“Actually,” Layla said, “I sort of did.”
She grinned, bolstered, then turned toward Callie. She hadn’t moved from her spot by the board, but her gaze landed on Max. Those hazel eyes held their usual intensity, but their familiar openness had been replaced by an almost catlike air of mystery. She didn’t know how long they stood there, but long enough for the chill to creep through her clothes. Surely something had to give. No one could feel this many swirling emotions without something taking precedence or priority. Or then again, maybe she felt all the things, and Callie felt nothing. Would Max have to break first?
The thought was disconcerting, and Max failed to rise to the challenge, merely flashing a weak smile before looking away under the guise of finding a chair. She sat several feet back from the ice and watched practice without noticing much of anything, including what the team happened to be working on.
She was good at reading people—or at least she always had been, until Sylvia. Even after everything had calmed down and her initial heartache had been replaced by other emotions, the thing that hurt the most was how much her misjudgment had shaken her sense of self. What did it mean that someone who derived their living, and even their sense of self, from their ability to ask the right questions, to read between the lines, to see the truth through the layers, had gotten all of those things so horribly wrong?
And now, when she needed most to tell herself she wouldn’t make the same mistakes again, she stared into Callie’s generally expressive eyes and saw . . . nothing. Her palms started to sweat, and she rubbed them together. She didn’t like feeling off balance or out of the loop, and she hadn’t for several weeks. Her body rebelled at the thought of going back there, her shoulders tightening and her stomach beginning to churn.
The crack of two rocks colliding reverberated through the cavernous space, drawing her attention back to the ice. Or more accurately, to the players on it.
“Whew,” Layla called. “What a shot, Ella.”
“Hot darn,” Ella said, with a huge smile on her face. “I’m going to come up with an I-nailed-it dance because this is becoming a thing for me.”
Brooke laughed. “How about an Ella-nailed-it break, Skip?”
Callie nodded. “Sure. Take ten.”
The team didn’t need telling twice as they all made a break for the lounge, all except for Callie. She sighed heavily enough for Max to see the rise and fall of her shoulders even from a distance. She had a sudden memory of kissing along those tight muscles and had to tamp down the urge to do so again.
“Glad you’re back,” Callie said, as she used her foot to scoot a couple of rocks into different positions.
“Yeah?”
“I’d started to wonder.”
“Me, too,” Max admitted, “about a lot of things.”
Callie nodded.
“And I had work to do.”
“Work?” Callie finally glanced up. “That sounds . . . good?”
“Yeah,” Max said more confidently. “Work’s good. Work’s important.”
The corner of Callie’s mouth curled up. “I’m glad to hear it.”
“And you?”
“Work is getting better.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“I was off for the first few days after we got back here. Distracted, I guess.”
“Oh.” She didn’t know what else to say. “In a bad way?”
Callie’s smile grew, and she stepped off the ice toward Max. “There’s not really a good way to be distracted in curling.”
“Right. Sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” Callie said, then added, “I mean, you certainly played a part in the distraction, but I don’t blame you. And, I don’t have any real regrets about the events that sparked the distraction.”
“Events,” Max repeated, a little more playfully. “More than one?”
“Several, if I remember correctly, but things got a little blurry, and that’s risky in my line of work.”
“Mine, too.”
“Which is why you stayed away for a few days?”
“Partially.”
“Then we’re on the same page.” Callie pulled a chair near enough for them to talk quietly, but not close enough to touch. “We both needed to refocus and get back to thinking about work.”
Max nodded. She didn’t disagree, and she even appreciated Callie’s ability to recenter herself so quickly and completely, but those qualities also made her worry Callie had never fully stopped thinking about work in the first place. The fear might not have been fair or rational, but fears rarely were.
“So then, tell me about your work,” Callie prodded. “You were doing things related to the last tournament?”
“Yeah, some stuff along those lines.”
“Some stuff?” Callie teased. “Vague.”
Max’s cheeks burned. “Sorry. I did a couple of write-ups for the new blog, and then I edited a few highlight videos to share on social media.”
Some of the sparkle returned to Callie’s eyes. “That sounds fun. I mean, I assume you included all my best shots and cut the ones I flubbed, right?”
Max felt her expression twitch. “Uh, probably.”
Callie stared at her as if waiting for more.
“I don’t remember exactly what shots went into which pieces, but you won, so it’s got to be pretty flattering.”
Callie frowned. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want.”
“No,” she said quickly. “It’s fine. I just wasn’t prepared to defend my coverage of you right now.”
“I didn’t think I’d asked you to defend anything. I was trying to show interest in your job, because I know it’s important to you. I wanted to be supportive.”
She wanted to believe her, and she did, at least intellectually. Callie was kind and genuine, but Max was scared, and she hated that.
“It hadn’t even occurred to me that you had anything to defend until right now.” Callie glanced over her shoulder quickly at the white board. “Do you?”
“No. I mean, I don’t think so.”
