Fake Skating(112)

“I thought you were just having shoulder surgery!” I said, aware my voice sounded perilously close to hysterical, but I couldn’t help it. My heart started racing and my body was instantly on fire as the best friend I’d ever had watched me react to his news. “Is there something else—”

“No—shit—relax,” he interrupted, his dark eyes moving all over my face. He looked stunned by my reaction, and then he said, “I was just kidding about the dying thing.”

“You were kidding about the dying thing?” I said (yelled), smacking his forearm as I gritted my teeth and tried containing my anger.

“Hey, you can’t hit a patient—”

“You seriously think that’s funny? I have been literally falling apart since he made me break up with you and then my dad, my awful, terrible dad, calls tonight and tells me that you didn’t stop sending postcards but he threw them all away, so I never knew and thought you ghosted me, which means I kind of ghosted you, and just when I find all of this out, I see your body lying still on the ice like you are dead—how can you do this to me? How can you joke about this?”

I wished his collarbone weren’t broken because I needed to punch him square in the chest.

“What the fuck?” he said under his breath.

Angrily.

I raised my eyes to his face and he said, “Who the hell made youbreak up with me?”

Oh.

Oh no.

Had I said that?

Out loud?

“Dani.” He looked like hockey Alec as he waited for my answer, his intense eyes flashing as he demanded everything just by saying my name in that tone.

“Wait. No, no, no,” I said quickly, shaking my head and fake smiling like it was all a funny misunderstanding. “It’s not—”

“Tell me what that means, Collins,” he said.

“Nothing—I, um,” I stammered helplessly. “It’s not—”

“Tell me,” he said through clenched teeth, his eye contact aggressively intense.

“You don’t understand, I have to—”

“Tell me, for the love of—”

“Benji, okay?” I yelled, digging my hands in my hair, frustrated and scared and so damn tired. “He said he wouldn’t press charges if I broke up with you, but I need you to—”

“He did what?” Alec yelled back.

“Listen,” I said, holding up a hand as I desperately tried to get him to hear me, to understand that he couldn’t go off about this. “I need you to be cool. You can’t freak out because—”

“You broke up with me because Ben Worthington told you to?” His eyes narrowed and he pinned me in place with his stare. “Are you saying you did it so I wouldn’t go to jail?”

“I mean, I highly doubt there would’ve been jail time—”

“Collins,” he snapped impatiently, his eyes all over my face.

“Yeah…?”

He tilted his head, paused for a long moment, and then said, “So if I’d never hit Benji, would you have ended things with me?”

No, never, not in a million years.

“Well, no,” I admitted, but quickly added, “But it did happen, Alec, and I agreed to—”

“Then we’re back together,” he said definitively, like he was making an official proclamation. “Starting now.”

“What?” He had to be out of his mind or missing the point of what I’d done. “No, we’re not. You can’t—”

“Yes, we are,” he said boldly, looking slightly less angry but just as intense.“Have your feelings for me changed?”

I swallowed, not wanting to answer that. “Alec—”

“Answer the question.”

I said, “It’s not that simple—”

“Answer the question, Collins,” he said. “Haveyour feelings changed for me?”

“No,”I snapped, but then I took a deep breath and confessed, “Not one bit.”

His jaw flexed and he swallowed.

“Then this is that simple,” he said, his voice getting quiet. Quiet, yet the only thing I could hear in the world when he said, “We’ve made everything so fucking complicated since you moved back, but the simple truth is that all I’ve ever wanted is you—period.”

I shook my head, knowing I needed to dissuade him while at the same time wanting to lock those words in a box under my bed so I could reread them every night before falling asleep.

“I wanted you in fourth grade, when you launched me off that water pillow and broke two of my ribs,” he said, his eyes narrowed on me behind his glasses like he could still seeus at the lake. “I wanted you in sixth grade, when I drove over your foot with my dad’s ATV. I wanted you when Mr. Pockets got hit by a car and you cried as hard as I did, I wanted you when you kissed the shit out of me in the shed, and now, God help me, I want you when you shattered my fucking heart to keep me from ruining my own future.”

My hands were shaking as he looked so unbelievably… serious.

Alec Barczewski was never serious.

Not like this.

“Better and worse don’t matter with us—they don’t—because it’s all fucking better with you. And what the hell is simpler than that?”