Sugar & Ice

by Brooklyn Wallace

“Okay, fine. I’ll let you protect me, too,” I said when our laughter died down. I raked my nails down her stomach and her breath hitched, making her go quiet. Her eyes were dark with lust yet still mirthful, laughing without sound. “Dork.”

  She only laughed harder.

  Nine

  Jackie

  On Thursdays, Olivia led the beginners hot yoga class at the local rec center. Like most things about Olivia, it was as bohemian as it was admirable. She slaved away at her job as a tech monkey and still found the time to help soccer moms and stressed aspiring actresses find their centers.

  Meanwhile, I had only dragged myself out of bed to meet her for a sushi lunch after her yoga class ended. I sat in the Starbucks a couple of blocks from the rec center, waiting for her to text me that she was ready. I’d ordered my usual and grabbed a table in the back to dick around on my phone. I scrolled through the news (depressing), checked the current polls for the 35th district election (Crawford +13), and opened my last text from Gwen five times (a picture of her in a low-cut top at some schmoozing gala, just because I asked).

  A grin split across my face involuntarily. I hid it with a cough, even though I was sure no one was actually looking at me standing in the corner of Starbucks, smiling at nothing.

  When I looked up, I froze.

  I blinked in a feeble attempt to wash the image away, but it was no use: Deidre Bledsoe of the Los Angeles Storm was standing there in the flesh, a half empty bottle of water in her hand and that familiar mean scowl on her face.

  When the greater world of sports was forced to turn their attention on the WNBA, they liked to spice things up. One of their preferred ways was inventing drama, typically between rivals. More than one publication had referenced on-court altercations between me and Deidre Bledsoe as a catfight. NBA players had beef, but Deidre and I “got catty.” If we squared up on the court, the press junket would rework it as two women ready to scratch each other’s eyes out.

  Truth was, I’d never had anything against Deidre. We’d had a couple of intense matches, but we’d never met in the finals. I didn’t know when the feud had become legit for Deidre, but eventually it seemed like she wanted to scratch my eyes out for real.

  I ducked my head farther into my collar and tried to hide behind a man in an oversized coat. The rebel in me wanted to straighten up and look at her head-on, let her know I wasn’t afraid of her or anybody else. The coward in me was afraid of her, and quite a few other people, and wanted to get the hell out of dodge, macchiato or no macchiato.

  Before I could decide which one I wanted to listen to the barista called out my fake name. I practically power-walked to the front and grabbed my order. When I spun around, ready to make my escape, Deidre was right there in front of me.

  “‘Eliza Thornberry,’ huh?” She raised her brow and smirked, amused. I couldn’t tell if I was in on the joke or not.

  “What can I say? I miss the ’90s.” I cleared my throat and tried to remember how normal people who didn’t hate each other talked to one another. “How are you? I haven’t see you in . . . forever.”

  “Feels like it, don’t it?” Deidre grabbed the edge of the towel hanging around her neck and wiped it across her brow. “What’re you up to out here?” She lifted her bottle and gave it a shake. “I have a run in the park a few blocks down when I can. Ducked in to buy a bottle of water and leech the A/C. What’re you doing here?

  I nibbled on the straw of my macchiato and forced a laugh. “Waiting for my roommate to get out of her yoga class. It’s hot yoga, so I’m enjoying the non-sweat-and-feet smell while I can.”

  She laughed more easily, but no less obviously fake. It melted into a casual smirk as she openly eyed my drink. “That’s a lot of sugar, huh? Should you be drinking that?”

  “Uh, is there a reason I shouldn’t?”

  “Word on the street is you’ve entered into the charity bout. Good for you, by the way. I can’t say I wasn’t surprised to hear the news.”

  I hadn’t entered it—I still wasn’t even sure if I would—but rather than saying so, I blurted out, “Why is that surprising?”

  Deidre’s eyes widened. “I mean, didn’t you retire?”

  Sincerity shone in her eyes and words, but I felt my walls come up in a spark of familiar, competitive energy.

  I made my voice level when I replied. “I retired from the WNBA, yeah. But this is just charity stuff, not the league.”

