Neither option gave her confidence in bringing up the taboo subject. Moreso than that, she didn’t want to bring up the taboo subject with Jack. She understood—in a way that only a girl who grew up with her mother could—why he wanted to keep that part of his life safely quarantined. But on the other hand, she understood—in a way that only a grown woman who’d learned about avoiding the truth could—why that was an impossible dream on his part.
He noticed her pensiveness as they got on the Holly Jolly Trolley. All roads in the holiday transport led downtown to the square where the ice rink was set up around the fountain. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing, really.” The falsehood wasn’t even convincing to her own ears. “I’m just…out of practice, I guess.”
The tram made stops at the big department stores, the electric company’s epic model-train display, and the Riverfront where the park paths had been decorated and lit up. It was Christmas Eve, and the city had really pulled out all the stops in attracting holiday revelers. If the businesses weren’t already closed, they were letting their workers out after lunch and the streets were flooded with shoppers, families, and traffic. A horse-drawn carriage, painted white and decked out in greenery garland with lush red bows, pulled up alongside them, the driver’s top hat coming up even with the bottom edge of the tram’s window. “I mean, at dating.”
“You?” Jack snorted. “I’m the one who’s been an anti-social hermit for two years.”
A young couple sat under the red and green plaid blanket on the seat. A small brown figure appeared on the back of the carriage seat and stuck spindly arms into the girl’s hair at the back of her neck. The girl shivered and snuggled closer to her boyfriend with a laugh while the color drained from Lin’s face with the Chillsprite’s widening smile.
She looked away from the tableau and found her gaze attracted to a narrow alley between two buildings. A pile of darkened refuse shifted and she saw more dark bodies, scampering along the building’s sandstone facade. She tore her gaze away from the out of doors and away from the things other people couldn’t see. Instead, she focused on Jack. “Well, you at least started out with more social skills than the rest of us combined. Bailey used to tease you about it in college. Remember we crowned you the Ambassador to the Norms?”
Jack’s eyebrows lifted and crashed together. “You made me the campus face of an Elder God, I don’t thnk that counts as a social advantage.”
“Well, the club’s name was ‘Campus Crusade for Cthulhu’. We needed someone respectable to put a face on our eldritch and nefarious doings, otherwise we couldn’t get a campus room to hold meetings.” They arrived at the square and Jack’s hand at the small of her back sent a jolt of awareness through her. He offered his elbow and she took it as they began to walk. Her lips quirked up. “You’d still make a pretty good-looking face guy for an evil cult of evil, you know.”
The ice rink—a boxed-in platform with concrete Jersey barriers around it—came into view. They were on the opposite end of the entrance, and the square was crowded with tents. “If I remember correctly, we voted you Virgin Sacrifice.” He waggled his eyebrows.
They passed a little petting zoo with a real—and very real-smelling—reindeer and some lop-eared Arctic rabbits, tents with food vendors, and the ornately decorated shelter with a line of fidgety children snaking out and around that advertised pictures with Santa.
She shook her head. “That was Starla. Blondes have all the fun. I was Hysterical Survivor. The whole ‘Japanese schoolgirl and her pet tentacles’ thing.”
He had the grace to blush. “We rode you kind of hard with that, Bailey and I.” Jack steered her with increasing speed towards their destination—an inflatable snow palace whose back entrance opened onto the ice rink.
“Well into the EvoWorld days.” She laughed at the memory. College had given her enough perspective and distance from her mother to see that her Asian heritage held other effects besides isolation and superstition. Good-natured ribbing from close friends had given her confidence to express to them when she’d had enough, and helped her find her own personal boundaries. “What stopped you?”
He gave her a strange look as they queued up outside the inflatable behind a boisterous group of teenagers. “You dressed the part.” The sun came out from behind the clouds and shed silvery pale light down on the plaza. Even close to noon, the overcast skies lit enough to wash out the twinkle-lights but not blind. “EvoWorld’s second Halloween? I remember because you busted the entire Art Department the week before to create assets with the theme. It was our first real holiday event.”
