Winging It by Cate Cameron

Author:Cate Cameron [Cameron, Cate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B01ERPDMWG
Publisher: Entangled: Crush
Published: 2016-05-15T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

Toby

I’d thought I was pretty busy with just family, school, and the Raiders. When I added “helping Nat get sharp” to my list of responsibilities, any free time I’d had went completely out the window, but I didn’t really care. I talked Coach into letting Nat and me have the ice for a half hour after Raiders practices, and I did a little work on my defense skills playing against her one-on-one. After a couple days of that, I talked some of the other guys into taking turns staying late so we could work on multiplayer stuff. The women’s national team warms up for their tournaments by playing OHL-level teams, so I figured if it was good enough for them, it was good enough for Nat.

She ramped all the rest of her training up, too. Coach wouldn’t let her lift weights or do any of the other off-ice stuff with the team, but I bugged our trainer and nutritionist until they helped me do an assessment of her current fitness and came up with a plan for her improvement.

All of that makes it sound like I was doing a lot of work, but it was nothing compared to what Nat was doing. She might have lost track of her dream for a while, but now that she was back at it, she was relentless. Hard workouts without even the standard good-natured bitching, endless research into training camps and the hockey programs at different universities, and when she was on the ice? When she was actually skating, making plays, and taking shots and turning herself back into the hockey machine she’d been as a kid?

She was beautiful. Women’s hockey doesn’t have body checks, but they have body contact, so all the guys would play a bit physical with Nat, pushing her around and making her fight for the puck. We didn’t go full strength, maybe, but we went pretty hard. And at the end of a play, whether she ended up with the puck in the net or with herself sprawled out on the ice after a spectacular failure, she’d look up at me and just glow with happiness. As good as she’d looked that night she got prettied up for the Raiders game? She looked twice that good when she was on the ice, no makeup, sweaty and red faced, totally alive with the joy of the game.

She looked good at school, too. Lunchtime on Monday I was waiting for her at her locker; we hadn’t planned it, but I wanted to see her, and it was what we’d be doing if we really were going out. She stuffed her books onto the shelf with typical West finesse, meaning she almost ripped the cover off her politics textbook and tore a page halfway out of her binder, then burrowed into her backpack to find her lunch bag. As soon as she turned around, I caught her free hand.

She pulled it back, but not hard, and I hung on. “Boyfriend, right?” I prompted.

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