Page 61 of Looks Real Good Now
My eyes flicked down to his crotch; the line of his erection was visible against his sweatpants.
“I might make every day game day,” I said before I slid ontothe ice.
I was starting to find Liam’s erection distracting. How he was skating with it, I didn’t know, but he wasn’t showing any signs of slowing down, so I wasn’t going to suggest we call it a day just yet. We still had half an hour before Dad was coming by to clean the ice.
I, however, was exhausted, so I was sitting on the edge of the rink, reading while Liam sped around the ice when my screen went black and then Kai’s face popped up.
Kai hadn’t been in touch enough since we broke up for me to bother blocking his number, so I hadn’t. But I had forgotten that it was still in my contacts list. Out of sheer curiosity, I answered.
“Hey,” I said, injecting my voice with fake cheer. Kai’s eyebrows were drawn together in a way that told me he was annoyed. It wasn’t too dissimilar to how he looked when he realised I wasn’t saying yes to his proposal.
“Hey yourself. How are you?”
The formalities felt forced, and it made me itch.
“Eating, drinking, and baking. Losing at board games, you? How’s Aspen?”
“It’s beautiful. Hey, so a bit of a random question, but do you know Liam Mulligan?”
The itchy feeling morphed into something else. Liam skidded to a dead stop opposite me at the sound of his name.
“Uhhh, yeah I do, why?”
“I think it’s interesting that you personally know one of my favourite sportspeople and failed to mention it in the eight years we were together,” he said angrily.
I took a deep breath. “Well, we weren’t exactly friends while you and I were together. So, I don’t know why I would have brought it up.”
“How long have you known him?” he snapped.
“We were friends throughout our childhood, but I went to Michigan, and he went to Harvard, and we stopped speaking until recently.”
“Right about the time you broke up with me. Are you doing this to spite me?”
That caught me off guard and I physically recoiled at the suggestion. “Am I doingwhatto spite you?”
“Dating my favourite hockey player.”
“Did you not say he went down in your estimations when he retired earlier this year?” Liam was now next to me, close enough that I could feel his body heat, but far enough that not even his shadow was on my screen.
“I said that in the heat of the moment when the announcement came. The team could actually do with him this season. I forgot how key he was to some plays and Teddy could do with the support.”
“Sure, if you say so.”
I heard Liam try to stifle his laughter at just how little I knew about his former team. Why would I? Any update I received about them came mostly because someone wanted to tell me how Liam was doing. If he wasn’t on the ice anymore, what usewere those updates to me?
“Do you even like hockey? How can you be with a man like that when you don’t like hockey?”
“The same way I can have a father who’s a hockey coach and not like it. It’s not their entire lives so they know how to talk about other things. Besides, Liam’s always known I’m indifferent to the sport, so it’s not a problem.”
Kai flinched at the mention of just how long I had known Liam. “How did you even reconnect with him?”
“We bumped into each other at the airport.”
“And you’re already all over each other?” The distaste was thick in his tone. I hadn’t looked up the pictures of us that had ended up online, but I was pretty sure that none of them would displaythatmuch, if any, of us being all over each other. There would be hand-holding at most.
“He’s not a stranger. We were friends for fourteen years and it picked up where we left off. Whatever narrative you have concocted in your head isn’t true.”
“It all seems very convenient,” he spat. Liam scoffed and when I turned to look at him, I could see how annoyed he was.
