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)
“Whoa. Plot twist.” She sits back in her seat. “You and Merritt. I mean, don’t get me wrong, he’s super hot. But it’s hard for me to picture him holding hands with you at summer camp. Or anyone.”
My stomach twists with confusion. It’s hard to reconcile the Chase I knew back then with the chilly one I met today. “Well, he did. Until he didn’t.”
She props up her chin with her hand. “So how did this go down? Did you seduce him?”
“God, no.” I laugh. “I was an awkward virgin when I met him.”
Her eyes dance. “I’m sorry, but it’s hard to imagine you were ever awkward.”
“Think again. I grew up incredibly sheltered. I barely went to high school, because I was too busy competing. Flirting was like a foreign concept to me. And my mother kept up a steady drumbeat about how men only want one thing and then they’re gone.”
“Oh.” Darcy rolls her eyes. “Our mothers would get along well.”
“Yeah. So picture me ten years younger and fifteen pounds ago, watching Chase Merritt charm everyone in western Massachusetts. The female campers all had a crush on him.” After all this time, it’s still so easy to picture Melanie and the rest of the mean girls whispering behind their hands whenever he walked by. “He was the sexiest, most fascinating boy I’d ever met. And my mom hated him, which is always a plus.”
Darcy smirks at me over the rim of her glass.
“To this day I don’t know why he singled me out.”
“Have you looked in the mirror?”
I shrug. “There were dozens of pretty girls, and all of them were better flirts than me. I was always off in a corner somewhere, dreaming about triple-jump combinations.”
“Maybe that’s why he liked you,” Darcy points out. “You were aloof, not falling at his feet.”
“Maybe,” I hedge. “Or else I just seemed like a sure thing. Which I was.” I laugh. “God, I think I fell for him on the first day. He was the most confident person I’d ever met. And he had this attitude—like he didn’t seem to take anything too seriously, but he worked really hard. I wanted to be like that, too.” Hell, I still do.
Darcy looks thoughtful. “I guess I can see that. At least he used to be kind of playful. Not this season, though.”
“No?”
She shakes her head. “Maybe it’s just hockey trouble. His stats are bad, and the press has turned on him. They’re saying that maybe his star is waning. But he isn’t handling it all that well. It’s like he’s broken inside.”
“Broken?” Oh God. It’s worse than I thought.
“What was Chase like at summer camp?” Darcy asks. “Did he throw you in the pool?”
“Sure.” I can’t hold back my smile. “But he threw everyone in the pool. Then somebody dared him to jump off the diving platform. He yelled like Tarzan all the way down.”
Darcy grins. “What else?”
I sit back in my seat and allow myself to remember that summer. I picture Chase on the ice, making everybody smile. Off the ice, he usually had his Bluetooth speaker playing something upbeat. “He woke his campers up with pop music every morning. Their entryway would be, like, shaking with Fall Out Boy or Imagine Dragons. The girls used to complain, but they were all lusting after him. Then there was a lip-sync competition the second weekend. He and I were both assistant coaches—we had to chaperone everything. I thought it would be so lame.”
Darcy makes a motion to the waiter and points at our drinks, ordering a second round. “Please tell me Chase performed a solo.”
“No, the teams were divided up by our dorm entryways—five teams of girls, and one for boys. Every girls’ team picked Taylor Swift songs. But Chase and his guys did ‘Sugar’ by Maroon 5. And they didn’t just phone it in. There was a whole dance number, and they took turns being the front man. And the costumes…” I start to laugh. “Tight jeans, no shirts. And they hit up a Halloween store for matching glitter vests, like the Chippendales.”
Darcy hoots. “Did they win?”
“Chase—bare chested—holding a golden microphone and grinding like Adam Levine? What do you think happened?”
“God.” She dramatically flops back against the upholstery. “Please tell me you have video of some of this?”
I shake my head. That was before I learned to back things up in the cloud, and when I lost my phone a year later, every one of my photos from that summer was gone. I mourned them. “It was just kid stuff. But he was my first love. Until it all went bad.”
She winces. “What happened?”
“I talked Chase into something that was against the rules. He got fired, and I never heard from him again. I texted. I called.” I take a gulp of my drink, because it’s hard to think about that time in my life. “It was bad. I begged him to talk to me. But he never did.”