Jubilee

Wow. When we first started this ridiculous agreement, I hadn’t wanted Beckett to be good in bed. I’d wanted him to be a lackluster lay that I could just tune out for. Roll my eyes while he pumped away, maybe mutter a couple of oh-babys, and be done after a couple of minutes because he can probably pick up women easily enough that he’s never had to develop his stamina in the sack, unlike on the ice. Well, I was wrong.

He had the courtesy to collapse partly to the side of me, though the bed’s so small he’s still partially on top of me, and I don’t mind it. Mostly when I sleep with men, the last thing I want to do is cuddle. Orgasm? Done. Check please! I don’t like their strange bodies, or their weird smells, or their inane attempts at pillow talk.

Beckett is different. He’s familiar, and I kinda like the way he smells. Even when he’s sweaty, because that means he’s working hard, and that effort is devoted in part to me.

His head is resting on my chest, his warm breath drifting across my breasts he’d devoted so much attention to earlier. Absentmindedly, I reach up a hand until my fingers are running through his curls, careful not to tug because he deserves a rest after that performance.

It’s quiet. I’m warm, comfortable, sated, and this is the closest to peace I’ve felt since—

I suddenly feel like I’m being squeezed by a giant hand from shoulder to knee. Not only can’t I breathe right because my lungs are being crushed, but I feel as though I’m dangling from a great height. If that hand lets go, I will fall, and I know what it feels like to be dropped. To hit the ground hard at a crushing angle with unfortunate velocity. It hurts, and leaves you wounded, doing physical therapy for months, not able to see straight in the moment.

It’s not real. This is the message my rational brain tries to send to the rest of me, but the other part of my brain, the part that’s orchestrating this delightful panic attack, is far more compelling. My pounding heart? Doesn’t listen. My constricted lungs? Do not give a shit. My vision, which is convincing me there are in fact black spots dancing in front of my eyes because of a dangerous lack of oxygen? This is fucking performance art.

Even though I know better—because the thing is, I know—I can’t help it. I need to get up, I need to get out of here, I need to not have Beckett’s lovely curl-covered head and his charmingly protective arm suffocating me. Since I’m on the wall-side of the bed, I can’t just sneak out. So I do what any freaking-the-fuck-out girl would do in my position.

I push him off the bed.

He lands with a muffled thud, and before he can say or do anything, I bound over him and into the bathroom where I can have my meltdown in peace.

Back against the door, I slide down until my butt hits the floor, and bury my face in my hands. The good news is that I don’t feel quite so much like I’m in the clutches of a boa constrictor anymore. That’s definitely better. Breathing is good. Not feeling like I’m going to die is a definite improvement.

Except it’s not all that long before there’s a knock at the door.

“Jubilee?”

Right. Beckett, the man who just gave me the best orgasm I’ve had in years, who made me feel—ugh, fucker. Making me feel, period, is bad enough. He’s standing outside the bathroom door, probably wondering if I’ve lost my goddamn mind, because his voice is soft and gentle and cautious, like he’s talking to a scared baby animal.

“Yeah?” Sure, because responding in a chipper tone to the man you literally just shoved out of bed and onto the floor is totally going to lay all of his concerns to rest.

There’s a pause, and I almost giggle. Like one of those really unflattering things, where you kind of snort at the end? Poor Beck. Even though I can’t see him, I can imagine the expression on his face. Puzzled, with that little line forming between his blond brows, and the center of his mouth mushed up so his chin wrinkles.

“Are you okay?”

“Yep. Fine. I just . . .” Think, Jubilee, come on. Think of a reason you would have pushed a guy out of bed and made a beeline for the bathroom that’s better than “I think I might actually like you and that’s not okay, because my last partner that I fell in love with keeled over dead in practice from a brain aneurysm. We’d been in the middle of a death spiral, so when he fell, I slid across the ice and into the boards. So not only did I get a few cracked ribs and a busted-up shoulder, I had my soul ripped out in the process.” Definitely need something more reasonable than that. “I needed to pee. You know, how you’re supposed to pee after sex so you don’t get a UTI? I didn’t want to get a UTI. I’ve had one before, and let me tell you, they are unpleasant. So, I, yeah, needed to . . . pee.”

