I took a deep breath at the fantasy. This panicking would have to wait. I stuffed my phone in my pocket and started back to Naomi. She looked up when she saw me coming. That perfect smile appeared. I felt a weight on my chest.
“Should I get one of those rail assistant things?” Naomi asked.
I shook my head. “No. You’ll be fine. I won’t leave your side.”
She looked away. She’d been doing that a lot since we got to the rink, and it wasn’t typical of her. Since meeting Naomi, I knew she liked eye contact. She never ducked her head like she was now.
I tried to run through what happened between the classroom and now that’d evoke a change of behavior. Maybe I said something wrong? I was doing my best to be less intimidating and thought I’d been getting better. Naomi was willing to spend extra time with me. I mean, we weren’t exactly bonding on some existential level, but she wasn’t coming up with excuses to leave. And that made me hopeful.
She let me hold her hand as we made it to the ice. I stepped on first and then encouraged her to follow. Her grip on my hand tightened tenfold. The strength in her thin fingers surprised me. Naomi’s eyes widened a bit once she placed her first blade on the ice. Her whole body was frozen for a moment, stuck between safety and what she considered a risk.
“I think I changed my mind,” she whispered when a few kids whizzed by. Her jaw tensed when she saw Lincoln and Sam moving by at racing speed.
“You good, Naomi?” Lincoln asked while turning around to briefly skate backward so he could catch her response.
“Oh, I will be,” she called and added in a voice low enough for only me to hear, “once I get these dang things off my feet.”
“Wait a second,” I protested. “Just give it a few minutes.”
She shook her head, coils bouncing back and forth. “Uh-uh. I’ve had nightmares about this exact moment.”
“What happens in your nightmares?” I asked. Maybe discussing it would give her a sense of release. By the doom clouding her eyes, I think it did the opposite.
“I fall right as I get on my feet,” she recounted while staring off into the distance. Her voice sounded far away as she spoke. “My body slams to the ground. There’s a cracking noise—my spine, I think. And then, I try to get back up, but I fall again and this time it’s my head cracking. The ice whispers, “You’re mine now.”
I blinked. “Okay, very traumatic. I can understand the concern… Um, in your dreams, is someone else there?”
“No. Never. I’m alone.” She met my gaze. There’s something in her eyes I can’t fully interpret. It’s fear mixed with something stronger. I want to move closer but resist the pull because she’s out of her element. She doesn’t need the added stress of my attraction.
“The key to proving a dream wrong is to switch up the factors.”
“I’m here,” I continued. “So, there’s one thing that isn’t in your dream.”
She nodded but remained still.
“When you fall, where are you on the rink?”
Naomi looked over my shoulder toward the center. “Smack dab in the middle.”
“We won’t go to the middle,” I promised. “We’ll stay in the outer lane. You can hold on to me and the wall.”
“I…”
I waited, but she seemed to be running out of excuses. “Naomi, once you get a hang of this, you’ll love it.”
She gave me an unconvinced look. “You can’t promise that.”
“I am a little biased,” I confessed. “But once you find your center, as your blades touch the ice, it’s the closest thing a human can get to magic.”
The guys would jeer me if they could hear me now. But I believed it wholeheartedly. They did too, even if they didn’t want to admit it.
“You must’ve never been to Harkin’s Chocolate Factory,” she joked. “Now,that’smagic. If skating beats out all that chocolate joy, then I’d be in shock.”
“I haven’t experienced Harkin’s, but from the sound of it, I’m interested.”
“You should go,” she insisted, brightening now that we were talking about something she enjoyed. “It’s the real-life equivalent to Willy Wonka’s factory.”
“I’ll go, if you come out here,” I said.
