Chapter Thirty-Four

After her shower, Darcy lay on her bed noting each place where her muscles already hurt. She couldn’t believe that skating for less than an hour had left her muscles this tired. She used to skate for hours. She knew that skating muscles were unlike the muscles she used in her Peloton classes or even when she ran, but this was ridiculous. Natalie was going to give her so much shit when she realized Darcy was hobbled by a quick pickup game.

Lying there, waiting for Natalie to be ready to go back to the office, she was overcome by the urge to check out their hashtag. It was stupid but she wanted to see what people were saying. The people commenting on what terrible skaters they were and crowing about how hard figure skating is mostly used the official show hashtag. She was less interested in what they had to say than the folks who posted on the #PuckingHotties feed.

These people were funny and queer. They were her people. She wondered if they knew she was gay. She’d been relatively quiet about it but no one had ever asked her. It wasn’t really polite in an interview about a hockey game to be like “and how many of you are lesbians?”

Clearly, it didn’t matter to this crowd because they were having a really good time commenting on their chemistry. The GIFs were what had her laughing the hardest, though. Folks had taken clips from the show and turned them into slow-motion GIFs to “prove” that they were secretly dating. Every time their eyes met or one of them leaned infinitesimally toward the other, someone clipped it and turned it into a GIF.

She scrolled through them, realizing that they’d stopped being hilarious and started making her wonder. People had captured Natalie smiling at her, her eyes flicking from Darcy’s eyes to her lips and back again like they were in a rom-com. Another caught the moment when Darcy and Natalie bumped hips on the ice. Darcy remembered it because Natalie was being a goof by hip checking her in their ridiculous figure skates and it almost made both of them fall over. But played over and over as a GIF, it looked flirty, like they’d been dating forever and this was the kind of fun they had together.

No matter what any of the tweets said, no matter how many GIFs she looked at, it wasn’t real. She’d be lucky if she and Natalie were back to being friends by the end of the job. Everything these people saw on-screen was an illusion. It was their regular, former-teammate-turned-rival chemistry. They weren’t pretending to date, they were simply leaving the rumors to percolate online without shutting them down. No big deal. It didn’t mean Natalie had feelings for her, no matter how many GIFs she watched where Nat’s eyes lit up when they looked at her. Not even the GIF of Natalie’s tongue gliding over her bottom lip.

People’s lips get dry. It’s a thing! She argued with herself, one voice telling her that faking it was way too easy. They fell back into those old habits too easily for it to be fake. But the other voice shouted at her about how any chance she had disappeared a decade and a half earlier. She’d failed at being the kind of person Natalie could want to be with. She was so worried her friends would think she was a hypocrite—the same kind of “cradle-robbing senior” they’d long complained about—that she fumbled a stupid, nothing question from a friend and it hurt Natalie so badly she’d spent a decade trying to bash her face through the boards. In hindsight, a part of her had been so worried about how strong her feelings were and how that could derail all her other goals. Without her singular focus on hockey—and now TV—could she achieve the things she wanted? If she ever wanted to be more than “Marty LaCroix’s daughter,” she literally had to make a name for herself, and her feelings for Natalie were the only thing that came close to matching her drive for recognition.

She sighed and walked into the bathroom to brush her hair once more before Natalie showed up to go back to work. She only wanted to make sure it dried okay. Nothing weird about re-brushing her hair before she saw Natalie again.

“Oh shut up,” she said to the voice pestering her.

There was a knock at the door. When she checked the peephole she saw Natalie waiting outside. She pulled the door open. “Ready?” Darcy asked.

“Uh, yeah. Were you talking to someone? I thought I heard you say ‘shut up.’” Natalie raised her eyebrows, waiting for an explanation.

“What? No. I mean, there’s no one here...and it would be weird if I were talking to myself...” Oh my god. Five minutes scrolling through Twitter, and she’d become incoherent.

Natalie shrugged. “Okay. I didn’t want to interrupt if you were on the phone or something.” She stepped back so Darcy could leave the room. “Grace called me before my shower.”

Darcy turned and walked backward so she could face Natalie. “Really? Why?” Darcy held up a hand. “No, let me guess. She wanted to call and tell you how terrible I am and that you shouldn’t even pretend to like me for a silly TV show because...what did she call me? Oh right, ‘the fucking evil bitch who I hate with the power of a thousand suns.’”

Natalie blinked and jabbed at the elevator button. “That’s some memory you have.”

“It’s not every day that you get screamed at in the dining hall by a near stranger. It left an impression.”

Natalie tried to hold in her laugh but her shoulders shook. She was practically cackling when the elevator doors opened. A white, middle-aged couple stepped out and gave Natalie a look.

Darcy filed into the elevator and waited for Natalie to follow.

Natalie wiped her eyes. “Oh my god, she is going to love that you remembered. Yes, she was concerned that I might fall prey to your feminine wiles.”

It was Darcy’s turn to crack up. “Tell me she didn’t say ‘feminine wiles.’”

“No. But she remembers you and her hatred burns to this day. I told her there was no way in hell it was going to be a problem. Right?” Natalie looked up at Darcy.

Darcy was not going to give any hint of the way her heart took a dive at Natalie casting aside the idea so casually. “Obviously. You hate me, so...”

Natalie stared at her for an unnerving amount of time. When she looked ready to respond, the elevator dinged and the doors slid open to the lobby. Whatever the rest of their conversation might have been died when they stepped out of the shiny metal box. Darcy let Natalie walk ahead of her. She did hate her, right?