Was it? Maybe it was. I assumed the chemistry had led to the unspoken sexual tension that had been building, but maybe we had been primed for it. “I blame Mark,” I said. “He is the one who has been telling us to act like we’re into each other. We had orders to look at each other like we wanted to rip each other’s clothes off.”
Dom was still grasping his towel as if his life depended on it. That was probably true. If he were fully naked in front of me again, my self-control would vanish instantly. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Yeah, Mark put the idea in our heads.” He didn’t sound confident for once.
My stomach flipped. He knew as well as I did that Mark had only been pushing for that in the last few months. We had been getting questions for the last few years. And every time I’d truthfully stated that nothing had happened, my mind had temporarily wandered to what it would be like.
I didn’t know if I could sound believable agreeing with him, so I repeated my early assertion. “We can’t let this make things weird between us.”
“Absolutely,” Dom said. He sounded relieved that I was sticking to the line. Whether it was because it was the smart thing or he wanted to keep last night as a one time thing wasanyone’s guess. “We will just go back to business as usual on Monday. But that means that we can’t let anyone know that this happened. No one.” He stressed the last two words.
The way he emphasized it was a little offensive. I wasn’t planning on broadcasting it, but he made it sound like a dirty secret that had to stay hidden.
My silence must have tipped him off because he said, “I’m just trying to think about what would happen if people knew. We would never hear the end of it. And if you told your friends and things got back to Brandon…”
The unspoken end of the sentence hung heavy in the air between us. If it got back to Brandon, it would confirm every fear he’d had that the tension wasn’t just skating chemistry. Worse, he would feel justified in the insults he’d hurled my way on the night we’d broken up. “What about Wyatt, Ethan, and Zain?” I asked.
“What about them?”
“Do they know that I’m here? What if one of them says something?” I knew that there had still been people in the basement when Dom had pulled me down the stairs and into his room last night, but I couldn’t remember anything more specific than that. There had probably been people in the kitchen too, for that matter. I had been too focused on what had just happened and what I wanted to be doing to him.
Dom’s face paled. After an uncomfortable silence, he mumbled, “I don’t know.”
“Which question is that an answer to?” I asked.
“Both,” he said slowly. “They might know that you slept over. We weren’t exactly hiding that you came into my room in the middle of the night.”
I tried to remember who had been around. Most of the people had left the party by the time Dom had kissed me, but not everyone. Any of them could have seen us in the living room. Nomatter where they were in the house, they would have needed to walk past us if they were trying to leave. And while we hadn’t been kissing in there long, it must have been obvious what was about to happen for a while beforehand. That wasn’t even getting into anybody who had still been in the basement when we went downstairs. I could vaguely remember hearing some voices from where the beer pong table was set up, but I couldn’t remember more than that. “There were people downstairs when we came down.”
Dom ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know who it was.” He couldn’t meet my eyes. “We’re going to have to hope they didn’t pay attention. Or that they were super wasted. Or that they don’t know us well enough to care.”
That seemed like a lot of ways things could go wrong, but I didn’t see anything we could do when we didn’t know who it was or what they saw. “Let me know if you figure out who it was. If not, I guess I’ll see you on Monday.”
He seemed relieved that he didn’t have to find a way to kick me out so he could get dressed. “Okay,” he replied. “I’ll see you Monday.”
I grabbed the rest of my things and hurried out of his room. If I hesitated, I was bound to do something stupid. I waited at the bottom of the staircase, listening for anyone upstairs. I could hear the water running through the pipes, presumably because someone was showering, but no voices or footsteps. Hopefully, that meant that all of Dom’s roommates were still asleep. As I was trying to prepare myself, the water shut off. I squared my shoulders and dashed up the stairs, hoping to get out of the house before anyone was walking in the halls.
I slipped on my boots before reaching for my coat from the remains of the previous night’s coat pile, which was down to only one other coat and a couple of stray scarves and hats. “Fuck!”The curse slipped out as my heel got stuck in my boot. My shoulder thudded against the wall and I tried to regain balance.
I must have been louder than I thought, because I heard a male voice call, “Hello?”
Shit. Ethan had heard me. Instead of answering, I unlocked the front door and stepped outside. I had to get out of there before somebody saw me. The thought of someone seeing me and knowing what had happened was too much. Better to get home as fast as possible, so I would only have to deal with judgement from myself.
Chapter 19
Chapter 19
Ispentmylifefocusingon moving my body in complicated ways and holding it in impossible positions. Yet on Monday morning I struggled immensely with the simple act of getting out of my car. I had gone through the morning on autopilot from the time my alarm went off to the time I pulled into the parking lot at the rink. There were no more distractions to keep my mind off of what was coming later in the morning. I had to face Dom in the cold light of day, when we’d had a full twenty-four hours to think about what we’d done.
“You can do this,” I muttered to myself. “Just act normal.”
I had to tell myself what I should do, step by step. Get out of the car. Grab your bags. Go to the entrance. Head to the locker room. Say hi to people. Act the way you always do. Don’t make it obvious that anything out of the ordinary happened, because they were bound to ask questions. The girls were always around to offer support. I usually appreciated it, but not when I had promised to keep my mouth shut.
“Good morning, Hazel.” Seohyun greeted me with a wave and a smile as soon as she saw me. “You were not at the gym this morning.”
“I went for a run instead,” I said. It had seemed safer to do something on my own. If I went to a class with my friends, they were bound to want to talk about our weekends. Since they had also been invited to Dom’s party, it was guaranteed to come up. I’d tried to prepare an answer about how it was, even practicing it in front of the mirror. It was harder than I thought it would be to sound casual and unrehearsed. It would probably be best if I avoided the conversation entirely. To do that, I’d come up with a plan. I should keep the conversation away from me and my weekend as much as possible. “How was your date?”
I was feeling more confident by the time I had to start practice. It had taken a lot of questions and follow-up questions to keep the conversation away from me while getting ready and stretching. There had been a few times things got off track, but I managed to avoid talking about the party. It came close, but I focused on how nice it was to see my friends and the earlier part of the night. I wasn’t able to relax the entire time, but I still considered it a success. At least I had the excuse of early ice time to make a quick getaway. They never would’ve bought me being excited to work on the minutia of choreography improvements with Olga.
I was the first one to arrive by the rink. To calm my nerves, I stepped onto the ice to skate by myself. I wasn’t used to silence when I was skating here. It was unusual to not have Dom, Mark, Olga, or a combination of the three with me. Not having any of their voices in my ear or music gave me the chance to let my mind go blank. There was nobody to keep my guard up against, so I could truly relax. The soft noise of my blades, cutting into the otherwise smooth surface of the ice, was oddly comforting. It might be a weird thing to say about the sound of blades, butit was true. On the ice, I didn’t have the time or desire to think about whatever troubles I was having in my personal life. It had proven helpful many times in my teen years and it was just as helpful at twenty.
