Icebreaker: Chapter 48

THE ONLY BAD thing about having the best night’s sleep of your life is eventually, you have to wake up.

It’s peaceful here in the mornings, unlike the stomping up and down the stairs that happens in my house. Not to mention the arguing over who used the last of the coffee. Stassie stirs in my arms when her alarm starts blaring, grunting and grumbling when it doesn’t spontaneously stop, then cursing under her breath as she feels around for her phone.

I got skilled at pretending to be asleep—otherwise known as stealth mode—when we lived together. A few nights apart has made me sloppy, though, because when she calls her screeching phone a fucknugget I can’t help but laugh.

“Keep laughing, Hawkins, see what happens,” she says between a yawn and an aggressive slap at her phone screen.

“Come here, grumpy girl.” I smile, pulling her body back to mine. “How are you feeling? Can I do anything to help you feel ready?”

She rolls on top of me, resting her face against her hands on my chest. “Will you skate for me? I’ll go back to sleep, and you can text me how it goes.”

“I mean, I can try to bribe the judges, but I’m not sure your little stretchy body thing would fit me if you want me to skate.”

Today feels monumental and I’m genuinely surprised she’s not freaking the fuck out, but as the thought enters my head, she flings her body off mine and launches herself toward the bathroom, emptying the contents of her stomach into the toilet.

Luckily, she did prewarn me the anxiety on the morning of a competition makes her throw up nine times out of ten, and not to panic it was morning sickness. She also said the vomit was my cue to leave, because from that point, she would be a nervous nightmare, and she wouldn’t want me there for that.

By the time I’ve pulled on all my clothes and grabbed her a glass of water from the kitchen, she’s emerging from the bathroom, thankfully smelling more like peppermint than anything else. “That’s my cue to leave, right?” I confirm, bending over to kiss her forehead.

“Thank you for staying here last night.” Her arms tighten around me. “I’d be so much worse right now if you hadn’t. Good luck with your game today, I won’t be on my phone, but I’ll video call you when I get back to my hotel, okay? Text me your results too.”

I’ve been so focused on Stas’s competition I almost forgot we’re playing UCLA today. Hopefully, the rink-trashing drama is behind us now because the UCLA team are generally good guys. With it being so close, we see each other in clubs or parties, and other than a healthy bit of rivalry, they’re one of the more fun teams to play against.

The figure skating nationals are down in San Diego and will be all weekend. The first of their routines will be today, and if they score high enough, they’ll do their other one tomorrow. Anastasia was super understanding when I said I had a hockey game, so I couldn’t go with her; she was ridiculously sweet and said it was okay.

What I didn’t tell her is the second my game ends I’ll be jumping in my car to fly down the I-5 to watch her. I give her one last pep talk, tell her how much I love her and how proud I am of her, then leave her to it.

In contrast to the calm of Stassie’s place, the guys are being their normal clown selves when I get home.

JJ, Henry, Mattie, and Russ are all fully suited up, standing on the couch when I walk into the living room. Mattie uses the table as a stepping stone to jump onto a chair on the other side of the room; the table creaks under his weight but luckily doesn’t straight-up collapse. I look between the four of them, waiting for someone to say something.

Robbie appears from the den, big mug of coffee in one hand, pushing his wheel with the other. He’s already in his suit and I can sense the impending lecture about messing around before a game. Instead, he shrugs a shoulder and explains what the fuck is going on. “Floor is lava.”

“You’re fucked, then.”

“Not as fucked as you. Go get your suit on, we can’t be late to a home game.”

It doesn’t take me long to get ready, and as I’m about to get into the car, my phone buzzes.

JJ drives my car so I can text back and forth with my very nervous girl. We park and Robbie goes into asshole coach mode and demands I put my phone away to get into the zone. “You’ll see her in a few hours, just get a grip for a bit, yeah?” He grunts in his most Faulkner-like voice. “I’m nervous for her, too, but we gotta, y’know, we gotta just push through it.”

“Yes, Coach.”

I go into captain mode as soon as we step through the doors of the arena.

It pays off because, after probably the best game we’ve played so far this season, we beat UCLA a very comfortable 9–3. Faulkner told me yesterday that if we won, he’d let me delay our post-game review so I could head straight to San Diego in time for the pairs short program. I’m about to head out the door when Cory O’Neill, UCLA’s captain, grabs me.

“Good to see you, man,” he says, slapping my bicep. “It’s good to see you back on the ice. I heard a rumor you were figure skating.”

“Yeah, I was, for six weeks. Another big drama. Never stops at Maple Hills, right?” I scratch at the nape of my neck awkwardly. “Director of Sport benched me because a kid on the skating team got hurt and blamed me. They were going to stop the whole team from playing until they found who was responsible, so I took the fall. I wasn’t allowed to play until he could skate again.”

“Oh shit!”

“It wasn’t bad, y’know. My girlfriend is the guy’s partner, so it was six weeks of skating and training with her. I liked it, other than my body fucking aching. They’ve got a competition today, actually; that’s where I’m heading.”