  She paused to take a swig of her bottle. In that moment, it was the single most annoying gesture I had ever seen in my entire life.

  “Sure, but then you also dropped off the face of the earth after your little tumble during the finals.” She shrugged. “I figured you were done with the game.”

  “Ah. Well. You know how it is.” I huffed and gestured vaguely.

  “You know, Felicity plays in the Euro league now. She’s got that new shoe deal with that Finnish company. Kap-something.”

  I kept my face neutral and didn’t rise to the bait. “Good for her. I’m keeping my options open. I’ve got some irons in the fire.”

  “Like what?”

  “Press offers,” I said vaguely. That wasn’t a lie. There were always press offers.

  Her expression turned mockingly impressed. “Really? Oh. That’s good. Suits you.”

  Knowing I shouldn’t fall into the obvious trap, I jumped up and took a bite of it anyway. “How’s that?”

  She snorted and shook her head, like we were both in on a secret.“Come on, Dunn. You were always more celebrity than prodigy.”

  My mouth opened, and nothing came out. Deidre’s judging gaze rolled over me like a wave until I felt unsteady with the intensity of it.

  Deidre wasn’t my friend. She wasn’t even really my enemy anymore, if she ever truly was at all. So why did the undercurrent of pity and schadenfreude in the edges of her smile make me feel like curling up and hiding?

  Swallowing caramel sauce that suddenly tasted like felt and lead, I nodded toward the door. “I better go pick up my roommate. She’ll be getting out soon.”

  “You know, me and a couple of other Storm players signed up for that bout. It’d be nice to play you again. “

  I gave a jerky nod and took a step toward the door. “Yeah, that’d be cool. Hey, see you around, all right?”

  “I’m holding you to that!” she called, but I was already out the door.

  After escaping Deidre I loitered near the bus stop across from the rec center, hiding away from Deidre and the aura of schadenfreude and bad memories that poured through her eyes. When Olivia rushed out to say she had to miss our lunch date, profusely apologizing, I was relieved. The run-in with Deidre had left me feeling off-kilter, like the axis of my universe had been knocked askew.

  Her words echoed in my head. You were always more celebrity than prodigy. I wished I could say she was wrong, that she was still bitter after almost four years, but the truth was, even if she wasn’t entirely right, she wasn’t entirely wrong, either.

  The truth was, I lived for the attention. The press needed someone to gas up, and I was a perfect storm of undiluted potential: daughter of an NBA great, 21-year-old rookie from a no-name town, an impressive stat record, tall, but shorter than your average guard. A kid still wet behind the ears with something to prove.

  And I’d eaten it up. I’d never turned down an interview. I’d always been hanging back outside the stadium to talk, always open to the flashing lights and screaming fans.

  I had wanted to be a star. That was all I had ever wanted to be. I’d wanted to play ball and have people pay attention to me. To notice how good I was and how much the sport meant to me.

  Fuck, how stupid I’d been.

  No, maybe I wasn’t stupid. I was young. Young and overeager and looking for validation in all the wrong places. That was what led me to Felicity in the first place. All she had to do was tell me I was going to be famous, and I was gone for her. Unfortunately for her, I did end up a star. Unfortunately for the whole squad, and f
or me, I didn’t know how to handle it.

  Ever since I’d retired, there had been a tiny voice in my head telling me I could fix it all if I just tried. I wasn’t stupid; I knew that winning some no-stakes charity game wouldn’t fix the bad blood between me and the rest of the Sonics. It wouldn’t take back the sneers. It wouldn’t fix me and Felicity. Hell, I didn’t even know if I wanted it to. But I couldn’t deny the part of me that wanted to try, just to see.

  That stupid, self-defeatist thought gnawed at me all the way to Gwen’s and only subsided when I was buried between her legs making her scream my name so loudly I couldn’t hear my thoughts. After, though, when the house was quiet, there was no way to escape them.

  “What’s got you thinking so loud?”

  Jolted, I looked up at Gwen. She was sprawled out on the bed, pink lipstick smudged nearly off. I know there were matching smudged pink kisses decorating my thighs and the length of my spine.

