Page 60 of Looks Real Good Now
Oh.
“Right, well.” This was going to be fun. “Go have a shower and get close. It’s game day, baby!” I pressed a kiss to his cheek and got out of bed.
“I love you. You know that, right?” Liam said just as I got to the door. I turned back to look at him, the words on the tip of my tongue.
“I know,” I said instead. He smiled and I went to ask my dad a favour.
35
Alana
Ihad the keys in my hand and the high school ice rink literally had my surname on it, but as I turned on the lights, I still felt like we were doing something that we shouldn’t.
“Fuck,” Liam whispered from behind me.
“What?” I turned to look at him as he looked around the empty rink that used to be his third home.
“Just really weird being back where it all started.”
“Yeah? Bringing back all the good, the bad, and the ugly memories?”
“Something like that. Where exactly did you get these skates from?” He tugged at the pair draped over his right shoulder, his were over his left.
“When I asked if we could use the rink, Dad remembered that he saw them in the garage not too long ago and gave them the all-clear to skate on.” I slid them off his shoulder, sat down on a nearby bench and started unzipping my boots to put them on. Liam knelt in front of me and took over.
“Thank you for this. For today. And for the last week or so,” he said quietly as he loosened the laces on the skates.
“All I did was agree to be your fake girlfriend so your parents could change the broken record. Oh, does your dad know you’re here?” I don’t why I was bringing him up, but it seemed like the kind of thing he would have an opinion on, and I wanted to be prepared, just in case I had to fight him on this issue at all.
“You didn’t have to agree to anything. I’m not questioning a good thing too much because calling you my girlfriend is the best way to round out my year, but you definitely didn’t have to agree to anything. And no, I haven’t spoken to him today.” He carefully lifted one of my feet and put one of my skates on.
“I’m sorry that I didn’t give you the chance to round out your year in the best possible way years ago.”
Liam paused and looked up at me, his green-blue eyes wide.
“I know you are,” he said simply, before resuming putting my skates on.
“Not one bit of you is annoyed at me for denying us the last twelve years? I’m just forgiven?”
He looked up at me again. “I forgave you years ago. No, I didn’t like it, but I forgave you for it by the time I was drafted for the NHL. Things happen for a reason, you know? This week has shown me that we both lived the lives we were supposed to live, and we came back to each other when the timing was right. There is no guarantee we would have made it long-term back then. I might not have been drafted when I was and for who I was. You might not have found the best place to open a business. I might have wanted to move teams more while you were looking to make roots in a city, and that could have added tension.
“There are a thousand different ways that our relationship could have fallen apart because we didn’t know who we were or what we wanted. We were also incapable of really communicating with one another because we were kids. Maybe the fact that we were eighteen and didn’t quite know how to cope with the big feelings, which led to us avoiding them, was a blessing. The last twelve years have been good. They’ve made us who we are and now we can move forward together, knowing we’re capable of the big stuff.” He looked back down and moved to my second skate.
“I hadn’t thought of it like that, actually. I’ve spent a lot of this week thinking I could have spent the last twelve years feeling like I was flying and I’m an idiot for denying us that.”
He secured my skate and then tapped them twice as he looked back at me with a loose grin on his face. “I make you feel like you can fly?”
“Yeah, sometimes you do. But you’re right, it’s only because we lived our lives and made our choices that this feels so right now. Like maybe this could be a forever thing.”
I stood up and made my way to the ice, stopping just before I put my blade down to look down at Liam.
“You wanna break in this ice first?” His eyes dragged up from my skates to my eyes, his gaze was darker now.
“Nah, babe, it’s all yours.”
“It does it for you, doesn’t it?” I teased.
“What, seeing you on the ice? Yeah, it’s hot.”