She remembered well. They were all nervous over the idea, wondering if anyone would care that they’d replaced some of the background enemies with ghosts and jack o’lanterns, or that they’d redecorated the Enchanted Forest with fall colors. Back then, it was all just pixels on a screen. The event turned out to be a massive hit, and the first of many. A gamble that paid off.
She returned his look as they moved forward under the inflatable portcullis. “That one I threw together at the last minute because I’d been so busy riding the art department.” She shook her head. “It was a thrift shop plaid skirt and a bunch of skinny balloons.” She’d drawn circles on the balloons to look like tentacles and tied them around her waist underneath the skirt. “It was lazy and lame, by our standards. And more than a little silly.” And she’d felt rather bad about playing to the stereotype by then.
Jack avoided her gaze, suddenly finding the inflatable castle fascinating. “It was a short skirt. When I saw you in it, I had…thoughts.”
“There were balloon tentacles. I should have at least made them out of stuffed pantyhose. It was a silly costume.” The modern her cringed over how much of a harassment lawsuit that might have invited. As they grew older in EvoWorld, they’d learn to keep the fun but lose the lawsuit-bait. Antics like that were excused in a wild-west start-up, but not if they wanted to go further than start-up.
He flicked his eyes to her, and back up again. “They were not silly thoughts.”
“Oh.” By that time, he’d been married to Nancy. She had convinced herself to move on, to push her crush on him further and further into the background, to the point that the constant awareness of him was background noise to her life and nothing she allowed to occupy her thoughts.
Great move, Sanada. Way to go from zero to awkward in point-oh-four seconds. “You know, I haven’t ever been down here, I don’t think.” She said it more to change the subject than anything else.
The tension in his body lessened. “I haven’t been since I was maybe twelve.”
Out on the rink, twelve seemed about the most common age. Groups of laughing pre-teens wove in and out of clusters of younger families, teenagers on dates, and one gracefully-skilled elderly couple who could have come right out of a silver-screen musical. “It must have been fun.” She could see a caramel-haired young Jack, gliding around on ice skates. Probably surrounded by a bevy of pre-teen girls, eager for his attention.
“My mom took me down here, just the two of us. We lived in a one-bedroom on the East End that smelled like cabbage and cigarette smoke. We came down every weekend the rink was up on her day off.” His tone was so pensive, he might have been talking to himself.
She removed the girls from her mental picture. Her eyes drifted away from the youngsters in the sleekly-designed polar fleece. There. A kid wearing a gray hoodie and a plaid shirt over top of it struggled to keep his feet underneath him. Dogged determination radiated from every hand-me-down fiber of his being, from his unruly hair to his rental skates and the fix of his attention on the inflatable castle’s topmost spire.
The weight of unanswered questions pressed down on her. She wasn’t even certain that Shane was in trouble. And she could have imagined the whole exchange between herself and Kit. Reading too much into it, that’s me. My mother’s daughter, seeing youkai behind every bush and tree. “Sounds like a wonderful memory.”
The line move
d forward and they entered the inflatable. Inside, strung up in blue and green lights, a plywood counter took up the right-hand wall where teenagers handed out pairs of rental skates. The left side of the interior held rows of beat-up benches where dads struggled to get their kids’ feet into ice skates and moms wiped noses. Rubber mats lining the floor collected the ice melting off skate blades in large puddles and gave the interior a relative humidity much higher than the open air.
The far corner was cordoned off with bright blue tarps hung from the castle’s frame. A hand-lettered sign for ‘Shoe/Stroller Check-$2’ made Lin smirk at the crass commercialism, but Jack handed money and their shoes to the teenager by the curtain, in exchange for a little numbered key on a safety pin.
“Shall we, my lady?” He held out his hand to her, beneath the puffed-up portcullis.
“I’d be delighted.” My handsome prince.
~*~
When they emerged from the back end of the inflatable, Jack wasn’t too sure about their chances of making it around the rink. Some Winter King I am. I can’t even ice-skate.
