She dug her nails into my shoulder and I nodded, sniffling a little and desperate to take my chance and get away from her before Cade could leave.
"Are you sure?" Cade asked, still addressing me rather than Katy, whose face was turning visibly pink.
"I'm Katy, by the way."
Cade shook Katy's proffered hand and then the hands of her friends as she introduced them one by one, but I could feel his attention remaining mostly on me.
Katy tried again. "So you're new here, huh? Ice Wings?"
"Uh-huh," Cade nodded, reaching up and rubbing the back of his thickly muscled neck, still completely unaware of what he'd just walked into.
"You should come party with us this weekend. Sara's parents are going to Chicago for three days."
Katy was laying it on thick, tilting her head to the side as she spoke to Cade and biting her lower lip as her sugar-cookie blonde hair tumbled around her face in glossy waves. Like him, she was clearly used to positive attention from others.
Cade turned back to me.
"Are you going, Ellie?"
The look of genuine shock on Katy's face at that moment was almost worth the beating I knew I was going to get either that afternoon or at sometime later.
"Uh," Katy stuttered, thrown off by Cade's question, "Ellie, um, Ellie's busy this weekend."
I knew I had to get the hell out of there so I took my chance when Cade turned to me for confirmation of my absence at the upcoming party.
"Yeah, I'm busy this weekend. And I'm late for work so see you guys later."
I ran the whole way home from school, terrified that Katy was going to catch up with me. Then I waited in the debris-strewn driveway of my family's trailer until my breathing slowed. The last thing I needed was a grilling from my mom.
It was dark when I stepped quietly through the front door, taking care to ease it closed so it didn't make a sound. Darkness was good, it meant my mother was probably passed out in bed. I tip-toed down the narrow hallway to the second bedroom and opened the door. All three of my little brothers were sat on the floor, whispering to each other as they pushed toy cars around an old plastic racetrack one of them had found in the woods a few weeks ago. At the sound of the door opening, they all looked up at me. Three round, grubby, anxious faces, terrified they'd woken my mother.
"It's just me, little ones."
Jacob was seven, pale and dark-haired like me, and he was the one who watched the two younger ones when I wasn't around. Then there was David. David was four years old, quieter than any small child had any right to be and prone to hiding in cupboards when our mom was on the rampage. Finally, Baby Ben. That's what we called him - Baby Ben. Barely two and the only blonde in the Hesketh family. All three of them were underdressed, hunched over their cars and pressed against each other to try and keep warm in the drafty, mostly unheated trailer.
"Ellie!"
Baby Ben's face creased into a wide smile but even he knew to whisper when he spoke. I noticed the crust of snot on his upper lip, as well as the rattle in his chest whenever he inhaled. He'd had some kind of cold or chest infection for a couple of weeks by that point and the fact that it didn't seem to be going away was starting to worry me.
"Have you boys eaten?"
Three little heads shook back at me. They hadn't eaten. I left them playing in the bedroom and walked back to the kitchen, ignoring the hollow feeling in my own belly and opening the cupboards one by one, knowing I wasn't going to find anything but going through the motions anyway. A few slices of bread so stale it was hard and speckled with mold and a jar of instant coffee that seemed to have solidified into a solid mass. The fridge was no better. Off-brand ketchup, an empty container of milk and some bananas so brown and squishy that none of the boys had yet tried to eat them. Also, a half-full bottle of vodka on the bottom shelf and two six packs of beer. Helpless anger rose up in my chest at the sight of the fresh alcohol, which hadn't been there that morning when I fed the boys the last of the cereal and told them mom was going to go shopping that afternoon. They needed to eat. Baby Ben needed medicine so he didn't spend the whole night hacking and coughing.
I searched through the couch cushions and my bag and managed to come up with just over four dollars in change. It wasn't enough. So I walked out to the shed - one place I knew my mother would never look - to find the crumpled Zip-loc bag I'd stuffed between two rafters for situations like this. There was a single ten dollar bill inside it. Fourteen dollars. I wasn't about to sneak into my mom's room to check her purse so it was going to have to be enough.
