Fake Dates & Ice Skates: (The North University Series Book 1)

Coming to the rink now feels different. Weird.

It’s like I’ve forgotten what I used to do it for. At the beginning, it was for me to have fun because it seemed cool. Then it was for my mom, because she wanted me to. She wanted me to be a star for her. But today, for one of the first times in a while, I’m skating for myself. For fun. With Miles.

“I don’t know how I feel about this. I feel weird,” he stutters, turning around on the ice almost falling over. I spin and turn effortlessly just to show off.

“That’s because you’re used to trying to kill people while you skate,” I reply. “Sometimes you just need to relax, y’know?”

He glides towards me in his jeans and baggy sweatshirt, as he grabs my hands while he spins me around. He has awful balance. It’s like trying watch Bambi on ice: both adorable and ridiculous at the same time. I can’t help but laugh when he pulls me in and skates backwards as if we’re doing the hokey pokey.

“You’re right,” he says when he lets go, sliding down the rink seamlessly. “This is fun.”

“I’m always right,” I say with a smug grin, gliding in the opposite direction.

If it wasn’t empty in here, I wouldn’t have been able to hear him charge up behind me as he wraps his arms around my waist. He pulls me into him until my back is flush against his chest. He kisses me lightly just below my ear where my pulse is hammering. He sends rapid kisses across both sides of my neck.

“What are you doing after this?” he murmurs into my skin; his proximity and warmth makes me shiver. There is something so wildly comforting about being with him like this.

“I’m, uh,” I stammer when he bites my earlobe. “I’ve got to go to my mom’s house. She said it’s an emergency, but I have to come exactly after three.”

My mom sent one of her very ambiguous messages this morning. I’ve slightly been avoiding her since my performance. When we went to Palm Springs, I had an excuse not to talk to her but now after being back for almost a month, I have to turn up to whatever she needs me to. I’d like to request your attendance at my house this afternoon. It’s vital that you attend. Do not arrive any earlier than 1500 hours. And because she’s the strangest person I’ve ever met she signed the text message with Yours sincerely, Melanie Hackerly.

“Boo. I was going to coax you into coming over to my house,” he groans. “Do you know what the emergency is?”

“No but I’m going to find out. And don’t you have practice, like, now?”

“I do.”

“Then why aren’t you there?” I ask, turning around to see him.

“Because I want to be here instead,” he whispers. He kisses me softly on the lips and I mould into him. He moves his lips around mine and I gently bite at his bottom lip. I laugh and pull away.

“You need to go to practice, and I need to get going anyway,” I say, skating towards the exit of the rink. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Wait!” he shouts after me when I sit on the bench outside the rink. He stumbles out of the exit and sits down next to me. “You told me to remind you about the sports achievement evening this weekend – so this is your reminder.”

“Oh shit, yeah,” I say, kissing him on the cheek for the reminder. “Thank you, Milesy. I’ll order a dress tonight. I wouldn’t want to miss you fangirling over NU alumni.”

*

I walk into my mom’s house and it’s eerier that I thought. I half expected her to welcome me with a dramatic monologue in a candlelit room but instead it looks creepier than usual. Creepier than the fantasises I made up on the way here.

I’ve always felt off being here since the divorce. I know it’s never been my home in a sense but something else hangs in the air.

“Mom?” I call out but nobody responds. I walk through the kitchen, and I can’t see anybody. I wander through the living room and the den and still, nobody is there until I get to the dining room which leads out to the backyard and pool.

I spot the back of my mom’s blonde head first, stood next to one of the lounge chairs, staring out to the pool. When I get closer, I hear another voice, a female voice. I slide open the door, walking carefully out onto the patio.

“Austin?” I ask, my voice suddenly sounding miles away.

Sure enough, my gorgeous brunette older sister turns around. Her heart shaped face is luminous. She’s always had flawless and striking features, but this pregnancy has given that a whole new meaning. It’s even more jarring when I haven’t seen her in person in years. I can hear my heart thumping against my ribs. Dum, dum. Dum, dum.

She gives me a side glance before turning back away from me. “What are you doing here?”

“You’re late,” my mom interrupts, not looking up at me either.

“I’m not. I was trying to find you in the house. You could have told me you were out here.”

“Oh, so this is my fault?” she replies. I almost laugh  at her absurdity. Why does she always make it difficult to deal with her? She has always been one for the dramatics and to make things seem worse than they are. I make the brave decision to take a seat next to them, while Austin still stands away from me.

“What’s going on?” I ask cautiously.

