Chapter 161: Chapter 161

“Here, you forgot your gloves,” she says, handing them to me.

“Good thing. I wouldn’t have made it without them,” I mock, and she nudges me with her elbow. She’s so goddamned cute.

There are so many things I want to say to her, but I don’t want to say something wrong and ruin the night.

“You know, if you wanted to wear such a large sweater, you could’ve worn one of mine and saved yourself twenty bucks,” I say, and she grabs my hand but lets go quickly.

“Sorry,” she mutters, and her cheeks flush.

I want to grab her hand again, but I’m distracted by a short woman greeting us. “What size skates?” the lady asks in a deep voice.

I look down at Tessa, and she answers for both of us. The woman returns with two pairs of ice skates, and I cringe. There is no way in hell this is going to go well.

I follow Tess to a bench nearby and remove my shoes. She has both of her ice skates on before I have half of my foot in one. Hopefully she’ll get bored easily and want to leave.

“You okay over there?” she mocks me as I finally lace up the second skate.

“Yes. Where do I put my shoes?” I ask her.

“I’ll take them.” The short woman appears out of nowhere. I hand her my shoes and Tess does the same with hers.

“Ready?” she asks, and I stand up.

I grip the railing immediately. How the fuck am I going to do this?

Tessa fights a smile. “It gets easier when you’re moving on the ice.”

I sure fucking hope so.

It doesn’t get easier, though, and I fall three times within five minutes. Tessa laughs each time, and I have to admit that if I didn’t have the gloves, my hands would be ice by now.

She laughs and reaches her hand out to me to help me up. “Remember like thirty minutes ago when you said you weren’t going to fall?”

“What are you, some sort of professional ice skater?” I ask her as I climb to my feet. I hate ice skating more than anything right now, but she is beyond amused.

“No, I haven’t been in a while, but my friend Josie and I used to go a lot.”

“Josie? I’ve never heard you talk about any friends from back home.”

“I didn’t have many. I spent most of my time with Noah growing up. Josie moved before my senior year.”

“Oh.” I don’t know why she wouldn’t have many friends. So what if she’s a little OCD and prudish and she obsesses over novels . . . she’s nice, sometimes too damn nice, to everyone. Except me, of course, she gives me shit constantly, but I do love that about her. Most of the time.

Thirty minutes later, we haven’t even lapped around the rink once because of my fine footwork.

“I’m hungry,” she says at last and looks over to a food stand with dancing lights on top.

I smile. “But you haven’t fallen and pulled me down with you so you’re lying perfectly on top of me and staring into my eyes, like the movies.”

“This is so not like the movies,” she reminds me and heads toward the exit.

I wish she had held my hand while we skated; if I could manage to stay on my feet, that is. All the happy couples seem to be mocking us as they circle around me holding hands.

The second I leave the rink, I remove the horrendous skates and find the tiny lady and get my damn shoes back.

“You really have a future in sports,” Tess teases me for the thousandth time when I join her at the food stand, where she’s eating a funnel cake and wiping flakes of powdered sugar off her purple sweatshirt.

“Ha ha.” I roll my eyes. My ankles still hurt from that shit. “I could have taken you somewhere else to eat; funnel cakes aren’t exactly a nice dinner,” I tell her and look at the ground.

“It’s fine. I haven’t had one in so long.” She has eaten all of hers and half of mine.

I catch her staring at me again; her face holds a thoughtful expression as she studies my face. “Why do you keep staring at me?” I finally ask, and she looks away.

“Sorry . . . I’m just not used to the piercings being gone,” she admits, staring again.

“It’s not that different.” Without realizing it, I find I’ve moved my fingers to my mouth.

“I know . . . it’s just weird, though. I was so used to seeing them.”

Should I put them back in? I didn’t remove them only for her sake—it’s true what I told her. I do feel like I was hiding behind them, using the small metal rings to block people out. Piercings intimidate people and make them far less likely to talk to me or come near me at all, and I feel like I’m getting past that stage of my life. I don’t want to keep people out, especially not Tessa. I want to pull her in.

I got them done when I was only a teenager, forging my mum’s signature and getting wasted before stumbling into the shop. The dumb-ass could smell the booze on me but did the piercings anyway. I don’t regret getting them at all; I’m just over them.

I don’t feel that way about my tattoos, though. I love them and I always will. I’ll continue to cover my body in ink, expressing thoughts that I can’t bring myself to actually say. Well, that’s not really the case, seeing as they are random shit that have no meaning whatsoever, but they look all right, so I don’t give a fuck.

“I don’t want you to change,” she tells me, and I look over at her. “Not physically. I only want you to show me that you can treat me better and not try to control me. I don’t want you to change your personality either. I only want you to fight for me, not turn yourself into someone you think I want to be with.”