Chapter 2: Cade
I offered to go to the grocery store for my mom out of boredom, not helpfulness. We'd been in North Falls for a little over a week at the time and it was only just starting to sink in that it was home for the next ten months until I got drafted. I wasn't worried, really, because worry wasn't an emotion I experienced at that age, but I was disconcerted. By all of it. The smallness of the town. The way total strangers seemed to know who I was. The way they guilelessly engaged me in conversation in a way that would never have happened back in New York City. I looked down at my mother's list, written in her neat, looping handwriting.
"fresh tarragon
white wine vinegar
3 heirloom tomatoes
Ghirardelli baking bar (60%)
unsalted butter"
North Falls' dinky little grocery store had only one of those things - unsalted butter. For fresh tarragon I substituted dried, for the baking bar I bought chocolate chips, for the heirloom tomatoes I made do with the pale, rock hard variety and for the white wine vinegar, well, I had no idea what to buy instead of that. I wandered up and down the aisles in a kind of daze, wondering if my dad had accidentally driven us all into a random wormhole somewhere along the highway and we'd popped out in 1980 or thereabouts. Everything about North Falls seemed to have some kind of dulling filter placed over it, right down to the people themselves.
"Cade Parker?"
I turned around to face a middle-aged man in a John Deere baseball cap.
"Yes."
As soon as my identity was confirmed he smiled and shook my hand enthusiastically.
"Thought so. Not many boys in town as big as you. You looking forward to the season? Been training hard?"
I nodded, preparing myself for what I had already come to expect from these conversations - a grilling on how dedicated I was to Coach Hansen's program and a discourse on how lucky I was to be playing for the Ice Kings. Sometimes, they reeled off the names of former Ice Kings players who were now in the NHL. But just as the man in front of me was about to launch into his spiel someone caught my eye.
A small someone with a halo of thick, dark brown hair. It was that girl from history class - Ellie Hesketh. I don't even know why I was so eager to talk to her, but I was. She had seemed pretty eager to avoid talking to me during class, and again afterwards when I saw her by the school gates. A girl being uninterested in talking to me was so out of the ordinary that that alone was enough to pique my curiosity. There was something else, though, too. Something about her, something compelling that I couldn't quite put my finger on. She had very big, dark, almond-shaped eyes. I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to know more about her.
By the time I managed to extricate myself from the conversation with the older hockey fan, she was nowhere to be found, so I kept wandering the grocery store until I spotted her in the checkout line.
"Ellie?"
She noticeably jumped when she heard me say her name and for a second I actually thought she was going to make a run for it. What the hell was this girl's deal?
"Hi."
'Hi.' That's it. I wasn't sure what else to say so I stood there for a few seconds, trying to think of something and checking out what she was buying. A loaf of bread with a bright orange '50% off!' sticker on it, some dented cans of fruit, some children's cold medicine, a few other things.
She paid with a crumpled ten dollar bill and a plastic bag of change, which she s
eemed hesitant to hand over.
"Ha! Had to search the sofa cushions, huh?"
As a pink flush crept up Ellie Hesketh's neck and across her pale cheeks, it dawned on me that she may actually have had to search the sofa for change and a feeling of mounting horror froze my brain.
"I mean, uh, it's not a big deal if you did. Have to search the couch, I mean. It's, um..."
I trailed off as Ellie steadfastly refused to look at me and the checkout girl cut in.
"There's not enough here for the m-"
"That's fine, no problem."
Ellie grabbed a half-gallon of milk and put it to the side, quickly snatching up her bag of groceries and the few pennies the checkout girl handed to her before practically running out of the store. Without thinking, I pulled a hundred dollar bill out of wallet and handed it over.
"I'll be right back. Put the milk on my bill, too."
Then I rushed out through the automatic doors and into the dark evening to find Ellie. She was already almost out of sight, marching stiffly across the parking lot, but I caught up easily.
"Ellie! Hey! Ellie!"
She looked up at me, her eyes searching my face, but she still didn't say a single thing. The experience of being flustered around a girl wasn't a frequent one for me but Ellie Hesketh managed to have me babbling like an idiot with a single glance - even then, even before anything had happened.
"I'm sorry if I - uh, I'm sorry about making a stupid joke. I was just joking. I mean, it wasn't, I didn't mean it as an insult."
