Hard Checked (Ice Kings #4) - Stacey Lynn Page 0,44
sucked when I was a kid. Thought about hanging up my skates quite a bit but my mom knew I liked it, even if I wasn’t the greatest, so she kept encouraging me.”
“Really?” The shock in her tone is adorable.
“Swear it. I didn’t even make the varsity team the first time I tried out.”
“Noooo…”
Her hip bounces into me. She’s so small I barely feel it.
“You’re a pain in the ass, you know?”
She gives me a smile full of teeth. “I try.”
Shaking my head, I smile back at her. Adorable isn’t the word for her, but all the words I can think of to describe Gigi don’t fit. She’s so much more than any of them.
“Anyway, I begged my parents to put me in training camps that year in the off-season. I worked out in gyms with a personal trainer, did everything I could think of. We didn’t have a lot of money. My parents are both teachers, so I had to get a job to cover all the expenses. It wasn’t even until I was in high school and made the school team, I had brand new equipment for the first time.”
“Really?” Her voice softens and shoots straight to my chest.
“Yeah, I mean, we didn’t have a lot and when I was young, my equipment always came from a secondhand store. Most kids on the team had sticks that cost hundreds of dollars, skates that were batshit crazy in price, and there I was, going through four to five used skates a season, getting them sharpened all the time. I wanted this and I worked for it. I owe my parents a lot for sacrificing so I could have it.”
It’s been a long time since I’ve thought back to those earlier years. Amazing how once you get millions, you can lose sight of some of that, some of what made me who I was, what helped me get to the pros in the first place. It was all that grit Dad said was ingrained in me. I was too stubborn to give up. Too stubborn to quit.
Which makes me wonder if I’ve lost that somehow with Madison. When did I give in? Or did I? Or did she?
The thought makes my heart squeeze and I blow out a breath.
No, she’s the one who walked away. And with all the hard times we’ve been through, that hurts maybe more than anything.
“Hey. Where’d you go?” Gigi asks, and her lips are pressed together. I don’t even notice her hand is on my arm until I look down and see that little broken heart on her knuckle.
“Mind wandered,” I admit. “There’s a picnic stop up here. I need to get Bruiser some water.”
Gigi’s tattoo on her ring finger has piqued my curiosity. Odd for her to get a broken heart on her left hand’s ring finger if she claims she wasn’t all that cut up about her marriage ending.
I wait until we find the picnic area, moving slow while she stops and starts a few times to take pictures. There’s nothing interesting outside trees and leaves and sticks and the ground, but she chooses all different angles. I make a mental note to check her Instagram feed later to see her photos. What is she seeing that I’m not?
Once we find a picnic table, I dig out a collapsible bowl I brought for Bruiser and pour a bottled water into it. He slurps it up happily while Gigi wanders the small area, phone in hand, thumb pressing away on her photo app.
“Can I ask you a question?”
She peers at me over her shoulder, that soft smile on her face. Her cheeks have pinkened from our walk and are almost as bright as her lips. “Of course.”
“What’s with the heart tattoo on your finger?”
“Oh.” She laughs, shakes her head and her teal hair bobbles back and forth. “Stupid, drunk night shortly after I left Evan and wondered if we did the wrong thing. It was a few weeks before I went traveling.”
“Did you? Make a mistake?”
“No.” She drops her phone to her side and climbs up on the other side of the table top, putting her back to mine but she scoots back onto the table and leans back on her hands so I can see her face tilted up to the sunshine. She has another tiny semicolon behind her ear I’ve never noticed before and I want to ask her about that too.