. They were with Mel.
I couldn’t shake the way she looked: that glance back, her quick exit. They shouldn’t have meant anything; we were all tired and burnt out. But even off-duty, the coach part of me worried that the sudden sprint was actually a full-blown escape from something…or someone. Suspiciously, me. We weren’t only coworkers anymore; we’d crossed that line, and we sure as hell couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened.
Chapter ten
Mel
I stood in front of the Tahoe West quarters, waiting for my ride and trying not to glare at the scene playing out at the curb: Sean charmingly picking up a little girl and a woman, equally at ease, standing beside him. A vision of domestic bliss totally out of place after our hotel-room kiss.
How could he have held my freaking hips on the rink, kissed me as if I was the last slice of pizza at a party, and then be standing there now in a family reunion? Was what happened between us already erased by that curbside picture?
I’d Googled him. Divorced. But apparently, Google didn’t tell the whole story. The way he held that kid, the warmth in his face, the casual presence of the woman. It didn’t look new; it looked lived in.
And that was not how I rolled. A love triangle with a hockey coach wasn’t in my script.
A hot little knot twisted in my chest, a mix of anger and feeling punked on a grand scale. I felt violated for some reason, as if I had been invited to an exclusive party, only to find it was a packed house.
I didn’t dare to look back at the curb. My already-annoyed brain didn’t need any more fuel, and it wasn’t even noon. Plus, I still couldn’t believe Sam had bailed on me.
Her last-minute text had read:Final touches on the team’s research project. Sorry. Which, in sister-speak, meant you’re stuck with the one person you’d rather walk home in a rainstorm than ride with.
Cue: thirty-five minutes of what could only be a maternal ambush.
Mom looked at me now as if I were her last hope, and that made me avoid her like the plague. If I could sprint in the opposite direction, I would.
The teary, guilt-ridden people I’d unloaded on last Sunday were a shell of parents, whose financial crash had bruised. But they were proud people, stubbornly set on certain standards. The exact same people who raised two daughters to hold it together even when things fell apart.
Sam was crushing med school, with only a week until graduation—I was counting, beaming with sisterly pride, and cheering for myself too. The older daughter, still mostly sane.
Mom pulled up to the curb, looking way too cheerful for my current internal drama. I tossed my bags into the trunk and slid into the passenger seat.
“This sounds like a fun job, Mel. You get to see so many places,” Mom said after we had been on the road for about five minutes.
“It is,” I said, surprised by the genuine interest in her voice.
“How was Alberta?”
“Alberta was nice. I didn’t see much of it, but we had a couple hours free on Saturday, so I wandered a bit. The sky felt huge, and the air was super fresh. Oh, and I tried their honey lemonade. It was actually really good.”
Mom’s expression shifted as if she were trying to picture it.
For once, she wasn’t firing off probing questions that made me feel cornered. She was listening, and I did my best to entertain her, even if nothing in me felt that way.
Talking about Alberta helped release some of the pressure in my chest. Sean and I joked about what we saw like longtime friends, his hand in mine, us kissing… Warmth flickered low in my gut, unwanted but there, a rerun I couldn’t skip.
“And a private plane full of sporty men, and you haven’t snagged one?” she asked, catching me off guard again.
This wasn’t her usual timelines and expectations, dressed up in a sweet voice sharp enough to cut. It was old Mom humor, same as before everything went sideways. I felt too tired to dig deep into this unexpectedly nice Mom, but I’d take it. Today wasn’t a day for extra attacks on my nervous system.
“It’s hard to flirt when you’re also the one keeping score of their tardiness, you know.”
As I said it, the image from the drop-off slammed back into me, colliding with Sean’s lips under the Alberta sky. I folded my arms across my stomach, bracing myself.
Maybe I didn’t know the full story. But “maybe” didn’t stop this emotional recoil in my gut or the way I felt even more annoyed at him for making me one stupid cliché.
