“You’re so dumb.”

“I’m dumb? Then why haven’t you answered your phone?”

It was my turn to have my face close off, and I shut my mouth and shrugged my shoulders instead.

“No. You don’t get to shrug at me and think that’s enough of an answer. I’ve called you over and over again. I thought you were pissed off at me. I thought you didn’t answer because you were mad at me, so now I want to know why you didn’t other than you blaming yourself for being distracted.”

I rolled my eyes and looked away, shaking my head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter. It matters a lot.”

I lifted my shoulders again.

“Jasmine.”

Why couldn’t he just leave me alone?

“Jasmine.”

Why would he think something so stupid?

“Jasmine.”

I grunted and turned back toward him, hissing, “Because what the hell would I tell you, Ivan? I’m sorry? I’m so fucking sorry? That I didn’t mean to sprain my ankle and ruin everything?” I basically yelled at him. Horror filled me from the tip of my tongue down to the pit of my belly. Why was I yelling at him? And why the hell was I telling him this? Why didn’t he already know it?

His mouth opened, and he looked at me like I’d punched him in the stomach. “Jasmine—”

“I’m sorry, Ivan,” I croaked, horror and helplessness pulsing through my body. “I screwed up. I keep screwing up. I don’t know why I’m yelling at you. You didn’t do anything. It was me.” My voice cracked, and I felt my hand fist. “I fucked up. It was my fault. Not yours.”

I could feel a shout coming up, clogging my throat. Ripping me inside out. And I hated it. I didn’t want it to come out.

“Stop it,” he said, slowly, those eyes bouncing all over my face, something in them still looking like they were in shock. “Get your shit together. You’re coming with me.“

I looked into his eyes and sucked in a breath. “No.”

“No. You want to make it up to me? Get your things for a few days and come with me. I’m not leaving here without you, and I will take you kicking and screaming. If you yell something about being kidnapped, I’ll tell anyone who listens that you’re on drugs.”

I stared at him.

“You owe me the next six weeks, Jasmine. Get your shit together now. We’re going.”

“Ivan….”

He stared at me.

Anger and pain twisted my insides into a thousand knots. “I’m really sorry.”

It was his throat bobbing that caught my attention. His response was a slow, “I know.”

I had fucked up. It made my chest hurt. “I didn’t mean to.”

His throat bobbed again. “I know.”

“I’ve landed that a thousand times.”

Again. “I know, Jasmine.”

“I don’t know what happened.”

If it wasn’t for the breath on my chin, I wouldn’t know he had let a long, low breath out. “I know you don’t,” he basically whispered, so at ease from how he’d just been speaking to me a second ago.

I almost choked. Almost. “I promise I’ll do whatever I have to do to get better.”

But it was Ivan who choked. Ivan who blinked, one, two, three, four, five times, fast, fast, fast. His eyelashes fluttered from how fast he’d done it. Like something got caught in his throat that he couldn’t do anything about.

“Everything and anything. I swear. I know we’ll have to skip most of the Discovery Series and the WHK, but maybe we can still do Skate North America—”

It was his hands that cut me off. Those hands that I was so familiar with, I could pick out from a crowd by touch. The hands that had held mine, held me, so many times I couldn’t count.

But they had never held my face before. At least not the way he did right then. Because his palms went to my cheeks and he cupped them.

And then he cut me off.

With his mouth.

His lips pressed to mine. Surged to mine. Covered them. Hard.

And then he kissed my upper lip between his while I was still trying to figure out what the fuck was happening.

Ivan was kissing me.

Kissing me.

His mouth went to my eyes suddenly, and he pressed his lips from one of my eyelids to the other, quick, fluttering, so light I could barely feel it. One brow bone and then the other. And I just sat there.

I sat there and I didn’t move away or push him away or tell him no.

His mouth went over my cheeks, warm and everything wonderful in the world. “You tried to get up,” he said to me in a voice so low I barely understood his words. “You tried to get up and keep skating, and I swear I almost started crying right then.”

He kissed one cheek and then the other, soft, his mouth brushing over the bridge of my nose as he moved around.

“Only you would sprain the shit out of your ankle and try to get up to keep going,” he said to me, his voice hitching. “You kept saying, I’m sorry, Ivan. I’m sorry, Ivan. I’m so sorry, and I told you to shut up because if you kept saying it any more, I would have been the one….” His breath came out stuttered and choppy over my face, and his hands moved from my cheeks to cup my ears.

His mouth shifted over mine, grazing it, so light and sweet, something in me constricted.

Friends could kiss in relief. He wasn’t shoving his tongue in my mouth or copping a feel. He was just happy I was fine. He was just kissing me because… why not?

He cared about me.

People had kissed for much less, knowing each other not even a little bit.

I let Ivan kiss the places he wanted to, telling myself it was fine, that he’d been scared for me, because he had been. He had. And with that one thought, all I could focus on at that point were his words. His hurt. All shit I had caused.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I repeated, because I was. I was so sad it hurt me that we were here. It hurt me that I had let him down. “You’ve only had to pull out of a few events before me, and now I’m making you do it. I’m sorry, Ivan. I didn’t mean to fall.”

Ivan’s head shook in front of me. “Stop saying that.”

“But I am,” I whispered. “It’s my fault.”

“It was an accident,” he finished for me, sharply. “There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

“But I ruined—”

“You didn’t ruin anything. Shut the hell up,” he said.

“We’re out for six more weeks if everything goes well,” I reminded him, like he didn’t know.

“For two months total, Jasmine. Not the whole season. Not forever,” he also said, like I didn’t know that.

“But we’ve worked so hard—”

“Meatball, it doesn’t matter.“

I sucked in a breath at the reminder of how we were losing so much time out of the one and only year we had together. Eight less weeks that I’d get to be around this man who meant the world to me. Before he left me for someone else and I was on my own, the captain of my own destiny or whatever the hell it was called.

And I blinked.

“Don’t start. It’s only two months, and we were doing great. It was easy for us. Too easy.” He pressed his warm cotton candy pink lips to mine like he’d done it a thousand times before and would do it a thousand times again. “If anyone can come back from this in six weeks, it’s you.”

It would be me. Of course it would. But I couldn’t say the words then, as I stared into those eyes of his, our faces inches away from each other. All I could do was nod. And after a beat, then five, I said, “We’ll win.”

His gaze went even more intense as he said, with no hesitation, “You’re goddamn right we will.” He pressed his mouth, so quick, so hard against me, I didn’t have a chance to react until he pulled back an inch and said, hoarsely, his fingers threading through the damp hair right above the nape of my neck, “I’ll drag you back on the ice if I have to, Jasmine. I swear on my life.”

Something about his words made me shake on the inside. Maybe it was the conviction. Maybe it was the anger. The passion. The reality that he wasn’t leaving me any room to not do what he said.

Mostly though, it was something else completely.

I loved him.

I loved this man so much that losing him was going to break my cold, dead heart into so many pieces I was just going to have to stick them in the same box I kept my dreams and carry it around with me forever.

I didn’t want someone to pat my cheek and tell me everything was going to be okay. I wanted this man who would never take my shit, who would never let me quit, and I had a feeling would never quit on me. Not ever. Not if I screamed, not if I kicked, not if I told him to go eat a thousand mounds of shit.

This was my partner. This was more than my partner. He was my other half.

And the only thing I could do to thank him for this gift he’d given me, this knowledge that he thought I was invincible, was to make sure we won.

I’d give him the thing he had wanted me for in the first place.

I’d give him my fucking all.

Chapter 20

Fall

If I could describe the next four weeks of my life with one conversation, it would have been like this:

Ivan: “Sit still.”

Me: “No.”