Page 41 of A Loser by Christmas
“Oui.” I slide out of bed to grab one for him. Grab bottled water too. “To rinse with.”
He takes the bottle from me, squinting. “Your water pump still isn’t working?” He eyes the door to my tiny shower room. “Your loo flushes. Your shower...”
I shake my head. “Nope. I shower at the marina reception building. I don’t know what’s wrong with mine. I tried fixing it myself. Thought I had, but Dad checked and told me to stop. Said I’d made it worse. I must have. It hasn’t worked at all since.” I drag on clothes to stave off goosebumps, and maybe Calum isn’t entirely impervious to the cold—as soon as he’s done brushing, he asks about the heating.
“It’s temperamental.” I flick a switch that sometimes works. No joy this morning.
“But your dad has bumped that right to the top of his repair list?”
“He doesn’t know about it.”
Calum’s frown deepens, and I explain in a hurry. “The thing is, every time he takes a look at something for me, he finds more problems to add to her repair list. I haven’t mentioned it because I?—”
“Don’t want to keep depending on him?” He huffs, but I think he gets it. “Then you better win that contest.” He herds me back to bed, heaping blankets around me, and passes me my laptop. “I’ll be back as quick as I can to get that ball rolling. You go ahead and use the time to?—”
“Look for ways to make your club drop you?”
“Yes.” He scrubs at the back of his neck. “No. I don’t know why I ever gave it any headspace. It was always a long shot.” A desperate one, I guess, when he gives me a final kiss of the morning. It ends with a breathless order. “Work on your win, Juno.”
If he says anything else on his way outside, it’s drowned out by more of Dad yelling at Harry. And it’s mon père that I keep finding in my edits. I don’t seek him out on purpose, yet I can’t help returning to a conversation that has nothing to do with any contest.
On my laptop screen, Dad shakes his head, his sigh heavy. “Tough break for the boy. Having to quit what you might be the very best in the world at?”
I get busy working on a transition, and when I next press Play, the screen splits with Calum as Dad’s mirror image. The cabin fills with his Cornish gruffness. “He really could have been the best in the whole world, but he walked away from his chance?”
Hours after Calum left, those twin echoes linger. They follow me across the marina to the shower rooms, where they curl around me like steamy tendrils. So does the suspicion that I’ve stumbled across a story worth chasing, and fuck me, it’s been so long since I had that feeling. This itch. A compulsion to hunt for missing pieces and to not quit until I find them. It’s a blast from the past. So is what blasts me when I return to my boat and open the hatch.
Heat hits me.
So does the sound of running water.
Calum is back from whatever makes him grey most mornings. He turns around in my galley, his grin proof that he’s responsible for granting a wish I didn’t think would get answered this side of Christmas.
“How...?” I nudge him out of the way to hold my fingers underneath that running water. “It’s warm.” I dart back on deck where I open a panel and reach inside.
Calum stops me. He catches my elbow in a Lito Dixon action replay, but he doesn’t demand that I land a Christmas kiss below his belt buckle. He grabs my arm to stop me from burning my fingers. “Careful.” He kneels on deck beside me to point out a repair Dad swore would be complex and time-consuming. Calum states the opposite. “It was a simple fix.” He holds his phone up and makes an admission. “At least it was simple for a friend of the family. There isn’t anything Carl doesn’t know about boats. I sent him a pic, and he spotted them right away.”
“Them?”
“These valves. Here and here.” Calum points out pipework. “He noticed they were all closed. Every single one was shut off.” His brow ceases. “The heating element inside your hot water tank too. He helped me troubleshoot and reconnect it.” Calum meets my eyes to make another, more individual, confession. “I fixed your cabin heater by myself.”
He isn’t Lito. Calum doesn’t have mistletoe dangling anywhere near his penis. If I wasn’t on my knees already, I’d drop to them right here regardless, I’m so fucking happy. I have to settle for shuffling closer while wishing I could land a kiss on him in public. I also wish I had worn my camera. I’d lock this footage of him pink with pleasure away in a folder. Save it to replay after hockey steals him back across the Atlantic. “Thank you so much. I swear I did all that once already.”
“It was no problem.” His phone pings, and I’m close enough to see the impact of the message he reads. Any hint of pink drains.
“Problem?”
“Uh . . .” He shakes his head. “Nope.”
I’ve spent the last few hours in my cabin studying him frame by frame, and not only to find similarities with my father. I’ve also revisited Calum chewing on burnt bruschetta to spare Penny’s feelings. This feels similarly evasive, another white lie in the making, this time to spare mine. “What aren’t you telling me?”
He blinks but doesn’t answer. His game-face mask slides back into place way too late to fool me.
“Seriously,” I insist. “You just solved my problem. Two of them. If that message means you’ve got a problem, how about you let me try to return the favour?”
His mask slips to reveal a glimpse of honest worry. “That was my agent. She woke up to an email from my GM. One from my head coach too. They want me back.”
“When?”
