Page 66 of Faking It with my Hockey Crush

“Yes. We figured that out together. I mean, he thought the same as you at first, but when I explained it all to him, he finally understood.”

“He told me,” I say. “He told me everything.” I pause for a beat. “At least something good came out of this, right?” I smile.

Ryan snorts. “Who knew? It only took Megan Whitmore’s callous trickery to get me and my brother speaking again.”

“Which is good,” I say.

“Yes,” he sighs.

The conversation fizzles out, and I don’t know what to say. Instead, I take a sip of my drink. Partly to do something, partly because I really feel like I need a drink. We both sit quietly for a while, the silence drawing out and the discomfort growing—for me, at least. I’m about to open my mouth and speak when Ryan looks at me nervously.

“So, about last night…”

He leaves the sentence open, like he’s scared of taking me in any one direction, leaving it for me to decide what I want to say.

I decide to take it in a direction he least expects. “What about it?” I knot my brow, feigning confusion. “Did something happen?”

A slow smirk grows on his lips, and I can slowly see the tension falling from his face, his shoulders, his entire body. My words have released him from the prison he’s probably been locked in since this morning. The prison I put him in.

“You’ve forgotten, huh?” he says, a mischievousness to his tone.

I wiggle my head from side to side. “My memory’s pretty vague.”

He places his glass on the table and then moves towards me. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting him to drop to his knees in front of me.

“I think, maybe, I need to remind you,” he breathes.

Taking my face in his hands, he brings his lips to mine and kisses me as tenderly as he did last night. This time, he doesn’t pull away. This time, I don’t want him to, and snaking my free arm around his neck, I pull him into me. His lips feel soft and full against mine, and while fireworks explode across my body, the pieces of my broken heart seem to carefully slip back together, and then it thumps blissfully in my chest.

When he finally pulls away, Ryan is as breathless as me, his pupils so big that his eyes look black.

“I don’t think I’m ever not going to want to do that,” he growls.

I smile. “You know, your Italian is fantastic, but you need to work on your English.”

He bursts into a grin then, and wrapping his arms around me, he pulls me into an embrace that fills me with so much joy that I think it’s going to overflow out of me. But that’s okay, right? It doesn’t matter if it does because I have Ryan at my side to fill me up again.

“So, Emma Carter, are you going to go out with me or what?” he says, nuzzling my neck.

“We’ve been going out for nearly three months,” I moan in reply. “Maybe you need to change your question.”

Ryan swiftly pulls away from me and stares at me, his eyes wide, his mouth gaping. He’s searching my face as I’m trying not to laugh.

“Really?” he gasps ecstatically. “Are you being serious?”

But all I can do is giggle deliriously. At this moment, everything is making me laugh. His face, how he’s acting, the fact that I’m here with him. Today was the darkest day I’veexperienced in a long time, and if nothing else, it made one thing perfectly clear to me.

I gaze at him, lost in his excitement, and everything I feel bubbles to the surface. “I love you, Ryan.”

“And I love you,” he breathes back.

And then he’s showering me with kisses all over my face. My forehead, my nose, my cheeks, my chin. And soon enough, we’re both in hysterical fits of laughter.

25

Ryan

Over the last sixweeks, Thomas has questioned me relentlessly on whether I’m doing the right thing, but no matter how many times he does it, I’m determined in my answers.

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