  The call from her to hang around while she pored over notes and proposals had been a lifeline preventing me from drowning in my own self-pity and misery. Unfortunately, after the kisses and whispers and moans had died down and she actually did go back to poring over notes and proposals, the dam had broken and it all came flooding back again.

  She didn’t look from iPad, but as her pink fingernails flew across its surface, I knew she was aware of me. It was evident in the tilt of her head and the way she leaned in toward me just so. I was almost giddy with the idea that I had become attuned her little quirks—her Gwenisms.

  I dragged my own clipped, polishless fingers over her knee. She playfully batted me away even as she shifted to lean against my side.

  I pressed my nose into her hair and inhaled the scent of her. Tangerines and sex. “Nothin’,” I murmured.

  She looked up from her iPad and narrowed her eyes. “Oh, something’s wrong all right. You’re making your spilled milk face.”

  “I don’t have a ‘spilled milk face..’”

  “Could you do me a favor and open your front-facing camera for a sec?”

  Defeated, I could only shrug. I stared down at where my fingers were splayed across her brown skin, smooth and warm. “It’s stupid.”

  The clacking stopped. When I looked up, I was met with the full force of an Exasperated Gwen Stare.

  “If it’s bothering you, it’s not stupid.”

  Her words and the gentle drag of her nails against my skin were enough to pull the black thoughts out of me like a sinner in confession.

  “I, uh, ran into someone. An old friend.”

  “Oh?” she said slowly, encouraging me on.

  I sighed. “Well, not so much a friend as someone who kinda . . . hates my guts. Maybe. Or maybe we are friends now and she’s just a really shitty person. I don’t know. You know Deidre Bledsoe?”

  “I think I’ve heard the name before.”

  “She plays forward for the Los Angeles Storm. We had this . . . manufactured beef that I guess turned real at some point without me knowing. Hell, maybe it was always real. Either way, I ran into her today and she asked me about the bout. I don’t even know how she found out about that. I know some of the Storm is going, but I haven’t even signed the damn paperwork yet.”

  Gwen’s fingers slowed but didn’t stop tracing soothing patterns into my skin. “Sounds like she was trying to get a rise out of you.”

  “Yeah, and it worked.” I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose to stave off a creeping headache. “It’s like she was challenging me. She even . . . she even brought up Felicity, and she’s not even a part of this. There she was, dangling bait in my face, and all I did was slink off with my tail between my legs.”

  “What were you supposed to do? Fight her in a public place? Break her ankles to sink a threepointer with your frappe?”

  “It was a macchiato, thank you very much.” I couldn't suppress a grin. “And I don't know what I was supposed to do. I just . . . I don’t know. It felt like she'd won.”

  It sounded lame even to me, but that was the only way I could think to put it. She had teed up again, and I had lost. With expert precision, she had dug her fingers into my wounds and picked them apart. How did she even know after all this time I will still hurting? She was a charging bull, and I wore my grief like a red flag.

  “She doesn’t matter,” Gwen said. “None of them matter.”

  “I know she—they—don’t,” I said. It felt like a lie. “It just . . . it sucks, you know? Knowing there’s a whole group of people out there you used to laugh and share your dreams with who don’t give a fuck about you now.”

  “What exactly happened between you?” Gwen asked gently.

  I didn’t have to ask to know she meant Felicity specifically. I sighed. “Well, what have you heard?”

  She shrugged, face carefully neutral. “The usual. But the press has a nasty habit of exaggerating the truth. I want to hear it from you.”

  A rolled over to face her fully. A manila folder poked me in the side, so I pushed her until she willing went backward to a cooler, clearer spot on the bed. I sucked in a breath and she breathed out, like we were sharing lungs and not just secrets.

  “It wasn’t some . . . tortured love story. Nothing that profound and definitely not that romantic. We just fooled around, you know?” I was staring at the far wall, embarrassed before the truly embarrassing parts had even been spoken, but I cut my eyes over to her after I said it. I don’t know what I expected to see there. Jealousy, maybe. Or judgement. All I saw was the calm I’m listening face she used with interviewers on local TV. “She was a little older than me, had been in the league a little longer. She was the top point earner, taught me a lot of tips and tricks, too. She said she saw a lot of potential in me and was excited for it. At least, that’s what she said. Then I started outperforming her and getting more court time than her. That’s when the cold shoulder started. After that, the fame kind of went to my head, and she couldn’t stand me.”