The response did nothing to soothe the hurt swirling in those hazel eyes now. “Did you write another hit piece?”
“No!” This whole conversation was spinning out of control. She understood the need to focus on work, but now work felt so much more complicated than it had felt last week. Never again would anything she wrote about Callie be a neutral process. She couldn’t just be a reporter giving unbiased press to a random curler. All those lines and their motivations were muddled. She would love to go back to talking about their jobs, but she didn’t know if she’d ever be able to separate her coverage of Callie the curler from her feelings for Callie the woman, and that was the very crux of her job. And, so very dangerous, both personally and professionally.
She couldn’t sit still as the panic rose in her once more, so she hopped up under the guise of stretching.
“Max,” Callie said, her voice placating. “I’m sorry we didn’t have a chance to talk on Monday morning.”
“It’s fine.”
“I don’t think it is.” Callie rose so they were closer in height once more. Too close.
“Yeah, you have to do your thing. I have to do mine. I mean, we have to do things together, but work things, also separately.” She was going off the rails now. She knew she sounded crazy. She couldn’t seem to stop. But she had to stop. She had to pull herself back together. She couldn’t have a panic attack. Not in front of Callie. She forced her lungs to take one deep, slow inhale, then pushed it out with more force than she intended.
Callie’s brow furrowed, and worry filled her eyes.
“Hey, what’s going on?” Ella called, striding up to her with the same expression she’d worn when she’d accused Max of stealing Callie’s bag.
“Nothing,” Callie said quickly. Then turning back to Max said, “I’m sorry.”
She shook her head almost frantically. “No, it’s my fault. I’m sorry.”
> “What did you do?” Ella snapped.
“Nothing,” Callie said again.
“It doesn’t look like nothing,” Ella said, edging a shoulder between them. “What did you say to her?”
“This isn’t really any of your business,” Max said halfheartedly. “Can you please respect our privacy?”
“Oh, you’re one to talk about respecting privacy,” Ella practically spat. “Care to call Victor Garrick and see how he feels about your right to privacy?”
All the air left Max’s lungs.
“Did you really think we didn’t know about that?” Ella pushed into Max’s personal space. “Did you really think any of us trusted you?”
She shook her head, not in an answer to the question, so much as an attempt to stem the rising tide of bile in her throat.
“Ella,” Callie said quickly, “stop.”
“No, Callie. I don’t care what kind of press coverage this woman comes with. She’s not worth whatever’s going on here. It’s not worth selling your soul for a few extra matches on TV.”
Max took another step back, reeling at the blunt impact of that statement. Is that really what Callie had done? Sold out for the TV viewership? She couldn’t believe it, and yet that’s likely all anyone else would believe if they ever found out.
Then Ella spun on her again. “How many more lives and careers and families are you going to destroy before you learn to leave people alone?”
Max winced, the pain of the comment causing her to take another step back, and then another.
“Okay, really,” Layla said, looking from Max to Callie, her dark eyes pleading. “I think we all need to cool down here. Maybe talk some things out.”
“No,” Max croaked, “she’s right.”
“She’s not,” Callie said quickly.
“She is,” she said more emphatically, but her conviction might have been undercut by the way she continued to back away from them. “Listen to her.”
“Max.” Callie reached for her, but she pulled farther way.
“I’m so sorry.” It was all she could manage before she turned and fled.
Chapter Fourteen
Callie stared at the door Max had practically sprinted through, trying to process what had just happened. Things between them had been awkward from the moment they’d made eye contact, but to say they’d escalated quickly would’ve been a radical understatement, and she couldn’t understand why. Certainly, Ella’s arrival hadn’t helped, but she seemed to have aggravated the situation rather than caused it. Thankfully, Callie wasn’t the only person trying to put those pieces together.
“What the fuck,” Layla said. “I left for, like, five minutes and come back to find everyone had a personality transplant.”
“No,” Ella said, a subtle seething in her voice. “That woman hasn’t changed her personality at all. What did she do to you, Callie?”
She blinked a few times, trying to make sense of the question. Max had done several things to her, but none of them warranted the venom in her teammate’s voice. “We were just talking. I think the bigger question is, what did she do to you?”
“Nothing,” Ella said. “I’m not giving her the chance.”
“The chance to what?”
“Seriously?” Ella stared at her, then turned to the others.
Layla shrugged, but Brooke nodded almost reluctantly. “I know you want to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, Callie, but with her past, and the way she looks at you, I mean, you can’t blame us for worrying. We care about you.”
“Looks at me how? Wait, worry about what?”
“She’s got sort of a bad track record with women,” Brooke said.
“Sort of?” Ella scoffed. “She broke up a marriage and tried to end a good man’s career so she could steal his wife.”
She heard all the words, and intellectually she understood them. But the sentence made no sense to her.
“It’s true,” Brooke said, again seeming to feel a little bad about it. “I mean, you never know for sure what’s going on in someone’s relationship, but I read some of the stories after Ella told me, and the facts are pretty hard to dispute.”