Killing. It.

I mash the heels of my hands into my eye sockets because that was way worse than I could’ve even imagined. It’s a good thing I’m not required to lie in my job, because I would be a failure. A big, huge failure. How many times can one person say pee and UTI in one breath? Beckett is so never sleeping with me again, because I am the unsexist woman on the planet.

Which is probably fine. Better, really, because apparently fucking someone I actually like and respect leads to feelings, and I’m better off without that ball of nonsense.

“Um, okay.”

Something hitches around my solar plexus, but it’s not panic this time. No, it’s the regret I’d warned Beckett about. Regret for sleeping with him, regret for treading so far down this path knowing I can’t go all the way to the end. Regret for making my happy-go-lucky workhorse of a partner confused and eventually hurt.

I’m sorry, Beckett. I can’t. If I could, I would with you. But I can’t, especially not with you. It would cost me far, far too much, and I’m already bankrupt.

I regret being so broken I can’t even tell him these things, but I can see that movie playing out in my mind: he’d convince me that I can, in fact, have him, that we could be happy together. And because he’s Beckett, with his earnestness and persistence, his goddamn cheerful steadfastness, eventually I’d believe him. Perhaps we’d have some time together, enough for his roots to grow into the soil of my heart. He’d take hold and make me whole, keep me together against the erosion of time and sadness from what I already lost, and then . . . maybe four years from now, maybe fourteen, maybe forty. The point is that it would be over and he would leave me. For another skating partner, for another bed partner, or maybe because he just fucking up and died. Bottom line, he’d be gone and I’d fall apart again. So, no thank you.

“I’ll be right out. You can get back in bed. It’s chilly out here.”

Silence on the other side, and then a shuffling. Like he’s walked away but come back again.

“Okay. As long as you’re sure you’re all right. That you don’t need me.”

Now the choking sensation is coming from the lump in my throat, but I clear it, and looking at the ceiling, blinking as fast as I can so traitorous tears don’t roll down my cheeks, I put on my best chipper voice. “I’m good. I’ll be out in a few.”

“Okay,” he mutters, not seeming convinced. But the thing is, he leaves. Yes, he’s left because I’ve told him to, but the reality is, he’s still left me alone. Which is why I can’t even try for this. Have to extinguish any ember of hope.

I lever off the floor, scrub my hands over my eyes, and then go actually use the toilet.

Beckett

It’s like fifteen minutes before Jubilee comes out of the bathroom. I’m not sure what she’s been doing in there, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned during my twenty-six years, it is not to ask women what the hell took them so long.

After doing my best to make sure she was actually okay—not believing her rambling excuse about UTIs and pee, but not knowing what else to do, because if Jubilee really doesn’t want to do something you’re not going to get the woman to do it—I did what she said and went back to bed. I’d stood there for a good while though, trying to decide which bed to get back into. I chose mine, but I’m still not sure it’s the right call.

When the door finally cracks open, and Jubilee comes out in her fluffy robe with the flamingos on it, I’m still not sure, because an expression flits over her face so quickly I can’t read it.

She doesn’t climb into my bed, which I would be totally fine with, but into her own, still wearing her robe. If she thinks that’s going to make me forget what she looks like naked, she is sadly mistaken.

I half-expect her to face the wall, pretend the whole thing never happened—it did, Jubilee, it totally did, and it was epic—but she doesn’t, instead turning on her side to face me, tucking her hands under her head, looking like she expects me to tell her a bedtime story. I mean, I guess I could, but—

“Why did you and Sabrina end it? You got really close, like a hair’s breadth from Sapporo. Another four years of working together, and unless one of you got hurt, you should’ve made it.”

Oh. She wants to talk about skating? I can do that, though I’d rather not talk about Sabrina. Not a good history there.

What Jubilee’s said is maybe true. But now Sabrina is skating with Todd Everhardt, and they’re here too. Maybe we just didn’t have the chemistry or maybe we were a bad match skill-wise. Whatever it was, when she was my partner, she didn’t make the SIGs, and now that I’m not, she did. I’m sure she sees the math as very simple.

