My tone was teasing, but he didn’t seem happy about it. “Well, sure, but that’s not what I meant. There’s more to you than the whole flexible, super fit, butt looks good in tight pants thing that they all jump to once they learn you’re a top skater.”
My eyebrows shot up. “My butt looks good in tight pants?”
Suddenly, Dom’s cheeks were as red as our team jackets. “Your… I…” he stammered, looking like a deer in headlights. Finally, he settled for saying, “What?” Clearly, he was trying to stall to give himself time to figure out what he was going to say.
“You were listing shallow reasons somebody might like me and you said that my butt looks good in tight pants.” I was not going to let him out of this, not when he had revealed to me that he knew about my crush on him. “Apparently you don’t like when people focus on those aspects of why I’m such a good catch.” It felt good to be the one doing the teasing this time.
He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Finally, he said, “Yeah, fine. I said it. But in my defence, it just slipped out. I think you’d agree that I’ve never let the fact that you have a nice ass make things weird between us. And I’d really, really appreciate it if you would just forget I said it so it doesn’t make things awkward.”
He seemed so concerned that I couldn’t help but try to reassure him. “It won’t be weird,” I said. I moved a little closer so I could reach out to grab the hand he’d had in his lap. Normally, it would be strange to grab at somebody you weren’t dating, but we had spent years holding each other’s hands. I gave it a reassuring squeeze, using the same pressure I would on the ice. “You didn’t make things weird when you knew I had a crush on you back in the day.”
“Honestly, I was worried that if I made it weird or complained, they were going to make me go back to singles,” Dom admitted. “It seemed safer to pretend that I didn’t know you had the hots for me instead of asking for another partner.”
I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t have the hots for you. I was twelve. I just thought that you were a cute older boy who I got to spend all this time hanging out with.”
“Sounds like the same thing to me,” Dom joked. He hadn’t let go of my hand yet.
“That was a long time ago. You think I have a nice butt now. So if you want to tease me about back then, I would think again, mister.”
He pressed his lips together. I found myself staring at them, examining the cupid’s bow. When he returned to normal, I forced myself to look away from his lips. It was harder than I expected. I tried looking in his eyes with the long lashes I was so jealous of, but the look he was giving me made me avert my eyes elsewhere. Instead, I focused on his cheeks, covered in stubble thanks to the late hour. Usually, he kept himself clean-shaven to maintain the appearance that was expected of a figure skater.
“How long ago?” Dom finally asked.
I snapped out of my thoughts of reaching out to feel his stubble. “What?” I couldn’t remember what I had just said. It had been wiped from my brain completely when I'd been distracted by his lips.
He was leaning forward ever so slightly, one arm on the back of the couch reaching toward me. He had his sleeves pushed up, revealing the muscled forearms that held me so often. “How long ago has it been since you got over your crush?”
Why was my mouth so dry all of a sudden? It shouldn’t be that hard of a question to answer. I had long ago told myself to stop being ridiculous about my partner and to stop thinking that way. Yet that felt wrong to say. I hadn’t been thrilled when he had talked about his girlfriends over the years, but I told myself that was only because I didn’t want him getting distracted. I’d repeated it so many times that I’d even started to believe it.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I couldn’t think that way, so I made myself stop.”
There was a loud slam as somebody closed the front door too hard, but it hardly registered. “I don’t think that’s how it works. You can’t just make yourself not think somebody is good-looking.”
“I had to try.” The words slipped out without my permission. I had never planned on having this conversation with him and didn’t know how to get out of it. “I was grateful just to be your skating partner, even if there was nothing else there.”
He pushed some stray strands of hair behind my ear. My breath caught in my throat as I waited for his hand to move away, but it stayed inches away from my cheek. “You assumed I would never be interested?”
“In the middle of my awkward phase? OfcourseI thought that!” God, why was it so hard to form coherent sentences right now? I hadn't drunk enough for my brain to have such a hard time focusing. “You were tall and handsome and always had a girlfriend, and I was definitely not in your league.”
“There have been a lot more years since then,” Dom said. “Years when you were definitely more… pulled together than when you were twelve. What about then?”
I chose my words carefully. “You sound like one of the interviewers we’ve laughed at over the years, asking that question. Or worse, one of our exes who was weirded out by our partnership.” Brandon was the most recent and the most volatile of them, but he was not alone in that category. Dom had dated a couple of jealous girls over the years. One of them had actually told me to keep my hands off her man. I wasn’t sure if I’d handled the situation better or worse than Dom had, since my response had been to laugh and say that I had to keep my hands on him and she could just deal. To be fair, we had been in high school at the time, so a little immaturity should be expected. Not that I didn’t think it had been an appropriate reply. I might still give the response today.
“You avoiding answering makes me think it wasn’t just at the beginning,” Dom said, his voice low.
“You constantly asking makes me think maybe I wasn’t the only one who thought there might be something there,” Iretorted. I’d hardly let myself think that over the years, taking his comments to others that we were just friends to heart. But with the way he was looking at me, transfixed, while pressing the issue made me think otherwise.
Dom slid over on the couch, closing the gap between us. “And let’s say, hypothetically, that I had feelings of my own at some point,” he whispered. He trailed his fingertips across my arm gently, making goosebumps form in his wake. “If maybe I had thought about what it would be like to do all those things that I’d adamantly told Brandon we’d never done? Then what?”
I had been this close to him literally thousands of times before. Even in the last few months, I’d spent so much time staring into his eyes. How had I never noticed just how thick his eyelashes were before? I thought I’d noticed every freckle over the years, but there was one near his lip I didn’t remember. Was it always there? Had I just not noticed it because I tried to avoid staring at his lips to prevent this feeling that was forming in my chest?
“Hazel?” he asked, breaking the silence.
It was hard to get the words out. “Hypothetically, when would this have been?”
He moved his head ever so slightly closer to mine. “Years. Almost since the beginning.” After a beat, he said, “Tell me honestly. Did you ever wonder…”
He didn't even need to finish the question. “Of course,” I said without hesitation. “I just assumed I was the only one.”
