Breaking the Ice (Timberwolves #1) Page 12

  "I hope that's enough for you," she said. "Let me know if you're not feeling any better in about ten minutes. You might be too big for the standard dose." She frowned at the packet, reading and re-reading the dosage instructions with intensity.

  He couldn't help but smile as he watched her and reached out to touch her cheek, his hand looking comically huge cupping her small, heart-shaped face.

  "Thank you," he said softly. "I really wanted to go home tonight and I couldn't have done it without you. I'm not a huge fan of hospitals."

  She smiled softly back, leaning her face into his hand ever so slightly. "You're welcome. I'm not a big fan of hospitals either so... I get it. It's always better to be home and comfortable when you're not feeling well."

  He nodded. "Exactly right. You know the last time I was in hospital," he said, relaying the story mostly just to stay awake, "It was when I broke a vertebra in my spine in the junior league. They were worried for a while that I might be paralyzed - this was before I woke up from an induced coma, by the way. So they flew my parents in to... Well, because I guess that's what you do with kids." He shrugged.

  Julia frowned. "They must have been so worried about you."

  "Yeah, they were really worried about losing their meal ticket," he smiled tightly, a smile with no joy behind it whatsoever. "But once I woke up and found myself in pain but with all mobility intact, they were back on their flight to Moscow within the hour."

  Julia's mouth fell open. "How old were you?"

  "Fifteen," Yaro replied, his eyes faraway. "They haven’t been here since. Still send them money every paycheck though," he laughed mirthlessly. "I'm a masochist I know, but it's the easiest way to be sure I just... Don't have to deal with them at all."

  "Yeah, I uh... I noticed you don't have any pictures or anything of your family," she said. "That explains a lot."

  "We're not what you would call close," he said shortly. "Like I said - I'm their meal ticket. They've always made that abundantly clear and... Obviously that's not the kind of parental influence I want. So if being that means I don't have to have them in my life any other way then... So be it."

  Julia was silent for a moment. She had a wonderful relationship with her family and couldn't fathom not having their support in her life. She felt a small morsel of understanding begin to unfurl itself within her - she began to understand why Yaro was the way he was. Quick to anger, quick to take care of himself with the means at his disposal, and fiercely loyal to his friends - of which she now supposed she was one. Privately, she still hoped to be more - but when it came to Yaro's love life she thought it wisest to take everything one small step at a time.

  "You're close to your family though," he said after a time, breaking her train of thought like a pin in a balloon.

  "Yeah," she smiled. "Yeah, I am. Or... I mean, I was. When I was growing up. It's not really the same since..."

  That same troubled look crossed her face briefly and he wondered if this was the moment she was finally going to open up to him. But she shook her head instead, clearing her throat.

  "You know. Since I moved to the city."

  "Ah," he nodded. "Yeah, of course. Distance changes things."

  She nodded resolutely, clearly seizing upon this narrative and clinging to it. "Yeah. I still talk to them every week though," she said with a small smile. "Just... Different days," she gave a small chuckle. "Too many to do all at once with my brothers and my parents and my nieces and nephews." She shook her head, a fond smile on her face creating what thought was the loveliest version of her he'd yet seen.

  "When did you move away?" He asked. "Do all your brothers live back home still? Do you miss where you grew up?"

  Raising her eyebrows and brushing off her forehead with imaginary sweat, she laughed.

  "Sorry," he said. "Too many questions."

  "No, it's fine," she smiled. "Let's see. I moved away when I was seventeen. For college. My brothers are all still in my hometown, yes. They all work in oil and gas so it's kind of the place to be for them. Which my mother never ceases to be grateful about," she gave a small laugh to herself. "And... Yeah I do miss it. But I'm happy here. Here is my own place. I made my own life here from scratch. You know?"

  Yaro did know. He felt the exact same about the city - having little to no connection to Moscow, where he had spent the first fourteen years of his life.