As for me, it was a way to get out of a relationship I didn’t really want to be in anymore.

“Yeah, maybe. Sabrina wasn’t willing to risk it. She ditched me. Told me straight up it was my fault we hadn’t made it. Threw quite a fit, actually. Like throwing shit and everything. You could learn a thing or two from her.”

I smile at her, and from across the couple of feet separating us in our narrow beds, Jubilee scowls back. I knew she would. But from a scowl, her face crumples, her nose wrinkling and the skin between her brows creasing. “That doesn’t even make any sense. I saw your performance at the qualifiers. You were not the problem in that pair.”

It’s kind of dumb that her words make me feel so good—obviously Jubilee hadn’t thought I was the weak link, otherwise she would’ve never agreed to try partnering with me, but she could’ve stayed silent. Instead, she’s defending me. And we’re the only two people here, so it’s not to put on a good show for the press or the SIG committee or anyone else who’s invested in how we perform. It makes me feel good.

“Doesn’t really matter when you’re at your partner’s mercy, does it? If she says it’s your fault, it’s your fucking fault. That’s how this works. You know that as well as I do.” Fuck. Should’ve watched my tone or not said that at all. I don’t feel that way about Jubilee at all, and I hope she doesn’t think I’m implying that I do.

Jubilee’s face goes still, and her gaze is looking off someplace far away, somewhere I can’t follow her. But soon enough she shrugs it off. “Sabrina was paying for everything?”

“Yeah.” It’s not unusual in pairs, actually. There are so many more women than men that if a girl can latch onto a dude who doesn’t suck, she pays for everything from the time they’re kids—gear, coaching, travel—even if the guy can afford it. Which I couldn’t. Especially not when I was dating Felicia, who was jealous of every cent I spent on skating. Hell, Jubilee is paying for most of our stuff too.

It used to bother me, especially when Felicia was playing her head games with me, but I can’t afford to have a real problem with it. Especially since resentment is one of those things that’s harder to hide on the ice. All it takes is one slip of a hand because you don’t feel like putting in a thousand percent of your effort to catch a person who humiliates and emasculates you on a regular basis, and . . . well, it could look an awful lot like what happened to Jubilee. Not that bitterness had anything to do with that. Just really fucking awful luck, and she paid for it. Over and over and over.

There’s that funny pinching feeling in my chest again and I have to send up a prayer that it’s not actually something physically wrong with my heart, because if I die on her, Jubilee is going to be more of a head case than she already is, and will probably give up skating, which is the only thing that matters to her now that Stephen is gone.

Even before Sabrina ditched me for not making the SIGs, I’d gotten blamed. My first partner, Sloan, who I skated with for eight years—the same thing had happened. When we didn’t make the junior finals, she told her parents it was my fault because I hadn’t taken it seriously enough, which was a heap of bullshit and they fucking knew it. She was the one who would eat junk food she wasn’t supposed to, who would cut out of practice early or skip conditioning to go out with her friends. After a super bad practice right before the juniors, I’d told her, “Look, I can carry you, but not the entire performance.” She’d gotten so mad I thought she was going to hit me.

When it was over and done with, I was the one who got dropped, natch. Can’t deny I’m a little pleased that she dropped out of competitive skating two years later. My fucking fault, was it, Sloan? Fuck you. Ever since then, I’ve worked my ass off so no one could blame me ever again. One of the things I like about Jubilee is that she holds her faults. If we lose here, yeah, we might end our partnership, but it won’t be because she thinks she can do better than me. It might just hurt too much. She won’t throw me under the bus to the press or to anyone else. I like her for it. Respect her for it, maybe even more than I respect and admire her athleticism. She might come across as a bitch, but the woman has ethics, standards, honor.

“I’m sorry that happened. You deserve better than that.”

We stare at each other, and I wonder if we’re going to talk about what just happened between us. You know, the awesome sex. But even if she’d been thinking about it, and with those parted lips, she might’ve been, she ends up with, “It’s, um, getting late. We should get some sleep.”

And I can’t disagree at all.