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“Surely you have practice.”
“I do.”
I turned back to the sink, scrubbing my hands even though they were already clean. “Then you should be changing. Getting out on the ice.”
“Fedor said you seemed distracted. Maybe upset.”
Damn Fedor and his big mouth.
“It was nothing.”
“You’d tell me if it was?”
I shrugged.
His eyes narrowed. “Does this have to do with Brashe?”
“Stop right there.” I dried my hands, yanking paper towels from the dispenser harder than necessary. “Whatever else you have to say, just don’t.”
“I’m not going to tell you what to do,” he said carefully.
“Good.”
His sigh rang out. “Brashe’s a good guy. I mean that. But he’s got a lot going on.”
“I know that.”
“Do you? Because he’s spent his whole life thinking he’s only worth what he can do on the ice. And I’ve watched what that does to people.”
“This isn’t… We’re not…” I couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Aren’t you?”
I couldn’t figure out what to say.
Crim was quiet for a long moment, studying my face with the same focus he used to read plays on the ice.
“You know what I see when I look at you right now?” he finally said. “The same expression you had when you were sixteen and that asshole Ryan Kellerman asked you to prom as a joke.”
My spine went rigid. “It’s not the same.”
“You wanted it to be real so badly that you convinced yourself it was. Right up until he didn’t show up, and you found out he’d gone with someone else.” His voice gentled. “I’m not saying Brashe is Ryan. I’m saying you have a pattern of seeing the best in people who don’t know what to do with it. I just don’t want you to get hurt again.”
“I can handle this.”
“I know you can. That’s not what I’m worried about.” He squeezed my shoulder. “I’m worried you’re going to fall for someone who doesn’t know how to let himself be caught.”
The words didn’t just sit heavy. They sank into my chest, settling somewhere I couldn’t reach to pull them back out. Because he was right. About Ryan. About the attending physician in my second year who’d complimented my work just enough to keep me hoping he was interested. About every person I’d convinced myself to believe in because the alternative, that I wasn’t worth their honesty, felt worse.
“What if I already am?” I said quietly.
Crim’s expression softened in that way that made me feel fourteen again, grief-raw and trying to figure out how to exist in a family that wasn’t mine by blood but had chosen me anyway.
“Then I’ll be here when you land,” he said. “But you don’t have to jump just because someone’s finally looking at you the way you’ve always deserved.”
After he left, I stood in the empty treatment room, staring at nothing.
Was Crim right? Was I setting myself up for the picnic all over again, but worse because I now knew who Brashe truly was? I’d felt his hand on my face and heard his voice go soft when he said my name.
