Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 113072 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 565(@200wpm)___ 452(@250wpm)___ 377(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113072 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 565(@200wpm)___ 452(@250wpm)___ 377(@300wpm)
“Are you referring to Chase Merritt?” I ask, rolling my eyes. “Can you not even say his name?”
“Why should I?” she demands. “You cried for months after he left. Your skating suffered. And it’s all his fault.”
Her facts aren’t exactly wrong, but the emphasis is odd. She remembers how my skating suffered. Not how I suffered.
Yet I don’t argue the point, because trusting a nineteen-year-old guy to love me forever was something I did to myself. “There are two dozen guys on this team, Mom. I’ll barely see him.” Especially since he’s avoiding me.
“Still,” she grumbles. “There must be better jobs.”
This, too, is hard to argue at the moment, so I change the subject. “How was your trip? Any good meals?”
“The meals were a challenge. Too much butter in everything.”
My mother, ladies and gentlemen—always a hater, even of Parisian food.
And she’s not done with me yet. “This contract you signed with the Legends—did you have Bruce look at it?”
Just hearing my ex’s name makes my stomach twist. “Of course not. It’s not his kind of contract. And I don’t talk to him unless I have to.”
“That’s a shame,” she says. “He’s a tough negotiator.”
This is accurate. He’s a cutthroat sports agent—that’s how we met. Except Bruce would never help me get a job in hockey. In fact, he’s blowing up my email inbox right now trying to get me to headline a skating show in development in Las Vegas.
We’re divorced, though, so I don’t have to read his emails. And unlike my mother, he’s not allowed to text me.
“Hey, Mom? I actually have to go. I have my first one-on-one training sessions today. We start in half an hour.” This excuse has the benefit of being true, so I get up off the mattress and reach for my Legends jacket.
“Oh!” she says, because my mother hates tardiness almost as much as she hates hockey. “We’ll talk soon, then. I need to see this new apartment of yours.”
I glance around the empty room again, picturing the face she’d make if she saw this place. She’d complain about how cold it is, and she’d be apoplectic about my lack of furniture.
Nope. She definitely can’t visit. “I’m really busy with the new job, but we’ll see how things shape up in a few weeks.”
“Weeks?”
I put her off by promising twice that I’ll call her tomorrow. Then I hang up and head outside.
Even if my apartment is terrible, my commute is not. It’s a ten-minute walk. As I turn toward the river, the Legends complex, with its glass and sharp angles, gleams like a modernist jewel in the wintry morning light.
Foot traffic thins as I approach the building on the corner where Eleventh Avenue becomes the West Side Highway. After pushing through the revolving doors, I scan my shiny new Legends ID at the turnstile.
Beep! The light turns green, and I feel a little thrum of victory. From there, I get on the escalator and ride toward the smaller rinks upstairs. I’ve booked sixty minutes of ice time for this morning, because the only guys who scheduled sessions with me are Eric Tremaine and one other player.
I hope Tremaine is bringing some of his buddies, as we discussed. Either way, I’m going to have to make another round of calls and emails and nag these guys to book their sessions.
Upstairs, I pause in the staff locker corridor to pull out my skates and stash my gym bag. The lockers are made of oak, and they give off the vibe of a high-end spa. There’s a palatial women’s bathroom available as well. “And nobody ever goes in there,” Darcy told me. “So it’s basically all yours.” It’s the one perk of being the only woman on the coaching staff.
I head into the smaller practice rink, where I change into a pair of Bauer Vapor hockey skates that set me back almost eight hundred bucks. But a girl has to look the part.
On the adjacent rink, the goalies are practicing with their skills coach. Pucks thwack steadily off the players’ sticks and the goalpost pipes. This is the soundtrack of my life—the crisp, clean scrape of steel against the ice and the rumble of the Zamboni. I love it.
After I retired from figure skating, I thought I’d never go back to a rink. I thought about college. I looked for a program that would fill me with a new kind of passion—one where I could use my brain and not my body.
But it didn’t take. Instead, I kept peering at coaching programs and ultimately found a new way to love skating—one without the soul-crushing anxiety of trying to be a perfect ice princess. Now I’m a different kind of skating nerd, one who isn’t the main character.
That’s the idea, anyway. I check the time and pray that Tremaine hasn’t forgotten our meeting.