Chapter 45

Chapter 45

When Bella showed me the photo, I almost didn’t recognize myself.

I looked delicate. Fragile. All that blood marring my white skates and my white dress somehow made me seem even more virginal and feminine.

And Heath looked like he would kill anyone who tried to tear us apart.

After the twins left—for a fancy dinner party with some sponsor in Chicago, which they’d used as an excuse to fly to the Midwest unsupervised—I fell down the rabbit hole. I read every news story, every post about us on Ellis’s obnoxious new blog.

I was shocked by the frenzy. Usually the American public cares about figure skating for two weeks every four years during the Winter Olympics. Even then, it’s the singles and the pairs who capture their attention; we ice dancers are an afterthought. But everyone loves a love story, and that’s what they thought this was.

When I was strong and self-assured, people recoiled from me. They told me I was too competitive, too ambitious, too much. But when I was brought low, bruised and bleeding, a princess in need of rescue instead of a conquering queen, they loved me.

I finally came to bed after midnight, eyes bleary from staring at the computer screen. Heath was still awake. He took off his headphones—I caught a few notes of Sigur Rós before he pressed stop on the click wheel—and pulled back the covers.

Since Nationals, Heath had made me feel so safe and comfortable. It would have been easy to stay, to choose a quiet life with him over the pain and punishment of skating. Easy as falling asleep in a snowdrift, the warm feeling that lulls you to sleep before you freeze to death.

I reached toward him. He closed his eyes, anticipating my touch. My fingers kept stretching, until they brushed over the carving on the headboard.

“Remember this?” I asked.

Shaw & Rocha. I traced the letters. We’d written them only six years before, but it felt like a lifetime.

Heath nodded, something guarded in his expression. “You want to go back,” he said. “Don’t you?”

“I miss it,” I admitted, though that word was far too small to encompass the bone-deep longing I felt to get back on the ice. “I miss—”

“Him.” Heath set his iPod on the nightstand and crossed his arms.

“No, that’s not…I mean, I have missed Garrett, and Bella, but—”

“I won’t lose you again, Katarina. Not to him, not to—”

“I don’t want to go back to him.” I sighed and stood up on my knees, taking Heath’s face in my hands. “I want to go back with you. ”

Heath’s lips ticked upward, but his eyes stayed wary. “You’re sure?”

My thumb found the smooth edge of the mark under his eye. I’d relearned the topography of his body, turned all his scars into familiar terrain. We still hadn’t talked about them, though, or spoken at all about his three years away. I’d started to believe it was for the best. The past was the past. We couldn’t change it.

But the future—the future could be anything we wanted.

“I love you,” I told him. “And I don’t want to skate with anyone but you, ever again.”

Heath’s smile blazed like a torch in the shadows. “I love you too, Katarina.”

Shaw & Rocha, Olympic champions. We could still make it true, it wasn’t too late. We had four years until Vancouver.

He kissed me and pulled me down beside him, and as we tangled the sheets around us, I told myself that this time everything would be different.