  "What about you?" She asked, leaning back against the back arm of the couch and wrapping her arms around her legs. "Do you miss Russia? You barely even have an accent anymore," she added, as if noticing it for the first time.

  "I don't miss it at all," he said. "It kind of seems like a dream, living there. I've been back a few times but I just don't feel much of a connection with it. Maybe because my visits home always involved my parents and they're not exactly... The best at making me feel at home."

  Julia nodded silently. "They always make so much about you being Russian. But you have your citizenship and everything don't you?"

  "I do. But I'm more famous in Russia than I am here," he said, shaking his head to indicate how bizarre he found that fact. "They love having one of their own in the spotlight, you know? That's what Ryan's Russian goon is so mad. That I'm the boy wonder of back home and I'm barely even Russian. As far as he or I are concerned." He shrugged his shoulder to indicate how much he cared about that characterization of himself.

  Julia nodded, considering this. The two of them sat in comfortable silence for a moment until Yaro's eyes began to drift closed again.

  "Hey," she said gently, giving his leg a tap. "No sleeping yet, remember?"

  He gave a small grunt. "You'll have to keep me awake then. Tell me something about you."

  She thought for a moment. "What would you like to know?"

  His eyes flickered drowsily. She thought it looked as if the drugs had begun to kick in.

  "Tell me something about your day."

  "My day. Hmm. Well, it's been kind of a roller-coaster, let me tell you," she said, thinking about where to begin. Then she realized she hadn't thanked him for his note - or even acknowledged it in all of the day's madness. She felt suddenly shy.

  "Hmm?" He nudged.

  "I got your note, first of all," she said at last, giving him a gentle poke back with her toe.

  "Yeah," he said, "I figured that when I tried to talk to you and you didn't hate me."

  "I never hated you," she rolled her eyes. "But come on. You had a fuck-buddy drop by while you were - while we were..." She trailed off, too embarrassed to continue.

  "While we were what?" He asked, amused. When she didn't answer, he poked her back with his considerably large toe. "While we were what?" He asked again, laughing as she resisted.

  "Admit it," she laughed swatting him. "It was a bonehead move."

  "Oh, I am well aware, don't you worry. Rhochelle informed me of this immediately."

  "Smart girl."

  "Yeah," he smiled fondly. "She's a good one. Not for me though. We're decent friends but that's about all."

  "About?" Julia asked, raising a single eyebrow.

  "Friends with benefits when we're both single. When we're not," he shrugged. "We return to friendship only.”

  Julia bit her lip. "And you're sure she doesn't mind?"

  Yaro gave a short, barking laugh. "Absolutely. She's got a very full dance card."

  "Oh," Julia said, "I see." Well. Far be it from her to judge, she thought.

  "She gave me great advice after you left," he said. "And for the record," he added, "That's ALL she did. She thought you were pretty."

  Julia shrugged, self-effacing. "That's very sweet of her," she said genuinely.

  "Yeah," Yaro said, feeling a delightful sense of fuzziness descend upon him in his sleep-deprived and drug-addled state that made his thinking frazzled and his tongue feel heavy and clumsy in his mouth.

  "I wanted to make sure I apologized before the benefit," he said, his voice growing groggy.

  Julia hesitated, wonderin
g if she should let him go on. He didn't look like he was in a fit state to remember anything she might tell him at this point. She decided to let him be.

  "It was really sweet of you," she said instead, meaning it.

  "I know how much it means to you now," he said, his words beginning to slur ever so slightly. "Christina told me about your brother and I... I just wanted it to go as well as it could. So I knew it was important to apologize," he repeated.

  For a moment, Julia was taken aback. She didn't often tell people about Jacob - only people she knew and trusted knew about her brother. She hadn't told Cassie anything about him at all yet. Often, she felt protective about his memory, as if telling people about his death was somehow giving a piece of him away forever.

