Page 35 of The Spice Play

“No, that’s not—fuck,” I sighed. “That’s not an order, it’s an invitation to discuss this.”

She wiped at her eyes again, every bit of makeup either removed or cried off, and I wondered just how much and how long she’d been crying before she made her way inside, how out of her comfort zone she was.

“Right. Sorry,” she said again, and I just wanted to make her stop apologizing, wanted to make her feel okay again, wanted to fix whatever problem she’d found — but she wasn’t letting me.

Hesitantly, out of some stupid idea that I could touch her and make it all better, I reached out, tucking the loosestrands from her braid behind her ear. “It’s not just what happened at the rink, is it?”

Her eyes went glassy again as she bit down on her lips. She shook her head, her face brushing against the base of my palm.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I offered. When she hit me with nothing but silence, I spoke again. “I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t want to listen, Nell.”

“My ex is getting married,” she croaked, wiping her eyes again as a stray tear broke free. “And I think, since finding that out and going back over everything in my head, I’m starting to realize that he wasn’tjusta shitty person. He was worse than that. And I don’t think I wrapped my mind around the extent of how much he fucked me up until now.”

Shit.

My chest ached for her, and one by one, things that had happened between us clicked into place, making more and more sense. She’d been confused that I didn’t call. She’d been upset that I’d come home late. She’d run when I had come close to kissing her in the kitchen. And she’d avoided me for over a week because of it.

“He’s marrying the girl who used to be my best friend. I introduced them.” She huffed out a hollow laugh as she pulled her legs up onto the bed. I did my absolute best not to notice that she wasn’t wearing anything but underwear beneath her oversized shirt.

“Fuck, that’s a low blow.” I shifted uncomfortably on my legs, my knee screaming at me, and eventually decided I was better off sitting down, too. I moved around the post, sinking down onto the mattress a few feet from her, trying to give her enough space that she didn’t feel crowded but close enough that she didn’t think I was made uncomfortableby the situation. “I’m sorry. I don’t know the extent of it, but I can guarantee you didn’t deserve to have to go through that. Any of it.”

The irony of my words wasn’t lost on me. I should be saying that shit to myself, too, and heeding it.

I pulled my legs up onto the bed, hissing in pain from the discomfort in my knee, and reached behind me for the ice pack — but she gave me pause when the warmth of her hand touched the cold skin, her fingers just gently moving across the scar.

“What happened?” she asked.

Holding the ice pack in my grasp, I waited, watching as she inspected it and trying not to visibly wince from the pain. “Took a skate to the knee about twelve years ago,” I said, turning my leg a little so she could get a better view. The white, raised skin wrapped around the side of my knee and curved toward the back, and looking at it now, I could still picture the way the skin and muscle had split so badly I could see my bones beneath. “It was my first year playing. I was having an impromptu practice with some of the guys on my team and I didn’t have my protective gear, and I was checking my teammate. We both went down, and his skate got lodged in my knee.”

She sniffled again, but the tears had stopped, her attention focused on me instead. If that’s what it would take to get her to calm down and feel okay, I’d happily talk her ear off. “Sounds painful.”

“It was. Still is,” I said. “The ice was covered in blood. We got in trouble for it.”

“You got in trouble for it?” she asked, her mouth popping open in a shocked O.

“Yeah,” I chuckled. “We weren’t supposed to be on the ice that day, and I passed out before the paramedics gotthere, so I couldn’t clean it up. The guys didn’t either. We just left a shit ton of blood all over the rink.”

“Well, obviously, you should have gotten your act together and cleaned up your own blood,” she joked.

“Obviously,” I laughed. I put the ice pack back on it the moment her hand left me, sighing at the minuscule amount of relief it brought. “It still flares up occasionally. I knocked it on the boards the other day when Bryan shoved me into them. Our masseuse worked some of it out, but it’s still screaming.”

“Was it hurting when you were at practice earlier?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I’ve been skipping leg day to get it to calm down, but I can’t exactly skip practice.”

“I couldn’t even tell you were in pain,” she said softly, breaking her stare and dragging her gaze back up to my eyes.

I shrugged, biting down the hiss I desperately wanted to let out as I readjusted my knee. “I can block it out when I need to sometimes.” I watched her closely, watched as her lips flattened into a thin line, watched as her nose crinkled just slightly. “I block out a lot of things, Nelly.”

She blinked at me, her mouth parting just slightly, but she didn’t speak.

“My ex wasn’t exactly the best person, either,” I said, gauging her reaction as I steered the conversation back to what she’d brought up. If she was done with it, then that was fine, but I wanted her to not feel alone, wanted her to feel comfortable if there was more she needed to say. “Not in the same ways as yours, I assume, but there was always a level of love that she wasn’t able to give me. Toward the end, Taryn started spouting a lot of toxic guru bullshit, going really hardcore on that single phrase,you can’t truly love someone else until you love yourself. Which, who knows,maybe in her case, it was true. But she picked up and left, went on a journey of self-discovery. Left her fuckin’ kid. Left me.”

Nelly’s eyes glassed over again, and her mouth opened further, but I spoke before she could say something that would likely leave me second-guessing saying anything at all.

“I’ve come to terms with it, for the record. And if you’d rather I shut up, you can say that. I just didn’t want you to feel like you couldn’t talk about your situation,” I sighed. “And I imagine if I found out tomorrow that Taryn was marrying someone else, it would probably bring up a lot of mixed feelings. It’s okay to be upset about it, Nelly.”

Her lower lip trembled, and for a worrying second, I wasn’t sure what she was doing as she moved across the bed toward me, her hands on the thick down comforter and her rear lifting, but in truth, I wouldn’t have moved regardless. If she’d been coming in to make a move, I would have let her. If she’d been simply moving closer, I would have let her. So, it didn’t strike me as something I should have avoided when her arms wrapped around my upper body and her head tucked into the crook of my neck, and I didn’t feel like I needed to push her off when her knee brushed against my thigh or when her breasts pressed against my chest. It was unexpected, and it was a little dizzying, but it wasn’t nearly as terrifying as I’d once imagined it would be to have someone wrapped around me like that in my bedroom after Taryn.

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