Page 43 of Interference

“Do you want to?”

“No! I’m with you!” I let my shoulders sag. “I want to be with you, Simon. Not him. Not anyone else. But everything I do to fix us—” I exhaled. “Look, I’m out of ideas, and the team needs both of us. Whatever we do, we owe it to our fucking team not to let them down because we can’t get our shit together.”

“Oh, really? My God, I had no idea.” He rolled his eyes. “Here I thought we were just doing this for fun until—”

“Jesus Christ, Simon. Stop. I’m pointing it out because we need to come to a solution that lets us coexist on the team and lets us stay on the team. Because if anyone catches wind we’re on the rocks, one of us is gone, and I’m not doing that to the team.”

“Neither am I,” he growled. “But we’re getting nowhere fixing this, so whatever suggestion you have”—he spread his arms and raised his eyebrows—“I’m all ears.”

My throat tightened. I didn’t want to accept it, but I could feel the direction we were going. It was like losing control on the ice, knowing damn well I was about to slam into the boards and there was fuck all I could do about it except hope I didn’t break anything. There was also that instinctive impulse to try to stop or at least course correct even though I knew I couldn’t. The nearly irresistible urge to fight against physics and maybe prevent the inevitable.

It was the same feeling I had every time Simon and I fought. And so far, every time, I’d managed to keep us from hitting the metaphorical wall. I’d somehow stopped anything from snapping apart.

Tonight…

Tonight, I was tired, and it had nothing to do with the game or the flight. I was just fucking done. For the first time, ramming into the boards sounded more appealing than the gymnastics I’d have to do to avoid it.

So I let the momentum carry me, and I let the crash happen.

I met my boyfriend’s eyes, and resignation filled my voice as I asked the question I already knew the answer to: “What do you think we should do?”

He blinked as if he hadn’t expected it. “I…” After a couple of seconds, he recovered, and he pushed his shoulders back. “I think we should keep the united front around the team and in front of cameras. But behind closed doors…” He shook his head.

Even though I’d known it was coming, it still hurt.

I swallowed hard. “So you want to split up.”

“Yeah. I do.” He shrugged as if we were just discussing on-ice strategy and not the end of the life we’d been building together. “We’re miserable. Why keep trying to force something that’s obviously dead?”

Ouch. Jesus.

“So. That’s it? We’re just done?”

“I think we’ll both be a lot happier.”

Speak for yourself, buddy.

I cleared my throat. “We won’t be able to hide it forever.”

“No. We just have to be amicable for the rest of the season.” He picked at the covers over his legs. “When we tell the powers that be that we’ve been broken up for months, they’ll know we can coexist as exes, and we’ll be fine.”

I nodded numbly. “So we just have to make it through the season.”

“Yeah. I think we can do that. Don’t you?” He sounded almost… excited at the idea? Not like he was relieved that we were no longer beating this dead horse, but that we were done. That it was over.

That he was a newly single man.

My heart sank. He’d been waiting to pull this trigger, hadn’t he? Did he already have someone else? Was that why he kept accusing me of sleeping with Wyatt? Or was he just itching to get out there and screw someone who wasn’t me?

He nudged me. “We can do it, can’t we?” His tone wasn’t that of a man genuinely concerned with whether we could pull this off. It was a push toward agreeing to what he’d already decided.

And what could I do? I wasn’t going to try to hold on to someone who didn’t want me. If he’d checked out of the relationship, then there was nothing I could do except let him go, move on with my life, and keep our breakup on the downlow until the season was over.

“Yeah,” I said. “We can do that.”

He actually smiled at me. Smiled. For the first time in months. “Great.” He gestured at the light. “Guess we should call it a night before our alarms go off.”

“Yeah. G’night, Simon.”

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