“Did you plan this? Holy shit, am I the third wheel here?” she asks, eyes wide, and I groan. I’m gathering my outfit, changing quickly into a pair of black wide leg pants and a black silky camisole. I reset my ponytail as well, making it a high ponytail instead of low, and reset my blush and touch up my eyeliner. I’m ignoring the way Kenz is crashing out because I don’t know how to tell her that this wasn’t my plan.
She won’t believe me.
“So I am the third wheel!” she whines. “Come on, I don’t want to be around a flirting couple all night! I wanted to go out and make out with random people and have fun, and now I’m going to be watching you two suck face.“
“We’re not, Kenz,” I sigh, listening to her rant. “Come on. You know that’s not what’s going to happen. Also suck face? That’s so retro of you, no one says that.”
I catch her eye in the mirror as I reapply my lipstick, a neutral berry colour. They’re wide, and she juts her chin out, waiting for the answer. “The hotel messed it up. We thought we were booked for two queens, and they gave us one bed, and there were no other rooms available. We had a pillow wall—”
She makes a noise that essentially calls me a liar. “We did, I swear, but sometime during the night, or when the hotel staff came in to clean, it got reset.” I turn, running my hands down my shirt and legs to give myself a clean line. To ignore the way my hands shake at the thought of Taylor and me doing more than what I know we’ve done, which is, nothing.
“I need to get you laid, because what the fuck are you thinking, lusting after your ‘straight’ teammate?” She puts air quotes around straight, and it slams into me like an anvil.
Right. She's straight.
“It’s not my fault, I swear.” Kenz’s brown eyes widen when I say that, and I get the distinct feeling that she’s suddenly very tired of my bullshit. “I promise. I’ve been working on getting over my crush.”
“The crush that is making you seem like an idiot now.”
“I haven’t acted on it at all. I was in a relationship for the last few years too. It's just… I’ve just been around her too much recently.” My stomach feels like a lead balloon is sitting in it.
“You’ve nearly kissed her twice in the hour that I’ve been with you,” she says.
My cheeks feel hot. “Nu-uh.” Her arms are crossed, pushing up her ample chest. “Come on, she’s going to be wondering where we are,” I say, turning and walking to the door.
“Eloise, you’re going to make a mistake if you don’t act on this—”
I whip around and run my hands down my legs again. I can’t rake my fingers through my hair like usual in case I mess up the slick back I worked hard to achieve. “I can’t act on this because she’s straight. I’m not going to flirt with her knowing she’s straight, it would cause all kinds of issues in the locker room. I won’t ruin myrelationship with the team that kept me after I got booted from the Chill.”
“The Chill trading you wasn’t your fault.”
My throat tightens. “Are you sure about that? Because it seems like it was my fault and only my fault. There was no reason to trade me, so for some reason, they wanted Rosie and offered me up.”
“It’s just hockey,” she says.
“Melody and I broke up, and she had mentioned that there was another woman she was interested in. Someone else on the team, I think.”
The surrounding air seems to have been sucked out of the room. I haven’t said that to anyone. That little bit of shame—that I wasn’t enough for her—gnaws at me whenever I think about it. “She said that she wanted to open the relationship, and I didn’t want to. I couldn’t.” I shudder. “I didn’t want a third after we had built something that I thought was solid.”
“Oh.”
I swallow back the knot in my throat. “Yeah, so let’s go out, get drunk, and dance the night away. Our flight back isn’t until 4 tomorrow afternoon.”
Kenz wraps her arm around my waist, and we’re in the hallway before I can blink. “Did you want to—?”
“No. I’ve got a therapist that I’m talking to about it. It’s just...” There’s a heaviness that settles onto my chest. “It’s not something I want to remember.”
“Sure. We can do that,” she says, squeezing metightly. “I’m sorry that she was such a bitch.”
A humourless laugh bubbles out of me. “Well, it’s five years down the drain. I’ll be fine.”
“Of course you will.” The elevator still has a whiff of Taylor’s perfume lingering. How did she do that?
“You’re not seeing anyone, right?” I ask and she cackles.
“Babes, I’m as single as the day I was born. I mean,” her cheeks grow dark, “There may be someone, but they’re being a bit difficult.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Difficult? Isn’t that your specialty?”
