Breeding My Stepsister on the Ice novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: The Ice Again

I read the number on his phone.

Then I read it again, because I'd read a thousand lab values in my life and never one like that.

"Twenty-two," I said.

"Twenty-two million."

"Normal starts at fifteen."

"I know where normal starts, Lainey. You've told me nine times."

I put both arms around his neck in the middle of a bar on Water Street and held on.

Behind us Gemma was still on her chair, still giving a speech nobody could hear.

He talked into my hair.

"A year," he said. "From zero."

"From zero."

"He said it'd never come back."

"He also said mild strain."

He laughed into my neck, and his whole chest shook with it.

Back in January we'd made a deal in bed, with the radiator knocking.

After Match Day, whatever my envelope said and whatever his number said, I'd stop the pill.

I'd taken the last one on Sunday.

He knew. I'd shown him the empty pack on the bathroom counter and he'd looked at it like it was a puck from a hat trick.

At one in the morning we left the bar.

Tate didn't turn toward Bay View.

He drove downtown, with the radio low, and neither of us had touched a drink all night.

The arena sat dark on the river.

He badged us through the side door by the loading dock.

The same night guard looked up from his phone. He was older and had a new parka.

He saw us, grinned, and looked back down.

"Alternate captain," Tate said. "Comes with keys again."

He flipped the breaker.

The work lights came on over the ice in long white rows, exactly the way they had the first time.

Twenty thousand empty seats.

The family box dark above the visitors' blue line.

He found me skates in the equipment room. My size, this time. He'd put them there in October and never said.

He didn't lace them for me.

He watched me lace my own.

Then we stepped onto the ice together.

I skated backward away from him, toes in, push out, drawing lemons all the way to the far blue line, and didn't fall once.

He stood at center with his arms folded and watched me come back.

"Look at you," he said. "Dr. Molloy, defenseman."

"Still not a doctor."

"In July."

I stopped in front of him with a spray of snow.

The work lights hummed.

"Here's the part I didn't say a year ago," he said. "Because I couldn't."

"Okay."

"I want a kid with you. Not a kid. Your kid. One who falls eleven times on Mom's rink and won't let me hold them up and bites me."

"They'll bite you."

"I'm counting on it."

"I want that too," I said. "I want to be a resident who comes home at midnight to a man asleep on the couch with a baby on his chest. I want our kid in the family box with a sign spelled wrong."

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