Cory’s brows furrow together. “Wait a minute, are you talking about Aaron and Stas?”

Not a good sign. “Yeah, you know them?”

He nods his head, confusion apparent. “I went to school with Aaron back in Chicago. I’ve known him since we were kids. You got blamed for Aaron getting injured? Stassie is your girl?”

“It was on Halloween. He showed up at The Honeypot with a busted wrist, said I’d pranked him, and he got hurt. You know our repu—”

“Halloween? Dude,” he interrupts, holding up a hand. “Aaron got hurt playing football with us. We were drinking and dicking about at the beach, having a bonfire. Davey tackled him and landed on his arm…I didn’t know he’d blamed you for that. What the fuck! He hasn’t told us any of thi—”

I can see his mouth moving in front of me, but I can’t hear anything over the sound of the ringing in my ears.

Everything seems to slow down as all the pieces rapidly start dropping into place. I’d made my peace with being the first person Aaron would blame during an unfortunate accident. I’ve been battling against this team’s reputation for almost four years, and I wasn’t angry about it anymore.

But he knew. He fucking knew how he got hurt, and he tried to get me in trouble for it anyway.

For what? For Anastasia? She’s been single for years and he’s never made a move. To get me kicked out of school? Nothing makes sense because what he did doesn’t fucking make sense.

“Hawkins?” Cory asks warily.

“I’ve gotta go.”

I’m halfway to San Diego before I realize I’ve been driving in silence. I crank up the radio, anything to drown out my thoughts, which are loud as hell right now. The main one is what am I going to do when I get there? I want to burst in there, tell everyone what he did, how he deceived the closest people to him. But she doesn’t deserve this. This is the most important competition of her life so far. Am I really going to set off a bomb when she needs to be concentrating?

I’ve answered my own question before I’ve even finished formulating it—this needs to wait.

I can’t imagine a future without Stassie, and sadly, her future is intertwined with him too. Even more so if they win this weekend.

Their names are going to be recorded side by side.

He knows she needs him more than she loathes him. That’s what this whole therapy bullshit has been about; he’s been reminding her she needs him as a partner.

Like we didn’t all already fucking know.

The rest of the drive flies by, and before I know it, I’m pulling into the packed parking lot of the Spirit Center. Stas said this is the first time in years that nationals have been on the west coast, and I feel lucky right now that she’s not on the other side of the country. Above everything else happening, I’m glad I’m here to support her, and that’s what I’m concentrating on.

People are lining the halls when I make my way into the building. Trainers with the protégés, parents with their very nervous kids, and huge families wearing different skating team emblems on their jackets.

It’s kind of wild that the best figure skaters in the country are in this building right now and Stassie is one of them. Figure skating for six weeks definitely gave me a new appreciation for how goddamn difficult it is.

I might still have bruises on my ass and knees from falling down.

I’ve got about ten minutes before the pair’s short program begins, which gives me enough time to buy a drink and use the bathroom. I don’t know why I’m so nervous when she’s the one who has to skate.

I’m lucky to get a seat at the end of an aisle, next to a huge family all wearing matching T-shirts. Stassie and Aaron are on second in their group, but I missed the warm-up, so I haven’t even had a glimpse of her. I don’t manage to pay attention to the first pair that perform, my mind is too preoccupied. My seat is directly above the access tunnel onto the ice, and in my eye line I can see the back of Brady’s head, so I know Stas is close.

Practically every part of the exterior of the rink is covered in cameras, with the whole competition being streamed online. The guys have all piled into our house to watch and have been blowing up our group chat with support—and horror—when someone in the last group had a nasty fall.

“Next on the ice from Maple Hills Skating Team is Aaron Carlisle and Anastasia Allen.” 

I can hear my heartbeat in my ears as I watch her skate onto the ice. She looks beautiful, her long, light brown hair curled and pinned back, showing the detailed diamanté encrusted netting across her chest and arms and down the front of her navy-blue costume. They move into the center of the rink, hand in hand, waiting for the music to begin.

A slowed-down acoustic version of “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None the Richer begins to play, and they make their first move across the ice. I’ve listened to this song and “Clair de Lune” more times than I can count in the time we’ve been together.

At practice, I was with her as she glided across the ice, looking so close to perfection it was hard to believe she wasn’t put on this earth just to do this. At the house, when she’d slide around the kitchen tiles, dragging me around with her, laughing, claiming we were practicing.

This song will always remind me of those moments.

I can’t move my eyes from the pair as they seamlessly and perfectly deliver every move. My phone is buzzing relentlessly in my pocket, but I ignore it, unwilling to miss even a split second. They’re nearing the end of the program, two minutes and almost forty seconds gone in a blink. Aaron picks her up for their final move, and Anastasia glides through the air flawlessly, landing so gently you wouldn’t think she was spinning through the air a second earlier.

The pair of them move toward the center of the rink, do their final dance moves, and end wrapped around each other as the music fades. Every second of it was perfect. Not even a hair out of place.

And when the applause starts, that’s when Aaron takes her face in his hands and kisses her.