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)
She gives him the thumbs-up.
But after the entryway grows quiet, he climbs the stairs to the roof alone. The night air is thick with July heat, and firecrackers still pop in the distance, and the air tastes like sulfur. Fucking Fourth. He drops into one of the lawn chairs and stares up at the dark sky.
A few minutes later, he hears the door open.
Zoe. His heart lifts, then sinks again. “I don’t have a snack,” he says when she quietly sits on the end of the other lawn chair.
“I didn’t come here for that.” She sets a small candle in a tin on the asphalt roof. Then she takes out some matches.
“What are you doing?”
She freezes, tilting an uncertain face toward his. “Maybe I should mind my own business. You can say so. But I thought we should light a candle for her.”
“For…” He swallows hard. “For my mom?”
“Of course for your mom.” Her voice is gentle. “She deserves her own spark on the Fourth, right?”
“Yeah.” His voice is rougher than shards of glass.
She leans over the candle, striking the match and touching it to the wick. Then she settles beside him. He stares at the little flame, breathing through his nose, trying to keep himself in check. Nobody in his life has ever offered to share this burden with him. Nobody.
Then a smooth hand reaches over the one-foot gap between their chairs and takes his. Her voice is so soft he hardly hears her. “Tell me something about her.”
“Um…” He tries to clear his throat. “She was funny. She could always find something to laugh about. Even when things were bad with my father, she’d make these little jokes…” His voice cracks. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” She slips her fingers through his. “Keep going.”
He squeezes her hand and tells her about his mom’s lumpy hand-
knitted scarves and her Motown CDs and how she snuck him chocolate bars when his father wasn’t looking. His voice breaks several times, but Zoe just holds his hand tighter.
“What was her favorite song?”
“‘My Girl,’” he chokes out. “The Temptations. She used to dance around the kitchen singing.”
“Then I guess we’d better sing it.”
“Sing it?” He doesn’t think he can.
So it’s Zoe’s voice that lifts quietly into the darkness. She’s got sunshine on a cloudy day, and Chase is suddenly drowning as Zoe’s thumb strokes the back of his hand in time with the music.
When she finishes, the silence feels holy. The candle flickers between them, sending shadows dancing golden across their bare knees.
“Thank you,” he manages.
In answer, she lifts out of her own chair and sits on the edge of his. He scoots over, making space, until they’re sitting hip to hip, just holding hands. Together, they look up at the starry sky and listen to the last firecrackers of the night. A dog barks in the distance.
He’s never sat this close to anyone he wasn’t taking to bed. But for once in his hectic life, he doesn’t want or need anything more than what this moment of peace has given him.
Chapter 13
Present Day
And that’s all for now,” I tell Tyler Jackson, who’s just finished up a thirty-minute session with me. “We’ll do this again soon,” I say over the pounding headache in my temples.
“Thanks, Coach Zoe,” he says gruffly before skating toward the exit.
I just gave the worst coaching session of my life. We worked on lateral movement. I think. But I’m bleary and distracted after a poor night’s sleep.
Luckily, Chase wasn’t arrested last night or even seriously questioned. It helped that he hadn’t really done anything wrong and that the bartender and another bystander were willing to say so.
It also helped that the cops were Legends fans. It was them, in fact, who put him into the damn taxi. So in the end, I wasn’t even able to help at all.
The upshot is that I was out until two in the morning for nothing. And I’m angry with myself for butting in. I shouldn’t have given Harp my number and asked him to call me. All I did was make trouble for Chase.
You’re too impulsive, Zoe, my mother always says. And it’s the one bit of criticism that is always on point.
After changing out of my skates, I open my Legends locker gingerly. No nasty notes today. Small mercies. I stash my skates and then ride the escalators up to the fourth floor, looking for a free cup of coffee. I pause outside of the office complex, where Darcy is on the phone. Actually she’s on two of them at the same time.
Yikes. I turn toward the players’ lounge instead. There’s laughter in the corner of the room, where a couple of guys are watching something on one of their phones. But Chase isn’t here. Thank God. I can’t face him right now.
I head for the coffee counter, and I’m just slotting a Nespresso pod into the gleaming machine when Alexei Petrov hurries into the room and approaches me. He presses his hands together in the prayer position and does a little bow.