  But with Yaro... She understood why Christina had told him. The older woman tended to be protective of her and she would have wanted to make sure Yaro understood the gravity of his behavior on the night in question. She'd seen how hard Julia had worked to make it happen, how she'd lobbied the team year after year to get behind what she knew was an important cause. Christina understood - and she knew deep down that Yaro would too. Somehow, it didn't hurt that he knew.

  "It's okay," she said reassuringly, patting him on the leg gently. "You've apologized. It's all good. Everything is going to work out just fine. Don't worry."

  "Do I have to stay up longer?" He asked. "I really don't think that I can do that."

  "I'm afraid so," she said. Then, did something she had never done voluntarily before. She offered to talk about Jacob.

  "How about I tell you about my brother? Would that help you stay awake for a little while?"

  Yaro's eyes opened wide and he sat up straighter, looking as if she'd given him an injection of caffeine, straight into the bloodstream.

  "Yeah, I think it would," he said sincerely, and took her hand in his, squeezing it gently and intertwining her fingers with his. She looked at their joined hands for a moment, an inscrutable expression on her face and then she looked up into his face with complete vulnerability, a nakedness that took his breath away. Then she took a deep breath and began.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  OVER THE NEXT several hours, Julia recounted more about her childhood and her relationship with her twin brother than she'd told anyone in years. She told him about growing up with Jacob and her brothers at the hockey rink every single weekend (and several weekday mornings), about being her brothers' biggest supporter and cheerleader, and about Jacob being recruited for juniors and playing in his first year when he was sixteen.

  "Watching him play his first game in the juniors," she shook her head, her brown eyes huge and sparkling, "It was just incredible." She smiled. "He was happier than I had ever seen him. And he played amazingly," she said, becoming animated and enthusiastic. "It was like it was meant to be... Silly as that sounds," she laughed, shrugging her shoulders. "It was just... Really amazing to be there to watch someone's dream come true, you know? Especially when it was someone I loved so much. It felt like my dream was coming true too."

  Yaro gave her a soft smile, waiting for her to go on.

  "He was on fire that entire season," she said. "And it was like we were all counting down the days until he turned eighteen so he could be drafted. At the end of his first season, we all went to his last game. The whole family. Even my older brothers. And keep in mind, they played their whole lives too. But they were never good enough to get drafted. They weren't mad about it at all though - it was impossible to be anything but happy with everything Jacob had achieved. He worked so hard for it, and he wanted it so badly. And it was all coming true."

  She looked so happy at the memory that Yaro wished that he could freeze that very moment, take a snapshot with his mind and carry it with him always. But it only lasted for a moment before it flickered and disappeared.

  "Everything was going well, they were ahead. Jacob was playing as well as he ever had. But towards the end of the game, some of the play started getting... You know, maybe a bit rougher than usual. There was a scout for the NHL in the stands apparently. And things got competitive.

  You forget how young they are, you know?" She said, turning to him. "Because they're so big. Jacob was the same. Almost as big as you," she nodded her head, indicating the size of Yaro’s body. "When he was about fifteen. They look like men but they're just kids. Stupid kids who make stupid mistakes," she finished dully.

  "Someone checked him on the other team - and I'm not mad at him," she said, almost defiantly. "He was just a kid and it was an accident and I'm sure he feels terrible especially after everything... You know," she cleared her throat. "Everything that came after. But it was just a hit gone wrong. The angle... Something was wrong. And Jacob just went down screaming. He was screaming," she repeated, "Like he knew in that instant that he'd lost everything. And I'll never forget the sound of it. Not ever."

  She fell into silence and for a moment Yaro wondered if she would go on at all. She gathered herself for a moment, but eventually found her voice again.

  "It was his Achilles," she said. "You know what that means," she added and of course, he did. It meant the end. The recovery time for an injury of that caliber was too high, the timing inconceivably bad. He would never have been drafted and he'd have known it then, in that instant.

