Fake Skating(84)

“That works for me,” I said. “But stick to the grass for traction.”

It was a cold night, but not as bad as it’d been for the past couple weeks.

She might not freeze to death.

“So what is up?” I asked, pulling my gloves out of my pockets and putting them on. “As much as I’d like to think you couldn’t live without seeing me tonight, something tells me there’s more to it than that.”

“Wow, you’re so intuitive,” she said, bumping her shoulder against mine.

It was a buddy move, something that was so fucking nothing, yet the way she was always leaning into me just did something to my insides.

Because she didn’t do it to anyone else.

I knew because I watched her way too fucking much.

“I know I am,” I said.

“I actually wanted to swing by because you’ve seemed very stressed the past few days,” she said, pulling her hat (my hat) down a little, “And I don’t like it when you’re stressed.”

“You don’t?” She doesn’t like when I’m stressed.“What is this, like, you worrying about my soft little squishy former self or some bullshit like that?”

“Sort of,” she said around a laugh. “I mean, you’re kind of the same person.”

“Asshole,” I said, bumping hershoulder with mine. “Calling me soft and squishy.”

“Missing the point, Barczewski.”

“No, I’m not, Collins,” I said. “And I’m fine. My mind is just on the game.”

And on you and what you said at the party and that I’m starting to want to spend every second of the day with you but I can’t because what the hell is going to happen in the future and I don’t even know if you like me and what the fuck what the fuck?

“I get that,” she said, shoving her hands into her coat pockets. “But, like… that’s it? Every time I look at you this week, it’s like the weight of the world is sitting on your shoulders. Am I wrong?”

I looked at the quiet street in front of me, flurries falling, and I wished I could tell her she was wrong, that I was handling it all.

I glanced over, and it must have been the way she was looking at me, that old familiar expression, because I heard myself say, “I’m just really feeling the pressure this week.”

Instead of looking at me like that was shocking information, she kept her eyes on the path in front of her and asked, “The pressure to make sure the team wins?”

If it were anyone else, I don’t know that I would’ve been able to say it out loud.

Explaining it to someone who wasn’t me would be impossible.

But as I looked at Dani, I heard myself say, “The pressure to be Zeus.”

Her eyebrows screwed together and she did look at me then. “Explain.”

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t look at her, especially when she looked at me like that, and tell her all my insecurities. I couldn’t.

But then she slid her fingers between mine, linking our gloved hands as she patiently looked at me like she had all the time in the world to wait for me to muster the courage to say it.

So I did.

“I love the game, but there are so many people counting on me that I’m scared—all the fucking time—of letting them down,” I said, and once I started talking, it was like I couldn’t stop. “And, like, they’ve never said it directly, but my parents need me to go to the NHL so fucking badly. They still owe a fortune to the hospital for all the surgeries and rehab, so if I don’t make it big, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel for them. It’s going to be all foreclosures and bad shit.”

The words came out of me as we walked down the block, they kept coming when we turned the corner, and I was still talking when we turned around by the elementary school. It was like the freedom to actually say out loud what’d been in my head for months now was fucking intoxicating.

“I hate that so many people are counting on me to fix everything, because what if I don’t?”

She didn’t say anything for a minute after I stopped ranting. She just walked beside me with the snow softly falling, and I wanted to file this image away because it felt important.

So very, very us.

It was the winter version of what we’d done so many summer evenings, walking around and talking.

“You have to know your parents will be fine, right? I mean, they love you and want you to be happy,” she said. “I don’t think you have to win a state hockey championship and go to the NHL in order for them to survive.”

“Dani, they have spent half their lives—and their income—supporting me. Now they’ve been dealt this shitty hand where my dad can’t really work even though he wants to, and the twins want to play hockey, which costs a fortune, and, like, I need to deliver this for them.”

“I know,” she said with a soft smile. “And you will—I can feel it. But if you don’t, everything is going to be okay. It will.”

“How do you know that, though?”

“I don’t,” she said with a shrug. “But I do.”

“Genius,” I said with a laugh, teasingly squeezing her fingers a little too hard. “That’s really fucking genius, Collins. You don’t but you do; that is a brilliant Harvard mind right there.”