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Everything in this old house was starting to go. It was beyond time to move. I headed down the hall, the same one I’d walked a thousand times, and went into my room.
I stopped immediately. The room was the same as always. Blue mismatched curtains and bedspread, old shelves full of secondhand, dog-eared textbooks. Old hockey sticks were propped against the wall, and posters of the greats in action on the ice lined the room.
One thing was different.
Winter DeLaurie was standing staring at the framed photos on the wall, looking like every teenage dream I’d ever had. It felt odd as hell to see her there, in my old room. My past and present colliding hard.
The story I’d told her parents the night before had been real. My first glimpse of the Ice Queen. After, I’d been aware of Winter at school, but she’d never been within my reach. Beautiful, aloof, rich, and smart. She had lived in another world that had revolved around football and country clubs. She had always been a universe away.
But not anymore. Now, she was standing right there, in my high school bedroom, smiling at my photos. A part of my life, finally.
“If you’re looking for the embarrassing ones, I keep them under lock and key,” I drawled, closing the door behind me and leaning against it.
“Liar. Your mom is already getting them out. Your time is coming, Martino,” she teased as she walked past my desk, trailing her hand over the place I’d spent countless hours sketching and studying.
“So, you’re just here to be nosy?” I wondered.
She nodded. “Of course.”
I fought the smile brought on by her cheeky tone and moved to the bed. “Well, knock yourself out. I just need to change.”
Without another word, I pulled my wet T-shirt over my head and threw it into the hamper.
Winter studied me, her pretty lips parting in an O of appreciation, before she turned away. “I should leave you to it, then,” she said quickly. Flustered.
A ridiculous reaction, considering everything that had happened between us but here we were. My jaded little brat was still so innocent underneath her icy exterior.
She went to walk past me, and I caught her wrist. “Should you?”
There was something magical about her in this room. The place where I’d had my first wet dreams, fumbling myself to completion before I could even understand my growing body. My mecca of unfulfilled, naïve teenage desire, and the woman who could represent those half-formed, painfully unreal fantasies. She gazed up at me, her breath coming quick.
“Yes?” she breathed.
“You don’t sound sure,” I murmured, moving closer and not stopping until her back gently met the door.
“I-I don’t know,” she muttered.
Her gaze was stuck to mine, the past weaving its spell on her just like it had with me. The fact that I was here with her now, after we’d graduated, was so unlikely. There were a million reasons why it might have never happened. Winter could have chosen someone else for her little charade. I might have stayed in Denver. I might have never come across her in the locker room that night in The Dunes, and we’d have remained near strangers who passed each other on campus with only a second glance. A girl I used to go to school with. Our lives nudging against each other but never intersecting.
“Do you want to?” I murmured and brushed her hair back. It was so satiny, I loved sinking my hands into it. I settled for running my fingers through it. Playing with it, and her.
“Do you want me to?” she countered, her blue eyes curious.
I shook my head. “I finally have a cheerleader in my room, all to myself. Why would I want her to go?”
She huffed. “Like you couldn’t have had a cheerleader in your room, anytime.”
“But not you.”
There was only one cheerleader who had ever held my interest, and she was staring up at me like she needed to be kissed. Lately, that thought crossed my mind a lot. Once you got past the cold, icy exterior, if she let you, there was a burning, needy, unsatisfied girl under there, desperate to be touched.
The Ice Queen, isolated in her frozen fortress no longer.
I leaned in and ghosted my lips up her cheek. She shivered. She was insanely responsive. Her body having entire conversations with mine without ever speaking a word.
“Your mom might come in,” she whispered, her eyes widening as I trailed my lips to the corner of hers, pressing a kiss there.
“Hmm, she might. Better make it count now, before she does.”
