Which is why I’d rather devour Aria Petrov forcing a Windy City billionaire onto his knees, than try to date in real life. Well… partially why.
Thankfully, my mom let us all break away from our “buddies” for the rest of the last day of the retreat. Which was fine by me because Peyton was starting to get back on my nerves. Every time I’d pick this damn book up, she’d open her mouth about my Autoimmune Hockey League. She wouldn’t stop asking questions until I threatened to sleep outside. Last I saw, she was off with Lena and Harlowe, lumbering through the woods.
With the flip of my page, the cabin door swings wide open. Peyton stumbles inside, her amber eyes wide as saucers.
“You’ve gotta come with me,” she blurts before I can even get a word in.
I blink up at her. “What’s going on?”
“Just grab your coat,” she orders, turning back toward the door.
Every hair on my body stands, my heart climbing into my throat. I sit up quickly, my body aching in protest while my mind runs laps around it. “What? Peyton, what’s going on?”
She glances over her shoulder, and I’ve never seen such an urgent look in her eye. “Just trust me. You need to see something.”
Her earnestness is enough to make me move. I swing my legs off the bed, shoving my feet into my slides as I grab my baby bluejacket from the back of the door and throw it on. I follow her out of the cabin and into the crisp night air. The chill baptizes me, but it doesn’t seem to bother Peyton as she leads the way across the grounds. Her pace is hurried, and I try to ignore the soreness in my legs as I match it.
“Peyton, seriously, what’s going on?” I ask, pulling my earmuffs from my pocket and tugging them on.
She keeps her gaze straight ahead, her footsteps never faltering. “You’ll see when we get there.”
My pulse thrums in my ears, the heavy thud rattling my sternum, and I don’t really know that I want to find out what this is, but at this point, I don’t have a choice. So I keep moving. If Peyton is acting this frantically, it must be important.
The path opens up, and suddenly the rink is in front of me. The ice is so white it almost hurts to look at, bathed in the cold light from the overhead lamps, the quiet hum of the refrigeration system buzzing in the night.
Peyton strides ahead purposefully, her silhouette cutting against the shimmering rink. As my feet slow, my eyes sweep the empty ice. It’s untouched. There’s nothing. No commotion, no team member collapsed or clutching a knee, no late-night emergency that would make sense of why I’m here. No scuffling feet, no shouting, just a perfect stretch of ice waiting for something to break it. My chest heaves as I look around, spinning in every direction, so sure, so confident that I am missing something.
My eyes fall anxiously onto Peyton, searching for answers, and that’s when I see it.
The two pairs of skates, the two sticks, resting neatly on the bench beside her.
A searing flush rushes to my cheeks, my heart thundering hard enough to drown out the buzzing overhead. My stomach isconcrete, sinking to the bottom of my body, crumbling when it hits the cold hard ground as I realize exactly what’s going on.
She set me up.
I storm toward her, cheeks burning against the biting chill.
“Youliedto me,” I snap.
Peyton raises her hands in defense, the whites of her eyes growing. “Wait, wait, woah,” she counters, but her calmness only fans the flames flickering inside me. “I didn’tlieto you.”
I grab one of the sticks, the cool of the fiberglass seeping through my gloves as I shove it angrily into her chest. “Then what is this?” An ache claws at the chords in my throat, and I do everything I can to steady them, though my words still tumble out jagged. “You said it was urgent.”
Peyton runs a hand through her hair, forcing a guilty smile. “To be fair, that’s subjective,” she says, but I’m done being placated.
My eyes narrow and I take another step forward. “So when I try to give you advice, I’m ‘nosy,’ but when you do it, it’s ‘urgent’?” I toss the stick back down on the bench with a clatter. “You don’t know what you’re doing, so juststay out of it, Peyton.”
I turn away, the raw ache in my throat swelling, threatening to suffocate me. I shouldn’t have said anything. I should have let her keep believing I was a quitter, that I had truly moved on from all of this. I should have allowed everything to unravel as it was, slipping from this situation, from this job, to live the rest of my miserable life that I had mapped out for myself since March.
I feel foolish.
Fucking stupid, actually, for not anticipating this. For notseeingPeyton’s stubborn, relentless nature, and recognizing that I would be nothing more than a project, a way for her to prove something to herself, to inflate her own fragile ego.
Tears well in my eyes, but I swipe them away quickly, my breath trembling as I force myself to step forward. But before I can take another, Peyton’s voice cuts through behind me.
“I’ve seen your stats.”
I freeze.