He took his first wobbly steps off the plywood ramp and onto the ice. A group of pre-teen girls glided past him in a rainbow of pastel hoodies, and the wind from their passing had a good chance of knocking him over. But the rough ice at the entrance gave way to a liquid-smooth feeling the first time he pushed off with his toe pick and a sensation all but forgotten swept over him.
“Oh. Oh wow. I’m going to get a workout.” Lin wobbled up next to him. “I can already feel my thighs starting to shake.”
His mind was already on dangerous ground with the retrieved memory of the year Lin dressed up as the stereotype and busted through his carefully-constructed preconceptions of her as the group’s little sister—cute, but hands-off. Thinking about her thighs shaking—and all the ways that might happen—took his mind away from the important business of staying upright and he felt his own legs lose the all-important real estate directly below him. “Whoops. Going down.” He did what he said, in a rather graceless heap at the edge of the wall, and looked up at her.
Her eyes crinkled at the corners as her mouth twitched up into a smile.
“Sure. Have fun at my expense.” His good-natured retort made her smile widen and he realized he’d be okay with prat-falling for the rest of the afternoon if that smile would stick around. “This was a lot easier when I was twelve.”
“Closer to the ground.” She ducked her head to hide the laugh bubbling up. As she raised her hand to cover her mouth, the motion had the same effect as his distraction and her other arm flailed. “Oh, shit!” Her legs flew out from under her. He twisted his body just in time to break her fall and she landed hard in his lap. Just where he wanted her, although at a velocity that was decidedly un-sexy. The breath whooshed out of him and fogged the air.
She draped her arms over his shoulders. “Can we just stay like this?”
Yes. “If you don’t mind my butt freezing to the ice.”
She struggled to her feet with the aid of the Jersey barrier. Jack took a little more time getting his legs folded under him and his body upright, not all of it due to skates. “Come on,” he said. “We’re both smart people, we can figure this out.”
They did make it around the rink once, and the second time with enough confidence for Jack to put his arm around her waist. With her hip bumping against his, they found a rhythm in less time than Jack expected. Her body fit against his and she seemed to pick up his leans into the turns.
“This is…nice,” she said, after a few laps. “We work well together.”
Her words could be innocuous, referring only to ice skating. But he couldn’t help feeling hope zinging through him. Small hope, since she’d used ‘nice’ instead of ‘earth-shattering’ or ‘my, what a big—’ “That we do. Why didn’t we do this sooner? We should have done this sooner.”
The light was fading as late afternoon approached, bringing with it more clouds like those that had been coming for the past week and a half—heavy with promise of precipitation, but not quite there on the delivery. Just enough to bring hope for a white Christmas, but not enough to bring snow. When she pleaded for a break, Jack bought them styrofoam cups of watery hot cocoa from a church group who’d set up shop right outside the rink barriers.
The families had peeled away to dry off cranky kids with bruised bottoms, leaving an older crowd consisting of a handful of hipsters, the elderly ice-dancing couple, and older teenage boys wearing hockey skates and showing off for the teenage girls drinking hot cocoa behind the Jersey barrier. Lin answered him after they’d passed the boisterous crowd. “No, we shouldn’t have.”
“Shouldn’t have what?”
“Done this sooner.” She sent him a pointed look. “You were married, remember?”
He grimaced. “No, I meant before I was married.” One thing he never, ever did to any of his girlfriends was cheat. He went out of his way to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Nancy had many bitter faults to lay at his feet during the divorce, but infidelity was not one of them. “We worked well together back then, too.”
She seemed suddenly interested in her footwork. “Bad timing, I guess.”
Bad subject to bring up. “I’ve gotten smarter in the intervening years.” He glanced at her sidewise, then ahead, steeling himself for some honesty. “I…made mistakes in my marriage. I don’t want to repeat them with you.” At least his confidence in skating had increased enough for him to attempt a turn and move backwards. He was surprised to find it easier than he thought. Maybe the body doesn’t forget everything.