“When were you going to tell me that Austin’s pregnant?” My mom’s piercing blue eyes stare into mine and my breath catches. I’ve been avoiding it in hopes that Austin would tell her. I don’t know how this has been flipped on me.

“It slipped my mind. I’m so sorry,” I say wearily. This is starting to feel like an ambush. My mom gives me a long look without saying anything, just letting her gaze sink into me before walking back into the house.

What the fuck is going on?

I’m left alone with Austin, and I don’t know what to say. We haven’t spoken since she told me she was pregnant. The same day that she told me I had to tell mom. That I had to carry the weight of that secret and accept the repercussions.

“I asked you to tell her and you couldn’t even do that, Wren. I had to fly out here and tell her myself. I told you that I didn’t want to do that,” Austin turns to me, showcasing her small bump. Her voice is steady and more dejected than angry.

“I’m confused as to how this is my fault. You’re a grown fucking woman, Austin. You shouldn’t have asked me to tell her in the first place,” I say back, sounding more bitter than I intended.

“I was going to figure it out. I told you to just do one thing for me. Do you have any idea how I awful I feel? I could barely stomach the look of disgust on her face,” Austin retorts, her sad brown eyes flickering over me. My stomach jolts and I start to feel the nausea kicking in already.

“How do you think I feel after having to keep that a secret on top of everything else? I worked my ass off for the showcase so I could tell her, and she didn’t even see the whole thing. She didn’t even say that I did good but she somehow managed to let me go away for a week. I don’t get it.”

“Wren,” Austin says thickly as she comes to sit down next to me. The slight anger that was in her face has softened as she takes me in, her shoulders relaxing. “When are you going to realise that that’s how she is? She can tell within the first minute of a performance if it’s going to go well or not. That’s how she’s always been.”

I don’t know when I started crying but I did. Everything is crashing down on me so quickly that I don’t have the time to process it. Hot stupid tears rolling down my face. Maybe it was seeing my pregnant sister for the first time. Maybe it was because I feel trapped in a confusing confrontation. Or maybe it’s the words that are coming out of my sister’s mouth are the kind of thoughts I’ve spent so long trying to avoid. The ones that creep up at me at night and lay next to me, but I’ve trained my brain enough to forget them.

“If you know that, why are you still doing ballet? Why do you care so much about what she thinks?” I ask.

“That’s the way I’ve felt my entire life and I can’t get rid of that feeling — to constantly crave that validation from her. To make it up to her for not being able to skate like she did. When you’re put on that kind of pedestal from so young, it’s not easy to just snap out of it. I’m too far in to change my career path now. This is what she’s made us believe. To only have this one choice. I thought that you knew that,” Austin explains. She reaches out her hand to me, rubbing her thumb over my knuckles. I can feel my hand shaking under her gentle touch.

“I need to go,” I whisper. “I can’t…”

“I know it’s hard to hear, Wren, but you need to be tougher if you want to survive in this world. She’s not going to be your harshest critic. There will be people a lot stricter than her. If you want something, if you want to skate, regardless of your reasons for doing so, you need to learn how to hold your head up.” Her words sound like daggers straight to the heart, no matter how gently she attempts to say them.

“I want to be able to do things that make me happy without feeling the need to please her. I’m sick of doing it for her and not myself,” I admit.

“You’ll find out the reason you’re doing it soon. If you weren’t doing this for yourself, you wouldn’t be in this deep. There is a part of you that wants to do this for you. And that’s the part that you need to hold on to. You’re her last chance at hope. Her last chance at a legacy.”

Her words weigh on my brain as if I’ve been watching too much TV. I’ve known that. Of course, I have. It’s all  she would talk about when we were kids. Some part of me hoped that if Austin succeeded – which I thought she would – then I wouldn’t have to try as hard. I could be good enough for myself and that would be enough.

I made bets with myself. If Austin won her competition, I could come second in mine. If Austin didn’t succeed in school, I could be fine too. If Austin could balance her relationship with her work, I could too.

“Why do we have to do this, Austin?”

“Because. She’s our mom. She’s hard on us but she’s given us everything. Even if they’re not what we wanted, it’s what we have.” Austin looks at me with kind eyes, understanding and sympathy laced within them.

“You should have just become a chef,” I whisper under my breath. She laughs and the noise almost shocks me hearing her laugh for the first time in years. Her smile reaches her blushed cheeks as she shakes her head lightly.