  "Obviously, he had to pull out of Juniors. And he had to make... You know, alternate plans for his life. Because this one thing that he'd been working for his entire life, that he'd had for just a short period of time was just snatched away," she said snapping her fingers. "Just... Gone."

  She sighed. "Anyway. He got into physical therapy and everything but... He had no motivation for any of it. He didn't know who he was without hockey - and now he had to try and decide what to do with this whole life he had stretching out before him that he just saw as empty. And scary. And we tried, we ALL tried, to get him interested in other things. To make him see how cool college could be and how he had the opportunity to discover himself all over again, but he just kept withdrawing and withdrawing until it was like I barely recognized him anymore."

  She looked down at their intertwined hands and spoke quietly. "We all thought he just needed some time and we did everything we could think of to support him. My brothers spent as much time with him as possible and tried to show him that there was... You know, life out there. My parents promised him they'd send him anywhere he wanted to go for college, to study whatever he wanted. And I just tried to be there for him."

  Yaro was silent, letting her work her way through her emotions. The way she spoke - careful and considered, but at the same time in torrential outbursts of words, it seemed as though she had been waiting to tell this to someone for a very long time.

  She looked down at their intertwined hands for a while saying nothing and the silence wrapped around the two of them, as comfortable as a down quilt.

  "He killed himself on our seventeenth birthday," she said quietly. "My oldest brother Logan found him, but he wasn’t… gone yet. He died later in hospital. Logan's never said a word about what it was like and I don't ever want him to. I don't want to know what it was like. I can't imagine how hard it would have been for him. It was hard enough just for me to hear about it."

  Yaro squeezed her hand gently. The raw emotion in her voice, the way the words and the reality behind them tore at her, he realized he had never loved anyone as much as she seemed to have loved her brother. The thought made his heart feel strangely constricted - but whether with longing or empathy he couldn't completely say. He waited for her to break the silence. Finally she did.

  "After Jacob died I just couldn't be home anymore. I used to love home - I was the girl who swore I was never going to leave, who swore that having a successful life didn't mean you had to move to the city. But everything changed for me after that. He was everywhere I looked. I loved my home but I just couldn't stand to be there anymore. So when I got the chance to take early admission at college here, I jumped at it. Started working wherever I could
to pay my room and board. And that was basically my life for four years," she sighed, running her other hand through her hair. I worked so hard and for so long... Because I just didn't want any time to think about what had happened. I don't think I really started dealing with it until I got this job," she said, giving a small laugh.

  "Being around other hockey players all day - people who remind me of Jacob so much, it just became impossible not to deal with my shit. And getting involved with Beyond the Ice really helped me process it all."

  She exhaled heavily and suddenly, giving her shoulders a shake. "Whew," she said heavily. "That was... A lot. I'm sorry to..."

  "Don't apologize," he said, letting his index finger trace the soft skin of her wrist. "I'm glad you told me. I wanted to understand."

  She looked up at him then, a wavering smile on her face, her huge brown eyes full of tears. She blinked rapidly to prevent them from falling. "You would have liked him," she said. "You guys were a lot alike. He wasn't as much of a jerk as you are though," she smiled.

  He gave a small laugh. "That's how I know you're feeling okay. You start taking pot shots again."

  She shrugged her shoulders, wiping with her sleeve a few tears that had managed to escape.

  "Okay," she said finally, slapping him gently on the leg. "Now it's your turn."

  "My turn to what?"

  "We're doing deep and meaningfuls, clearly," she said. "So now it's your turn to lay something on the line for me. Why have you been acting the way you have been in the League the past few years? You weren't always like this. So what changed?"

  Yaro felt his defenses going up immediately at this probing and had to patiently peel them down again, bit by bit. He took a deep breath.

  "I've been a pro since I was fourteen years old - in one form or another. Like Jacob. I was a Junior, recruited as soon as I hit eighteen by the NHL. High up in draft picks the year I was drafted. Not right at the top, but I was up there."

  "I remember," Julia said. "Definitely the highest international pick that year. You're too modest."