I’m not sure she’s going to drool over my body, but I figure it’s worth a shot. And I’m desperate enough to try it.
“See you later, Lols.” Her voice jolts me out of my thoughts, and I come to a dead stop at the end of the block.
Indie. She’s coming.
If I was hooked up to an EKG, a doctor would probably be concerned about how fast my heart is pounding in my chest. This isn’t from exertion. It’s all nerves.
This is it.
I pull the bill of my hat down lower over my face and start jogging again once I hear her feet slapping the bungalow stairs as she descends them. My earbuds are in my ears, even though I don’t have any music playing through them. I need her to think I didn’t see or hear her.
Feet pounding to the rhythm of my heartbeat, I jog down the sidewalk toward Indigo Bloom and whatever fate awaits me.
She’s not paying attention, her chin tucked into her chest as she frowns at her phone, so she doesn’t see me in time to avoid the collision.
“Shit,” she squeaks as she runs straight into my sweaty chest. Her phone clatters to the sidewalk as I wrap my arms around her to keep her from falling backward after she bounces off me. Unfortunately, she has enough momentum that I lose my footing, and we both go down.
Fuck.I was supposed to catch her. This was supposed to be smooth.
Instead, I’m spinning us around so it’s my ass that will take the force of the fall while I let out an undignified sound that is embarrassingly close to a shriek.
“Oh my god,” Indie cries, her hands going to my shoulders and gripping tightly as we fall in what feels like slow motion.
A slow-motion disaster.
My ass hits the sidewalk, Indie flails as she tries to brace herself, her forehead smacking into mine and knocking my hat off, and then she’s in my lap, straddling me. It’s only thanks to the throbbing of my forehead that I don’t pop a damn boner beneath her as the full weight of her gorgeous curves presses into me.
Fuck, she feels like heaven. How many times have I thought about what she would feel like in my arms? My imagination had nothing on reality.
“I’m so sorry!” Her voice is panicked. She rubs her head as she looks up. “I wasn’t paying attention, and I should have been. Are you oka?—”
The words die in her throat when she registers me. The hand still gripping one of my shoulders tightens as her eyes widen, her cheeks flush a gorgeous shade of pink, and her jaw drops. There’s a momentary flash of something that looks a hell of a lot like the way the girl I spent summers with would look at me. Open. Happy. Hopeful. Then it shutters, and I watch her throw walls up between us.
I do a lot of visualizing as part of my game-day prep. I run through scenarios and plays and visualize how I’ll stop the puck. It helps me feel prepared. By the time I step onto the ice, I’ve already stopped a hundred pucks in a hundred ways, and my nerves are gone.
So, of course, I visualized how this moment would go. I played out a dozen scenarios in my mind. Sometimes we’d run into each other. Sometimes she’d see me first and stop. Sometimes she’d be confused to see me, others she’d be excited, and in a few she was angry. I thought I’d prepared for all eventualities. But I never prepared for the possibility that she’d lock her emotions down in an iron cage and stare at me with a blank expression that gives nothing at all away.
Somehow, this is worse than the scenarios I played out where she was furious.
My fingers flex where I’m still holding her to me, soaking up the warmth of her body, memorizing her softness and the way she shivers just enough to prove she’s not completely unaffected when I let my palms slide down to her hips.
If this is the first and last time I get to touch her in a decade, I’m going to commit every single moment to memory.
The wind blows a strand of pink hair into Indie’s face, and I reach up to brush it behind her ear, savoring the skim of myfingers over her cheek. She sucks in a breath, and I have to tell myself to do the same.
She’s so beautiful. So familiar yet different. I’ve been holding my breath, afraid to break whatever tenuous spell we’re both under.
Then she does it for me.
“Sebastian?”
seven
INDIGO
I’m straddling Sebastian Navarro.
“Indie. Hi.” Sweat glistens across his forehead, his chest, his back. His tawny skin is warm beneath my palms, and his body is hard and muscular. The boy I once knew shines out through the familiar tilt of his smile, but he’s all man now. A decade of professional conditioning and hockey has honed him into something broader, more confident. More devastating to my heart. “Are you okay?”