“Well, since I’ll be staying at home when the baby comes, who knows what could happen,” she says, rubbing her stomach as she looks down at it. ‘They say anything happens when you’re pregnant.’

“You seem calmer than you did on the phone,” I murmur.

“I’ve come to peace with it. I’m happy. Excited, even,” she responds.

“Do you know what you’re having yet?”

“A boy,” she says, turning to me with a grin. My heart doubles in size. “Thank God for that, right?”

“I’m so happy for you, seriously. Dad is going to be over the moon. And I’m going to have a nephew!”

“Yep,” she says. “We’re thinking of moving back here too. Well, maybe not Salt Lake but closer.”

“Really?” I don’t bother to hide the excitement in my voice. As much as she can be hard to deal with, I’ve missed having my sister around. She’s the only close family I have here other than my parents even if she’s only visiting.

“Yeah. I’ve missed you, Emmy. I know we weren’t the kindest to each other growing up, but this baby has really made me rethink it all. I want to be closer to you.”

“I would really like that.”

After a much needed catch up with my sister, she stays on the patio when I walk back into the house. For a second, I feel like I’m floating. Hearing what she said about our mom was hard, but it had to be said. There had always been some unspoken rule between us that we could never admit what we were doing our sports for. We pretended to ignore the rants that mom would go on as to how her life was ruined when she first fell in love with dad and got pregnant with Austin.

As kids, it wasn’t something we could laugh about. It was a cautionary tale. Something for us to learn from. It wasn’t anything we could just joke about because it really was our whole lives. We trained, we preformed and that was it. There was no reason to sit and look into it. By the time I realised what was underneath it all, Austin had already gone to college, and it felt like it was too late. As if bringing it up would start either and argument or a revolution.

When I get to the kitchen to walk out the front door, I’m stopped by my mom.

“I’m disappointed in you Wren,” is the only thing I can hear her say. My eyes adjust to the kitchen counter, and I can just about make out my mom’s figure. She’s sitting with a glass of wine, staring out into the front yard through a sliver in the blind. Yeah, this is how all my nightmares start.

“Oh, really?” I retort sarcastically. She scoffs before taking a large sip of her drink. There is nothing I love more than my mom when she’s drunk. Kidding, of course. She is the worst when she’s drunk.

“Since you’ve been hanging out with that boy something has changed in you. You would never talk to me like this.”

After the day I’ve had, I don’t bother to hold back on my candour. I don’t usually like to air out my shit like this, but it needs to happen. There’s no use for us to hide this anymore. There’s no reason for me to be up her ass 24/7 and let her control every aspect of my life like she has been for the past nineteen years.

“That’s because I was afraid of you for so long. I was so scared that you’d stop loving me if I did something wrong. Like you did with dad. But he didn’t even have to do anything. You just stopped. No explanation. That was it and you never told us why. I have spent my whole life trying so hard for that not to happen. I thought that if I did my best, if I made you happy in some way, you wouldn’t stop loving me.”

I take a deep breath. I don’t know when I got so close to her; when I could start to smell the wine on her tongue, but I did. She looks at me for a moment, as if contemplating which direction to take. She avoids my eyes when she speaks next.

“You’re starting to sound bratty and selfish, Amelia. You seem to be forgetting who paid for all your skating outfits and who pays for half of your rent. Yet you and that boy were so quick to take that vacation, knowing you were lying to me.”

“Does that even matter anymore? Austin is happy. Can’t that be enough?” I huff. “Listen, we’re grateful for the trip but we didn’t ask you to do that. You’re the one who got us that hotel so you could try to make me forget about how much you hated my performance. Like you do every time. The same thing with the flowers. In some pathetic way for you to apologise and make yourself feel better.”

“It was abysmal, Amelia. I was not going to lie to you. You needed that sort of feedback for improvement. You need a backbone. If I was hard on you all the time, then you would stop skating. I need to find a balance somewhere,” she slurs.

I’ve never seen her get this bad before and it’s starting to make me feel sick. My heart beats loudly in my ear as I try and keep my cool.

“I can’t listen to this anymore.”

I turn out of the door as the sun starts to set. The days are short here and the nights are long and dark during the winter. Regardless, I kick my jog up into a sprint as I try to get out of her neighbourhood. I don’t know where exactly I’m going.

I could have got back in my car, but I don’t think I’m able to sit still with all this adrenaline rushing through me. I must have been running for almost an hour by the time I can see my apartment from where I’m stood panting. Instead, I turn left down towards the houses near campus.

I run up into the cul de sac and I see his house. I run up the steps and knock the door.