She was so small next to me and the parking lot was so dimly lit. Was she shaking? A wild urge to pull her into my arms suddenly overtook me but I resisted, perfectly aware of how such a gesture would make things even more awkward than they already were. So I just kept blathering.
"I bought the milk for you. If you don't mind."
She stayed silent so I kept going, pouring words out of my mouth in a desperate attempt to keep her there, standing in front of me. It wasn't like me to act like that, at all. People - especially girls - usually got flustered around me, not the other way around.
"It's not - it's not charity. I don't know - I mean I'm not sure what your situation is but it's just some milk. Can't have cereal without milk, right? Wait here, OK? I'll be right back, just wait here."
Burning with acute, unfamiliar embarrassment but unwilling to let Ellie go, I ran back into the store to get my groceries, half expecting her to be gone when I got back outside. She was still there, though, right where I'd left her, stock still and disconcertingly quiet. I handed her the bag in my hand. Not just the milk, but everything I'd bought and finally she looked up at me, her eyes glistening.
Oh my God. Tears. She was crying. I was eighteen years old at the time, the product of a solid upper middle class upbringing, but also an incredibly sheltered one. Although it should have been obvious, I had no idea why Ellie Hesketh was crying and I was convinced it was because of something I'd done.
"I'm sorry. Ellie, oh shit. Are you OK? I'm sorry about my stupid joke. What's - what's going on? Did I-"
She cut me off before I could finish, her voice a whisper, thick with emotion.
"Cade?"
"Yes?"
"Please don't tell anyone at school about this."
"No, of course not, I won't say a-"
"Thank you."
And then she was gone. I stood watching her walk away, my mind racing with things I could have said or done to prevent her upset. I stayed out there for a few minutes, trying to make sense of what had just happened and convinced that I'd handled everything so badly she was never going to speak to me again. Then I walked slowly back into the store and repurchased all the items on my mother's list, the ones I'd just given to Ellie.
When I got home, my mother was horrified. Not by my lateness, and not by the fact that there was barely anything left from her hundred dollars. She didn't even notice the money. No, the real cause of her upset was the lack of fresh tarragon.
"Really, Cade?" She asked me, eyes wide. "They didn't have fresh herbs?"
"Uh, no. They had some of those basil plants in the plastic bags, but nothing else."
My mother looked over at my father, who was sitting at the kitchen table and listening to our exchange.
"James, where have you taken us?"
She was only half-serious and my dad knew it. He looked up at me, grinning.
"You see what this is doing to your mother, son? You better get drafted as soon as possible or she's going to die out here in the sticks due to lack of fresh herbs and Louboutins."
I chuckled. My dad was, like my mom, only half-joking. We'd known since I was around twelve that the NHL was a possibility but it was only within the last couple of years that it had become what it now was - destiny. I was six foot four and two-hundred and twenty pounds of muscle. I was also really, really good at playing hockey. Good enough to have scouts sniffing around by the time I was eleven, good enough for ESPN to have covered my junior career so far.
"Amazing hands for a kid his age - and a kid his size." That's what my former coach had said - it's what everyone said. Finesse and size. I was the perfect hockey package. My parents were determined to maintain control, though. I wasn't going to be sold to the first bidder. The NHL was as close to a foregone conclusion as it got, all that mattered was that I didn't go to some second-rate team for a second-rate salary. Other kids my age, boys I'd grown up with and played with, were chafing at their parents ambitions for them but not me. If anything my ambition outmatched theirs - or so I thought. All I'd done since I was a kid was eat, sleep and breathe hockey. It was all that mattered. Until Ellie Hesketh came along and crept into my heart like a tiny, bedraggled kitten.
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About The Author
Jessica Lake is a romance writer from Montreal, Canada. She spends a lot of time daydreaming about the kind of hard-on-the-outside-soft-on-the-inside alpha males she loves to write about. In her spare time she loves to read, walk in the snow and bake pastries beyond her skill level. Her writing partner is a fluffy orange cat named Freckle - he is full of ideas (most of them about food). Jessica loves to hear from her readers so don't be shy!
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Other works by Jessica Lake:
Cade: Fire And Ice (A New Adult Hockey Romance)
Hot Blooded Page 28