  “Definitely sounds like jealousy.”

  “You’d think that would make me feel better, but it doesn’t. And I can’t help but see it from her perspective, you know? Even after all the whispers. Even after she turned everyone against me. I know it was important to her, being the best. Being one-upped by a rookie you mentored is one thing. Being one-upped by a rookie who fucked you and then stole your limelight with a smile on her face is another.”

  I bit my lip and forced myself to meet Gwen’s eyes. They were dark and deep, red-rimmed with lack of sleep and set with frown lines. She was beautiful.

  “I never even said I’m sorry,” I whispered, hoping she would understand. “They never even said they were sorry.”

  My leg throbbed with the threat of phantom pains, and I bent to grip on it reflex. Gwen shifted to scoot down next to me until her head was under my chin. Then she placed her hand over my heart and tapped out an unfamiliar cadence against my skin. I focused on the tap-tap-tap of her fingers until everything was calm again.

  I buried my nose in her hair and breathed in the scent of cocoa butter and wine.

  “You know what the worst part of this whole thing is?” I muttered. “I keep thinking of snappy comebacks now when I couldn’t then.”

  “Would it make you feel better to say them to me now?”

  “Can I?”

  “Lay ’em on me.”

  I twisted up and looked down on her with a cocked eyebrow. “If you ran that court half as much as you run your mouth, you wouldn’t be where you are now.”

  “Devastating,” she drawled, but there was a twinkle in her eye. “Maybe I should get you to write these debate notes for me and let you drag Osten.”

  “And work under you? Tempting.” I waggled my eyebrows, and reveled in her derisive snort.

  “Ugh, you’d hate it. Right now I’m dealing with a pesky rumor that we’ve advocated for raising taxes specifically on small business.”

  “Sounds riveting,” I joked.

  “Mm-hmm. My tension headache a
grees with you.”

  Pressing two fingers to her temple, I murmured, “I could take care of that for you.”

  “Thanks, but my pussy is still smarting from the last two hours.”

  I swatted her. “Not that, though once your pussy’s well rested I’d love to give her some TLC again. Turn on your back.”

  She raised a skeptical brow, but turned over to lay on her stomach. I crawled on top of her until my knees were framing her hips. Pushing the sheet out of the way, I dug my fingers into her lower back to knead the tension I knew was kept there.

  She grunted, then moaned in a way that almost instantly got me wet.

  “God,” she whimpered in a whoosh of air.

  “Right?” I grinned wickedly. “I’m pretty good at this.”

  “Maybe I will put you on the payroll so you can do this. I’ve become quite fond of those fingers.”

  I worked my way up her back to her tight shoulders. It worried me, how tense she was. She worked hard and went after what she wanted, and I admired her for it, but I couldn’t shake the ridiculous notion that it was killing her.

  I bent down to kiss the back of her neck and press my nose to the curls there. “Yeah, I can do that. Personal massager to the World’s Greatest Campaign Manager? Dream job.”

  She turned her head and laughed, soft and breathy. She already looked more relaxed than right after an orgasm shakes her hinges loose.

  Yeah, definitely a dream job.

  Ten

  Gwen

  The venue for the first debate was a modest affair: a high school gymnasium on a Tuesday night. The school was in Osten’s neighborhood, and was one of the more well-off public high schools in the district. I was as amused by the brazen attempt at garnering favoritism as I was annoyed by gall of it. Of course the home field advantage would be an initial block for Jeffrey, but it was also an opportunity to speak to a new audience, and hopefully sway some voters currently in Osten’s corner.

  Jeffrey paced a small hole into the stage, murmuring what was no doubt his stump speech for the fortieth time. The sound of mindless chatter buzzed behind the drawn curtain, and every now and then, he would stop and look up at it, as if it could impart wisdom on him before he took to the stage.