Page 56 of Sexting the Coach
“Maybe someone needs to change that,” Elsie says, quietly, and I can’t stop myself from returning my gaze to hers, meeting those gorgeous, honey-brown eyes.
Maybe someone should. I’m just not sure I’m the one to do it.
Chapter 23
Elsie
Weston is quiet as we sit side-by-side, pulling down the laces on our skates. I’m wearing the smallest pair of hockey skates they had, which feel clunky and altogether too-much compared to the figure skate construction I’m used to.
Nausea is still rolling through me. It rose up in my throat the moment I started retelling that story, and it hasn’t gone away yet, constantly pushing. I swallow it down again and again. In the months following the accident, I would get sick any time I thought about it, but after a while, I was more in control.
Now, I feel some of that control slipping away again.
I can smell Weston’s cologne. Feel his body heat next to me. Sitting here with him reminds me of countless practice sessions at the rink. When I was a kid, my dad would bring Drew and I to the one nearest our place in Denver.
Secretly, I think he always hoped I would be into hockey, too. But the first time I saw a figure skater out on the ice, I knew that I wanted to focus on the delicate sides of the sport. I wasn’t interested in the blood and fighting, in the gruff positioning and explosive nature.
But Drew was. And until the accident, that was enough to keep Dad happy.
“Can I ask you something?”
Weston pauses in pulling off his skate, turns to look at me. “Apparently.”
For a second, I think about pulling it back, resisting the urge to ask. But this question has been swimming in my head from the first moment I learned about it, and I have to know the answer.
“Are you still in love with Leda?”
The laugh that barks out of him is so sharp and fast it almost makes me jump. After a second, when he realizes I’m not laughing, he sobers, raising his eyebrows at me.
“Oh,” he says, straightening up. “You’re serious.”
The flush that rushes over my cheeks is seriously hot, so I even feel it against the backs of my eyes. Ofcourse,he’s still in love with Leda—she’s a gorgeous and successful movie star. Who wouldn’t still be pining after a woman like that? She?—
“No,” Weston says, shaking his head. “If I’m honest, I’m not sure I was ever really in love with her to start with. I was young, and she was—well, out of my league, to say the least.”
“Oh, please. You’re a famous athlete.”
“I am—Iwas—in the NHL. Not exactly the same as being Tom Brady or LeBron James.”
I don’t want to argue with him about the tenants of his fame. “Why do you think you were never in love with her?”
He looks at me for a long moment, swallows, then shrugs and turns back to his skates, working on his right foot laces. “Guess I’m older and wiser now.”
Weston shifts to take his other skate off, and when his skin brushes mine, it sends a scattering of heat over me. I nod and turn back to my skates, turning all this over and over in my head.
He’s not still in love with Leda. That information hums through my veins, along with the way he looked at me just now. Was I imagining the weight of his gaze? It doesn’t help that I’m still feeling high and a little queasy from the conversation on the ice.
I told Weston about what happened with my brother.
Now, Weston is the only person—outside of my family and roommates—who knows about it. When he looks at me, it will be with the full weight of who I am. What I’ve done. The future I ruined.
And as much as I expected him to be disgusted with me, just like my parents—mostly my father—were, he’s not.
When Weston listened to me tell him about what happened, I didn’t hear any of the disdain I expected. I thought, as a hockey player, he would understand the distinct horror of losing a career to an accident like that. Of what it must have been like for my brother, for my parents. The loss they went through.
At least a small part of me was sure that Weston would take Drew’s side. My family’s side. That Weston would start to think a little less of me, and that I would feel it every time his gaze landed on me after.
It’s part of the reason I waited so long to say anything about my brother. Part of the reason Inevertalk about it, and why I ignore the mail from Drew, and why I almost never see my parents. Why it was surprising to me that they were at that gala.
