Page 29 of Lighting the Lamp
“How many?” Ford asks, staring at Beau like he’s trying to figure out if he’s kidding about the laps.
Beau looks over at me, his eyebrow raised. “What do you think, Lisey?”
I tap my finger to my chin, making a show of trying to decide as all the boys plead with their eyes to make it a reasonable number. “Let’s go with the number ten.”
“Seriously?”
“Want to make it thirty instead?” Beau lifts an eyebrow as Ford snaps his mouth shut and skates off.
“That felt… therapeutic.”
“You mess with the goalie, you pay the price.” Beau shrugs, the corner of his mouth pulling up in a smirk.
“Petty. I like it, but does he know what happened?”
“No one knows what happened. Not really.” His thumb scrapes against the seam of his glove.
“What do you mean?”
“The parents know I took a couple of weeks of medical leave, but that’s it.” His voice stays low. “Darius kind of figured out I wasn’t just taking a vacation, but we didn’t tell him why. He’s just happy his uncle Beau is coaching for a while.” He shrugs again, but this time, it’s more defensive. “What was I supposed to say? ‘Hey, my heart tried to kill me, and now I flinch every time it beats too fast’? I didn’t want it to change the way they looked at me.”
“Beau, we are all just worried about you. Maybe stop pretending this is normal and let someone in.”
“I let you in.”
Something flutters, then sinks because I have no idea what he really means by that. And I don’t know if I want to ask.
“I’m good,” he says again. “But I’ll take it easy. Scout’s honor.”
“You were never a scout,” I mutter.
“Still honorable,” he responds.
My heart is tangled somewhere between relief and fury and something dangerously close to hope. I can already feel it coming. The shift in his posture and the way his gaze lingerson me like it always does right before he says something I’ll be replaying in my head at two a.m.
“Try not to make me chase you down with a defibrillator today.”
He slows, grin already blooming as he runs a hand through his damp hair. My eyes scan his too-pale yet slightly flushed face, but I already put my foot in it once. No sense in making it worse. He knows I’m worried, and if I know Beau, the next thing out of his mouth is going to be a snarky, smart-ass comment.
“I don’t know,” he drawls. “You offering mouth-to-mouth, Lisey?”
God, of course, he’d go there.
I arch a brow, pretending my pulse didn’t just spike. “Only if you go down hard. And even then, there are at least three more qualified people in this building.”
He leans on the boards, one arm draped across the edge like he’s lounging in a bar, not a few weeks out from nearly dying. His smirk turns slow and deliberate. “But would they look as good doing it?”
There it is again, the shift that started in the hospital. His hand finds mine like a lifeline. It’s still here, humming low and electric between us. Every look. Every not-quite-joke. It’s like we’re standing on the edge of something neither of us knows how to name.
Beau leans in further, just an inch, but everything in me coils tight. His eyes dip to my mouth, and when they flick back up to mine, something in them is raw, like he’s reaching for something without realizing it. All the noise in the arena fades. The chill disappears. There’s only the ache of almost. My heart trips so hard it feels like it bruises my ribs as my eyes drift closed.
“Hey, lovebirds,” Darius shouts, skating toward us with a devilish grin stretching across his face. “You gonna kiss, or can we get back to the drill?”
My brain short-circuits, and my eyes fly open, flinching as if someone yanked me out of a dream. My knees buckle as my grip tightens on the wall, barely managing to keep myself from crumbling to the ground and making this moment even more embarrassing.
Beau doesn’t move right away; he straightens slowly as if he’s forcing his body to obey when his every instinct is still in the moment. His jaw flexes, sharp and deliberate, like he’s weighing whether to murder Darius with a look or just let it go. I’m contemplating the same thing until I see a blur of movement catch my eye up in the stands.
Ramona is sitting beside Ford’s mom, Quinn, with the world’s most obvious smirk plastered across her face. Both of her arms wave dramatically over her head like she’s the grand marshal of the Alise’s Public Humiliation Parade.
