“Sorry.” I lean forward to kiss him again, to erase Josh and Mom and Dani and the competition from my mind. But he pulls away and all the bad things rush back, impossible and immense, water cascading over a frozen gorge and eroding everything in sight.

“I can’t do this,” he says. “This isn’t … where are you right now?”

He asks me, but I can’t give him an answer—not the real one. The one that admits I’m back on the ice at Fillmore, watching Josh perfect those backward crossovers. Back in my kitchen on New Year’s, listening to the Addicts with him on the phone. Back at the game tonight, wrapped in that immense and secret hug while Will wasn’t looking.

The spark returns, rushing through my veins, electrifying my entire body. Half-naked in the back of a car perched on the edge of Niagara Falls, I remember Kara’s warnings again, how they’d secretly filled my insides with prickles of fear and loss.

But tonight, somewhere beneath this bone-white city of glass, my panic over the thought of Will ending things eroded, replaced by something much more lasting and intense:

Disappointment that he didn’t.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I should get back. I have to get up early tomorrow and … anyway.” I turn away so I don’t have to see his face. His touch is light, first on my bare shoulder and then my cheek, but still I don’t move. He passes me my shirt and jacket. The back door opens, the dome light blinks on, and the roar of the Falls fills my ears, drowning the guilt, muting the confusion. The door clicks closed. He leans against the car while I dress, his back to me in the window.

“Are you mad?” Outside, I tug on his jacket, desperate for him to tell me no. Or yes. I don’t know. Maybe that would make things easier. If he’s mad at me, if he tries to make me feel guilty or calls me a tease, then I could have something to hate about him. Something to cling to, some reason to tell myself I shouldn’t be messing around with a guy like Will. A guy who—no matter how technically perfect his kisses are—can’t chase the cold from the inside.

“No.” He smiles without showing his teeth and kisses me on the cheek, just below my eye. “I’ll take you back. Come on.”

Riding along the desolate I-190, I look at Will’s profile in the dark, the lines of his face lit only by the moon on the bright snow, the headlights passing by and vanishing in the northbound lane. My eyes are all over Will, his perfectly angled face, his wavy hair, his hands on the wheel, but I can’t stop thinking about Josh. Wishing he was here. Wishing this was us. Wishing I could kiss him under the moonlight as the water rushed past like the hooves of a thousand horses.

“You know you have to tell him,” Will says, as if he can read my mind. He looks at me straight on, eyes so dark and sad that I can’t find the courage to argue. “Otherwise, what’s the point of anything, right?”

I look away, vision blurring as the snow falls in white needles against the windshield and the long list of tonight’s revelations finally hits me.

My gig training the Wolves is over.

My best friend has a new crush and a new crew.

And for all the time I’ve spent making out with hockey captain number seventy-seven Will Harper, I still couldn’t outrun the truth.

I’m totally falling for Josh Blackthorn.

And I have no idea what to do about it.

Chapter Twenty

The Perfect Storms

Eggless white vanilla cupcakes topped with a thin layer of mashed blueberries and white meringue frosting; dusted with powdered sugar and served chilled

Fillmore is empty and unblemished, the sky darkening to a dusty gray as I lean against the signpost and lace up my skates. They’re calling for a storm, and other than the seasonally confused seagulls, I’m the only one stupid enough to hang out on the lake. Especially since the only other person who knows about this place is the one I’ve been dodging for two weeks.

In the wake of my championship make-out fail and subsequent realization at Niagara Falls, I’ve been too mortified to face Will or Josh. The morning after, Will sent out a group text announcing my retirement from special techniques coaching, and that was it. My time with the Watonka Wolves was over. Done. Since then, I’ve spent every lunch period alone with a PB and J and a cupcake magazine in the library. Beelined for the nearest bathroom whenever I caught either captain at my locker or truck. Ignored calls and texts and hockey party invites. Dove into the Hurley’s kitchen when Josh and Frankie showed up at the front counter, wolfing down hot chocolate and cupcakes with Dani while I hid behind the safety of my mixer.

I still go to the games, but only as a spectator, sitting in the stands with the parents and siblings while Dani cheers with her new friends across the rink and rushes into Frankie’s waiting embrace after every win. I’ve tried to talk to her at the concessions stand, but always after the first greeting and awkward smile, the silence seeps in and pushes us apart again. Even at work we hardly speak—just enough to do our jobs and keep Trick, Mom, and the waitresses in the dark.

Here at Fillmore, the wind whips against my fleece, and I lean back and shake out my arms and legs. Across the white expanse of the lake, the cold rushes me and that dead, desperate emptiness blows straight through my bones.

I know what it’s like to miss someone. Despite how mad he makes me, I still miss my father. I miss the way things used to be in our family. Sometimes I even miss Kara, the way we’d calm each other before an event, laugh about it at the diner after, blowing endless bubbles into our loganberries. But I’ve never before missed someone that I’m physically with almost every day. Dani and I work side by side, sometimes for hours on end. We sit next to each other in French. We cross paths in the halls and at the hockey games. We’re not outwardly fighting anymore—things are quiet. Civil. Friendly enough, but not friends. Every day, she looks through me and I look through her and even though it’s like I’m watching her disappear right before my eyes, I can’t seem to make it right between us.

After three inseparable years, my best friend and I don’t know each other anymore.

I don’t know if things are serious between her and Frankie—they’re always together in the halls and after the games, but she doesn’t call me out for a smoke break to dish the romantic details. She has no idea that whenever I see Josh, my heart beats triple time, and that I’m still too scared to tell him.

I’m clueless about Dani’s big photo project, and I never saw the pictures from her dad’s New Year’s Eve show. I didn’t get to confess my cupcake fakery, how guilty I felt when Trina raved about her Bubble-Gum Blings the following Monday in French class. She hasn’t seen my father’s last three blog posts from Utah, the ones I couldn’t bring myself to unsubscribe from. She didn’t get the in-person demo of RustBob SpareParts, the robot that Bug finally put together from all that old computer stuff.

And Dani doesn’t know about the thing that’s tearing a hole in my heart, shredding my dreams. I try to ignore it, to let it pass, but it always comes back, standing on my chest, breathing against my throat.

Doubt.

Despite all my so-called natural talent, the unimaginable potential, my months of retraining, and an intense wanting like nothing I’ve ever felt in my life, some part of me believes that I’m really not good enough. That in seven days I’ll pour my soul out on the ice for those foundation judges, and sit in the kiss-and-cry room as I wait for the scores that will change my life….

And the numbers won’t even come close.