Page 106 of Ice Princesses
I press my lips together and look back out at the ice, at anything that isn’t her face right now.
The doors at the far end of the rink open and close as people move in and out, and every single time, my attention snaps to it before I can stop myself.
“I’m not hiding,” I say. I hear, again, how defensive it sounds, but I don’t take it back.
“Okay,” Sandra replies, completely unconvinced. “Then when were you planning to tell her?”
My stomach drops.
I turn to her slowly. “Tell her what?”
She raises a brow, like she’s deciding how much patience she has for this. “The job,” she says.
I freeze.
“What job?” I ask, because apparently I’ve decided to commit to the lie, even though it’s already collapsing in on itself.
Sandra lets out a short laugh. “The one in Wyoming, Ceci. The one you’ve beenthinking aboutfor the past week and pretending is just a hypothetical so you don’t have to admit to yourself what it actually is.”
I stare at her.
“How do you even?—”
“You’re not subtle,” she interrupts. “You’ve been checking your email every five minutes, and then you disappear for forty minutes at a time to call someone and come back looking like you ran a marathon.”
I open my mouth, close it. Then open it again. “It’s not like that—” I clear my throat. “She’s not interested in me like that.”
“Dios mío,” she replies, and groans so loudly, I have tolook around to see if someone notices we are having this conversation here. “Why are you being so dense?”
I drag a hand down my face, trying to regroup, trying to figure out how this turned into a conversation I was very intentionally not having.
“It’s not a job,” I say finally. “It’s a short-term maternity cover before the Olympics for an assistant coach, and it’s not even guaranteed full-time after that.”
“And where is it?” she asks.
I hesitate.
“Ceci.”
“It’s like an hour and half away from Lake Jasper,” I admit.
Sandra doesn’t say anything. Which is worse.
“Okay, you have a point,” I add quickly. “But that doesn’t mean anything. It’s just—timing. It’s practical. It’s?—”
“Closer,” she finishes for me.
The word sits there between us, heavier than everything else we’ve said. I don’t respond. Because that’s the part I haven’t said out loud, not even to myself in a way that feels real.
Sandra studies me for a second, not unkindly, but with a level of clarity that makes it very difficult to keep pretending.
“We’ve talked about this before,” she says. “You’re allowed to want things.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?” she asks.
I exhale, long and slow, and let my gaze drift back across the rink. To the entrance again. Still nothing.
