Chapter 77

Chapter 77

Ellis’s room at the Radisson was so generic, we could have been anywhere in the world.

It was absolute heaven. I took my first hot shower in days, then rigged up a cold pack for my throbbing foot with the plastic bag from the ice bucket, while Heath figured out how to connect his phone to the Bluetooth speaker on the nightstand. We both availed ourselves of his painkillers before he hopped in the shower too. He was on the same pills I’d been prescribed after my fall at 2006 Nationals, and I was already looking forward to the warm-bath sensation that would wash over me once they kicked in.

He came out of the bathroom wearing a towel around his waist, beads of water clinging to his back. The hot water had made his scars stand out in sharp relief.

“How’s your foot?” he asked.

“Better. The ice is taking the swelling down.”

I moved over on the memory foam mattress to make room for him, and he lay back against the pillows, shoulder touching mine. His moody folk-rock playlist wrapped around us like a soothing sonic blanket, but I still wasn’t feeling anything from the medication.

“Let me see,” Heath said.

“It’s gross.”

“Katarina.”

With a sigh, I twisted around to lay my foot in his lap—careful to hold my hotel bathrobe shut, since I wasn’t wearing anything underneath. Not that he hadn’t seen it all before.

Heath examined my wounds, the heat of his hands grazing my skin. I flinched.

“Sorry,” he said. “Did that hurt?”

“No.” Yes, but I didn’t want him to stop.

“Want me to bandage it up again?”

“Probably better to let it breathe.”

Heath nodded and set my foot gently down on the comforter, then reached behind him to adjust the pillows for more support.

“Your back?” I said.

He nodded. I stood on my knees and gestured for him to sit up.

“You don’t have to—” he started.

“I want to.” I smoothed my palm over his trap and dug my thumb under his scapula. “Unless you don’t think you can take it?”

Heath smiled. “Do your worst.”

For the next twenty minutes, I worked my way through every major muscle in his back. He melted under my touch, eventually stretching out flat on his stomach so I could get more leverage. I straddled his legs and ground my knuckles into his lumbar spine until he groaned.

“You are evil, ” he mumbled into the pillows.

“Oh, come on. You’ve had worse.”

I was only teasing. But with my fingers brushing his scarred skin, it didn’t seem so funny.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Heath flipped over underneath me. “For what?”

“That you had to go through…everything you went through. That I wasn’t—”

“Like you said.” His voice rumbled against my bare thighs. “I’ve had worse.”

“Still.” The belt of my robe was starting to come undone. Heath’s towel had slipped too, exposing his hip bones. “No one deserves—well, whatever the hell Veronika did to you.”

“It wasn’t Veronika.”

I froze.

“She never touched me,” he continued. “Although she did scream a lot, whenever we did something wrong in practice. She said it was so we wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.”

My hands had come to rest on Heath’s chest. His fingertips skimmed the hem of my robe.

“If it wasn’t Veronika,” I said. “Then who—”

My phone buzzed on the nightstand. We both turned to look.

Bella Lin’s smiling face lit up the screen.