Ugh.

So many girls went nuts over his face, over his hair, over his eyes, over his figure skating, over his arms, his long legs, the way he breathed, the toothpaste he used…. It was annoying. Even my brother called him a pretty boy—he called my sister’s husband a pretty boy too, but that wasn’t the point. If that wasn’t enough, girls worshipped the broad shoulders that helped him hold his partners a full arm’s length above his head with one foot balanced on the narrow slice of metal called a blade. I’d overheard women swoon over a butt I didn’t need to look at to know had to be a perfect example of a bubble butt—tight buns were pretty much mandatory in this sport.

And if he had a best feature, those creepy eyes would have been it.

But he didn’t. The devil didn’t have any redeeming qualities.

I stared at him, and that evil pretty-boy face stared back at me. He didn’t look anywhere other than my face. He didn’t frown or smile or anything.

And that shit put me on edge.

He just… looked. With his mouth shut. And his hands—and fingers—tucked into his armpits.

If I had been anyone else, he would have made me uneasy with that gaze. But I wasn’t his groupie. I knew him well enough to not be distracted by the bodysuit he wore over his natural form. He worked hard, so he was good. He wasn’t a unicorn. He definitely wasn’t a Pegasus. He didn’t impress me.

Plus, I had been there when his mom ripped him a new one once years ago for talking back to her, so there was that, too.

“What’s this about?” I asked slowly, staring at Ivan’s semi-familiar face for another second before finally dragging my gaze back to Coach Lee, who was almost hunched over the desk, if someone with her posture was capable of hunching, elbows firmly planted, the thin, dark slashes of her eyebrows still high in interest. She was just as pretty as she’d been back when she competed. I had watched videos of her back in the 80s when she’d been the national champion.

“It’s nothing bad, I promise,” the older woman answered carefully, like she could still pick up on my uneasiness. She gestured toward the chair besides Ivan’s. “Can you take a seat?”

Bad things happened when someone asked you to take a seat. Especially one next to Ivan. So, that wasn’t happening. “I’m fine,” I said, my voice sounding as weird as I felt.

What was going on? I couldn’t be getting kicked out of the facility. I hadn’t done anything.

Unless those shit kids from the weekend had tattled on me. Damn it.

“Jasmine, all we need is two minutes,” Coach Lee said slowly, still motioning toward the chair.

Yeah, this shit wasn’t adding up, and it was only getting worse. Two minutes? You couldn’t do anything well in two minutes. I brushed my teeth for longer than two minutes twice a day.

I didn’t move. They had tattled on me. Those little fuckers—

Confirming that I wasn’t hiding my thoughts at all, Coach Lee sighed from her spot behind the desk. I didn’t miss the way her eyes slid toward Ivan briefly before returning to me. In a navy suit jacket and a crisp white shirt, she looked more like a lawyer than the figure skater she had been and the coach she currently was. The woman shifted in her seat and sat up straight, her lips pursing together for a moment before she spoke again. “I’ll get to the point then. How set are you on being retired?”

How set was I on being retired? Was that what everyone thought I was? Fucking retired?

It wasn’t like I’d chosen not to have a partner and miss an entire season, but… whatever. Whatever. My blood pressure did something weird it had never done before, but I decided to ignore it and the r-word at least for now and chose to focus on the most important part of what had just come out of her mouth. “Why are you asking?” I asked slowly, still worried. Just a little.

I should have called Karina.

In a straightforward move I could appreciate at any other time, the other woman didn’t beat around the bush. And that’s what surprised the hell out of me even more than I’d already been, because I wasn’t expecting the sentence that came out of her mouth. It would have been just about the last thing I’d ever expect to hear out of her. Shit, it was the last thing I would ever expect out of anyone’s mouth.

“We want you to be Ivan’s next partner,” the woman said. Just. Like. That.

Just like that.

There were moments in life where you asked yourself if you did drugs without realizing it. Like maybe someone had put some LSD in your drink and didn’t tell you. Or maybe you thought you took a pain reliever—and didn’t remember—but it was really PCP.

That right there, standing in the general manager’s office at the LC, was that moment for me. All I could do was blink. Then do it some more.

Because what the fucking fuck?

“If you’re ready to come back out of retirement, that is,” the woman continued on, using that r-word one more time, like I wasn’t standing there wondering who could have spiked my water with hallucinogenic drugs, because there’s no way this shit was happening. There was no way these words were actually coming out of Coach Lee’s mouth.

No fucking way.

I had to have misheard her or just completely missed a giant part of the conversation somehow because…

Because.

Me and Ivan? Partnering? There was no way. No chance.

…wasn’t there?

Chapter 3

I didn’t like being scared—who the hell does other than people who love the shit out of creepy movies?—but the truth was, there wasn’t a whole lot that could have that effect on me. Spiders, flying roaches, mice, the dark, clowns, heights, carbs, gaining weight, death… none of that freaked me out. I could kill spiders, roaches, and mice. I could turn on a light in the dark. Unless he was a big-ass clown, chances were, I could kick his ass. I was strong for my size and had taken a few self-defense classes with my sister over the years. Heights did nothing for me. Carbs were great, and if I gained weight, I knew how to lose it. And we were all going to die at some point. None of that fazed me. Not even a little bit.

The things that kept me up at night weren’t physical.

Worrying about being a failure and a disappointment weren’t things you could just fix. They were just there. All the time. And if there was a way to work on them, I hadn’t learned how to yet.

I could probably count on one hand the number of times I’d been freaked out in my life, and every single one of those times revolved around figure skating. Once was the third time I gave myself a concussion. My doctor at the time had told my mom that she should consider making me give up figure skating—and I’d genuinely thought for a while she would force me to call it quits. I could remember the two concussions following that one, and being worried that she would put her foot down and say that was it, that I wasn’t going to risk all the repercussions that came from continued brain trauma. She hadn’t.

And the other times when my mouth had tasted like cotton and my stomach had tightened and churned… I wasn’t going to think about those moments more than I needed to.

But that was it. My dad thought it was funny to say that I only had two emotions: indifferent and pissed off. It wasn’t true, but he didn’t know me well enough to be aware of that.

But as I stood there wondering if I was either dreaming this, on drugs, or if this was actually fucking real—and entertaining the idea that it was, that I wasn’t on some hallucinogenic drug—I felt a little scared. I didn’t want to ask if this was real… because what if it wasn’t? What if it was some screwed-up kind of joke?

I hated feeling so insecure.

I really hated being scared that the answer I was looking for was one I probably would have sold my soul for.

But my mom had told me once that regret was worse than fear. I hadn’t understood it then, but I did now.

It was with that thought that I made myself ask the question that a big part of me didn’t want to know the answer to, just in case it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “Partner for what?” I asked slowly to be sure, trying to rack my brain for what the hell I could partner up with him for in this screwed-up dream I was having that seemed to be real. Fucking Pictionary?

The man I’d watched grow up from a distance that was sometimes too close, rolled those ice blue eyes. And just like every other time he rolled his eyes, I narrowed mine in return.

“To skate pairs,” he answered like “duh.” Like he was asking to get smacked. “What did you think? For square dancing?”

I blinked.

“Vanya!” Coach Lee hissed, and out of the corner of my eye, I might have seen her slap her palm across her forehead.

But I wasn’t sure because I was too busy staring at the smart-ass in the seat and telling myself, Don’t do it, Jasmine. Be better. Shut your mouth…