“What story? What facts?”
“Yeah, I’m going to need to be filled in here, too,” Layla cut back in.
“Don’t you two ever follow hockey even a bit?”
“No,” she and Layla said in unison.
“We live in Buffalo, for fudge’s sake. Victor Garrick has been a star forward for the New York Rangers for, like, ever. And he’s totally loved by everyone, but last year Max ran a story about how he was juiced up on steroids and violent to his wife.”
“That’s awful.”
“Yeah, ’cause none of it was true. Max made it all up to make him look bad.”
She shook her head. “Why would she do that?”
“Because she was banging the wife.”
Her stomach lurched.
“It’s true,” Brooke said softly. “She’s never really denied that part.”
“What part did she deny?” Layla asked.
“She said she got bad information from the wife, but I mean, really, that was her only source, the woman who she was cheating on the guy with?”
“And he was humiliated. He had to hold a press conference and tell the whole world he was diabetic and this would be his last season playing hockey and how he wanted to go out on his own terms. Max took that way from him, along with his wife.”
Callie eased back into the chair. So many things made sense now. Her dad’s warnings, the reason Max was even covering curling in the first place, all her anger and resentment. She shook her head. Actually the last part didn’t quite make sense. Why would she be mad at other people if she had been the one to dig her own grave? And where was this other woman now? Surely, if Max had gone through all that for her, she had to love her a lot. Or maybe she hadn’t. Maybe Max slept with women like that all the time. Callie certainly wasn’t in a position to argue otherwise.
“You okay?” Layla asked. “You’ve gone a little green.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“How about, ‘thank you for getting rid of her’?” Ella asked. “Did you see the way she turned tail and ran when it became clear we knew her game?”
Callie flashed back to that moment. Max had run, but she hadn’t looked like someone who’d been caught, so much as hurt. Her eyes had gone wide and wounded. And if she was someone who slept with sources on a regular basis, she certainly hadn’t acted like it earlier. She hadn’t been smooth or carefree today or ever before. She hadn’t even chased after Callie or really pursued her in any way. Perhaps she should feel a little offended about that. If Max fell easily into bed with women she covered, or connived and cheated to get what she wanted, why had Callie been the one to kiss her first, to invite her back to the hotel and jump her as soon as they got there?
She couldn’t make sense of Ella’s story with everything she’d experienced herself, and yet if Max had never denied the allegations . . .
She shook her head again.
“Come on,” Brooke said gently. “Let’s get back to work.”
Ella sighed. “Yeah, okay. Maybe we’ll be able to focus better now.”
“No,” Callie said softly.
They all stared at her.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to focus.”
Brooke laughed nervously. “You can always focus on curling.”
She shook her head again, this time with more force. Something was off. Something in her, something in Max, and it was off even before Ella had burst in. Max had gone from twitchy to scared to hurt. That thought overrode all the others.
She kicked off her curling shoes and tossed her broom to Layla. “I gotta go.”
She would owe them all an explanation eventually, but for right now she needed to get a few of them for herself.
Max’s hand shook too badly for her to get her key in the ignition. She hadn’t had a full-blown panic attack in m
onths, and she had honestly thought she’d moved past them. Another thing she could add to her long list of stupid assumptions. At least she was still breathing, albeit rapidly and shallowly. Still, she didn’t think she would pass out, and as soon as her arms stopped spasming, she could drive. She could leave the club, leave Buffalo, leave the country if she wanted to. She’d seen signs for Canada not far from her hotel. Maybe she could apply for asylum, not that they would give it to her since she was still clearly a social pariah. The thought made her chest tighten painfully. So much for breathing.
She pushed her seat back and tried to double over as best she could with the steering wheel in her way. She tried to think of something else, anything else, anything concrete, the shudder of a winter wind against her car, the squeak of the rubber floor mat against the trembling soles of her shoes, the sharp rap of knuckles against her passenger side window.
The last item on the list finally burned through the haze, and she glanced up to see a face pressed close to the glass.
She screamed and jumped so hard she smacked her knees on the steering column. One hand shot to her leg and the other to the center of her chest.
“Sorry!” Callie called. “Oh, I made it worse again.”
She shook her head, but she couldn’t draw a deep enough breath to offer any consolation.
“Can you come out here?” Callie asked. Eyeing Max more closely, she said, “Or do you mind if I open the door?”
Max shook her head again, finally sucking in a full gulp of air.
Callie opened the door and leaned her head inside. “Hey.”
“Hey,” she managed to rasp.
“You okay?”
Max stared at her, still gasping but no longer fruitlessly as her lungs began to expand again.
“It’s okay,” Callie said, her voice calm and steady as she eased into the seat beside her. “I’m right here.”
“Why?”
Callie’s eyebrows shot up.
“Why are you here?” Maybe not the best first sentence to mutter on the comedown of a panic attack, but it was all she could think of.
“I don’t know,” Callie admitted, still staring at her with concern.
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