“You make friends everywhere you go, don’t you, Davidson?” Isla quips.
“Wait until you see me in action tonight.”
“Oh, I’m betting on it.”
“Is that why you invited me? To piss off your family?”
“Spence invited you,” she corrects.
We walk out of the building into the hot North Carolina night, humidity cloaking us like a heavy, wet blanket. I immediately miss the air conditioning of her building, the quiet of the empty hallways.
“I’m this way.” I beeline toward my car parked against the curb at the end of the street. When I reach it, I spin around to find Isla standing ten feet away, stopped in her tracks. “You parallel parked?”
“Are you impressed by me, Covington?”
“Impressed? Parallel parking a truck on one of the busiest streets in Palmer City is diabolical behavior. I’m wondering if I’m safe getting in there with you.”
I laugh, shaking my head. “If anyone isn’t safe, it’s me.”
Isla stills at my words, though I doubt she surmises their underlying meaning. I didn’t realize how deep I’m in with her until tonight. I’m dressed like I’m heading to a church barbecue, and earlier, I internally stumbled over all the reasons I like her while talking to avirtual stranger. And when she finally appeared, I nearly swallowed my damn tongue.
This isn’t going to end well for me.
“You’re probably right,” she recovers, brushing past the awkward silence and continuing her walk to my truck. “My ex-husband can get desperate.”
I jog around the car to the driver’s side door and slide in quickly at a break in the traffic. Isla hops in a moment later, securing her seatbelt before she looks over at me. I’m convinced that I’ll never adjust to the beauty of her ocean blue eyes, no matter how long I have the privilege of staring into them.
“I like my chances against a guy born with a silver spoon in his mouth,” I say. “That is how you met him, right? At a country club or a benefit dinner or a—”
“Prep school,” Isla cuts me off. She flashes me a quick smile. “Then, a wedding at an estate five years later.”
I’m at a loss for how to respond, marveling at how her childhood existed in a polar opposite place from mine. If I wanted clothes when I was a kid, I had to work for them. Not because my father didn’t work, but because it costs a fucking lot to be poor in this country. His job covered the necessities, but adding all the expenses from our sports on top of that, we scraped by.
Isla comes from a family that has amassed more wealth than most people can dream. She never wanted for anything, never needed to worry about her future or how the consequences of an action could turn her entire life upside down. She always had a soft place to land.
And yet, she has the energy of a person who has clawed for what she has, who won’t quit because something is difficult.
I want to know what made her this way. It doesn’t make sense how our backgrounds are completely different from each other, but I can recognize parts of myself in her.
“What, uh, happened between the two of you anyway?” I ask once I’ve pulled out of the spot and maneuvered into traffic.
Isla inhales deeply before slowly letting the breath rush out of her. “He wanted me to give up what I love most in the world.”
“That’s fucked up.”
Anyone who’s seen Isla skate can see she’s destined for the sport. Her partner should support her career one hundred percent, not try to rip away a critical fabric of her being. I’d never want to give up watching her zip around the ice with the perfect mix of grace and aggression, or miss her eyes light up after landing a complex element.
“Tell me about it.” She huffs out a half-laugh, half-sigh. “But I realized that Ishouldlove him more than skating, right? Or at least the same amount, but in a different way? It busted open the lock I had on all these doubts about our relationship, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t chain them back up.”
I wonder if that’s how Diana thought about our relationship before she decided to end it. The day she told me we needed to talk and proceeded to splatter my heart all over the kitchen floor, I’d been blindsided. The decision wasn’t sudden for her; she’d been working herself up to it for a long time, and I had no fucking clue. Maybe she made the same calculation as Isla, that she should’ve been more devastated by the thought of not having me in her life.
“He didn’t take it well,” I guess, a pit forming in my stomach as I merge onto the highway.
“That’s an understatement. He tried hard to convince me to reconsider, sending flowers and takeout to my apartment. It was nice at first, but when I wouldn’t budge, he brought my parents into it, and they turned the pressure way up.”
“Why are they taking his side over yours? You're their daughter.”
At the red light before I turn onto the highway, I glance over at Isla. She’s staring out the window, her hands knotted in her lap.Jesus. I’ve never worried about facing my parents. No person should.
