I Seduced His Rival: Now the Hockey Star Wants Me novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Lewiston

I didn't take it from him right away.

I looked at it in his hand.

My skate on the front. My terrible drawing. The crease worn soft and gray from three years in a drawer.

"Read it," Chase said again. "Go on. If you don't mean it anymore, it won't hurt to read it."

A woman walking a dog on the sidewalk slowed down to watch us.

"I don't need to read it," I said. "I wrote it."

I took it out of his hand.

I didn't open it.

I tore it in half, right down the fold, the skate on one side and the back on the other.

Chase made a sound.

I held one half out to him.

"You kept it three years," I said. "Keep that."

He didn't take it. He just stared at the torn edge.

Then his face changed.

I'd seen the charm go out of it on the terrace for a second. This time it didn't come back.

"You think he wants you?" he said quietly. "Thibodeau? He doesn't want you. He wants to beat me. He's wanted to beat me since freshman year. You're the puck, Finola. That's all you are. When the season's done, he'll drop you on the ice and skate off."

"Get off my steps."

"You were nothing before me. You'll be nothing after him."

The woman with the dog said, "Hey," sharply, from the sidewalk.

Chase looked at her. Then at me.

He walked away without his half.

I picked it up off the step. I put both halves in the kitchen drawer with the takeout menus and didn't look at them again.

Lewiston, Maine, was white and gray and smelled like woodsmoke on Christmas Eve.

Luc's mother's diner was on Lisbon Street, a long room with red stools and a counter and a pie case with the light on.

She was behind the counter in a red apron with a pencil in her hair.

She looked at me for one second when we walked in, up and down, the way Kat's mother looks at fish at the market.

Then she came around the counter and hugged me so hard I lost my breath.

"You're the skater," she said into my hair. "He never brings anybody. He's never brought one single person."

"Ma," Luc said.

"I'm talking to her."

She sat us at the counter and fed us until I couldn't move. Meatloaf. Mashed potatoes.

Then three kinds of pie, because she couldn't decide which one I'd like, so she'd find out.

I liked the blueberry.

"Blueberry," she said, satisfied, like I'd passed a test. "Good. Lemon people can't be trusted."

Luc was eating his pie with his head down, and the tips of his ears were red.

"He was terrible at skating, you know," she said. "When he was four. He cried every single time he fell down."

"Ma."

"Every single time. Big fat tears. I'd have to go out on the ice in my boots."

"He still can't spin," I said.

His mother laughed so loud the old men at the end of the counter turned around.

Their house was small and yellow on a hill, with a woodstove and a sagging porch.

Luc's room was exactly the way he'd left it at eighteen.

A narrow bed. A shelf of peewee trophies. A poster on the wall of a Bruins defenseman from twenty years ago.

"Oh my God," I said.

"Don't."

"You had a crush on a defenseman."

"I had a role model."

"You kissed the poster. I can tell. There's a mark."

"That's water damage."

I was laughing too hard to answer. He pushed me down onto the narrow bed, and the springs shrieked.

We both froze, listening.

Downstairs, the television was playing a Christmas movie, loud.

"She's half deaf from the diner," Luc said. "Thirty years of a fryer bell."

"Is that true?"

"Mostly."

We went to midnight Mass with his mother and walked back in the snow.

The bed shrieked when he pushed me down, and we froze.

The television downstairs kept playing.

"He's had that bed since he was four," I whispered. "I can hear it."

"We'll be quiet."

I pulled him down by the front of his navy sweater and kissed him.

He tasted like blueberry pie and snow.

"I passed your mother's tests," I said against his mouth. "All of them. Even the lemon thing."

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