His confidence in dating, however, still clung to the wall, with its feet sliding around underneath. He took her hands.
“Hey, no getting fancy. You have me at a disadvantage.” Her light protest might have held an edge of deeper meaning, and he might have just been paranoid.
“I’m the one going backwards, here.” He tightened his grip on her fingers. “I’m not just looking for something casual.” He looked away. “I know we started out that way…”
“Jack.” She lifted her chin to meet his eyes, and her stare pierced him. “What we have is physical, and hot, and so addictively sexy it should be outlawed for people our age.”
His thoughts before about making her legs shake were bad enough. She cut through his insecurities with a hot knife with that direct, dark-eyed gaze of hers, though. But if sex was all she wanted from him, he was pretty sure the novelty would wear off in a few weeks. He took a breath.
She wasn’t finished. “And what we have is also complicated. Full of history. Comes with its own baggage cart with his and hers matched luggage.” She tugged on his hands and pulled herself closer. They drifted to a stop in the middle of the rink. “You can’t plan it out.”
He looked down at her fingers, clasped in his, and the kidskin gloves that insulated him from her touch. “I just want to declare my intentions.” It sounded rather old-fashioned.
Her lips curved up as she leaned into him. Bright slices of noise from the teenagers’ passing broke around them as she rose up on her toes to touch her lips to his. “I have intentions, too, Jack.”
~*~
Wherever her head was, it was filled with steam and whipped cream and glitter. The rest of her was kissing Jack Winters in the middle of downtown on an ice rink, with bells ringing in her ears and champagne replacing the blood in her veins.
She knew what he was asking of her. What he tried to tell her. For someone like him, for whom relationships had come easy and gone just as easily, not knowing how things would play out between them must be unsettling. She was used to living with the uncertainty. It was only after she and Roger had become a sure thing that they fell apart. She assumed Roger would invest more in the relationship, and he believed he no longer needed to. She didn’t want to tick off check-boxes or meet quarterly goals.
She wanted passion and partnership and compatibility, and above all, a place and a person to give her whole self. She felt her kn
ees go weak as she realized just how deep she could fall with Jack. As if the crush never went away. Was it possible to be star-struck at thirty-nine? Her fingers curled into his jacket sleeves as he deepened the kiss and she fell just a little more.
Bells reached her ears and his tight grip eased. Her face was on fire and his eyes had darkened to thin rings of pale blue around deep black pupils. The rise and fall of his chest against hers echoed the heartbeat sending blood and heat right to her core. “Do you hear bells?” Even his voice seemed to carry sparkles in it.
She closed her eyes, took a deep cleansing breath through her nose. Her head cleared, but only just enough for her to float back to earth. The sparkles righted themselves as “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies” playing from the giant inflatable animatronic Nutcracker soldier in the display at the opposite end of the skating rink from the castle.
But the bells—“St. Peter’s. Christmas Eve Mass.” Jack shook his head. “Had me worried there.” He smiled down at her. “Have we given the kiddies enough of a show?”
At least her voice came back to normal, even if the rest of her was still filled with helium. “If that’s St. Peter’s, we’d better get going if we want to get up to Starla’s on time.” A kitchen pow-wow with her best friend might just be the thing she needed.
Hand in hand, they glided back to the ice castle. The rubber mats on the floor performed the physical task of slowing the slip-sliding, gliding, not-quite out of control feeling in her body, but the rest of her still felt like it was on ice skates, and someone had just run the Zamboni over the inside of her soul.
~*~
They stumped their way over to the curtained-off area of Shoe Check, shedding melting ice from skate blades as they went. Jack’s skates touched the edge of a puddle made by a low part in the uneven, rubber-matted floor and a hissing crackle, almost too quiet to notice in the background noise, drew her attention as if it had been a siren. She glanced down and noticed the puddle freezing over. “Jack.” She tapped the back of his blazer.
WinterJacked: Book One: Rude Awakening Page 20
