“I don’t hate it. Will you please stop saying that!”
He’d never said it before.
Embarrassment suffused her face.
“Well, you don’t love it, that’s for sure. Then why? Only because it’s what your father wants you to do?”
Her eyes went flat. The flatness so stark it shone under the lights. “Why is that so wrong? Look at you, you ended up on the pitch eventually, didn’t you? I guess our legacies aren’t as easy for us to get away from as we want.”
“Except I actually love football. I wasn’t forced into it because it’s my legacy.”
She looked like he had hit her. He wanted to take his words back. He wanted to turn back time. He wanted to run for his life.
She’s just a girl I dated in high school.
And he was a bloody liar.
A bloody liar who was in so much trouble.
“You didn’t always love it,” she said so quietly he almost imagined it coming from inside his own head. How hard she had fought to bring him back to it. In the end her betrayal had done what her love hadn’t been able to.
“You’re right. I did lose my love for it for a while.”
“How did you find your way back to it?” she asked. It was a question with so many other questions rolled into it, he wasn’t sure how to answer.
In the end honesty felt like the best path. “When I tried to play in high school here, everything felt like a legacy, like every single thing I did on the pitch said something about my pai, and I just couldn’t do it. But when I found myself on the pitch after . . . after I went to England, I didn’t give myself a chance to think. At first everything was automatic. Coded into me since I could barely walk. Then I realized that it had never been just me on the pitch until then. My pai had always been there with me. I had so much to learn, so much to unlearn, and when I embraced that, suddenly, for the first time the game was mine.”
China walked in with her crew and Ashna blinked away the storm in her eyes at his words. They were led into the interview studio, where they proceeded to answer the usual barrage of questions. How special it was to be here. How special it was to form a bond with each other (a bond between strangers!). How food was nourishment not just for bodies but for souls, and so on and so forth. He filled the silence with sound bites. She did the monosyllables.
“When did you know cooking was your passion?” the interviewer asked her, and the layer of misery at her core rolled to the surface.
Her lips stretched, desperate for a smile. “I . . . I always . . .”
“I’m so glad she’s passionate about it, because I’ve always been terrified of the damn thing,” Rico drawled with a wink. “I mean, she literally had to walk me through the churro in baby steps. I still managed to mess it up.”
The interviewer chuckled and picked up the perfect pass Rico threw him. “I don’t think we’re allowed to criticize that churro. I believe Ms. Raje said it was the best churro she’d ever tasted.”
For all her being flustered just now, fierceness shone through her smile. “You should have tasted it. It was.”
For all his smoothness just now, Rico couldn’t come up with a response to that.
Satisfied at canning another perfect on-camera moment, the interviewer moved on to rehash The Video, making Ashna shut down again. She really hated that video. Rico really hated that she did.
Thinking about his slide across the floor refreshed the pounding in his knee.
“So you ready for your next cooking challenge today?” the interviewer asked.
“Can’t wait to get in there and cook up a storm,” Rico said, overcompensating for her silence again.
When they were done, Ashna hurried out of the studio, racing right down the passage and out through one of the back exits into the open air. Rico had no idea why he followed her, dragging his damn leg with him.
She leaned her head back and sucked in a breath. The bun at her nape loosened and Rico’s insides did a godawful leap.
“Can they talk about anything other than that stupid video for one damn second?”
He let the door slam behind him. “Right, the stupid video of me tearing open my wound because you couldn’t keep a grip on a knife.”
She squeezed her temples, hands shaking. “You know what I meant.” Her fingers rubbed her skin so hard it reddened. “Did you really tear . . .” Her gaze dropped to his knee. The need to touch him, to comfort him, flared in her eyes.
He didn’t want her looking at him this way. It was this look, this look that drank his pain up into herself, that had screwed him in the first place.
“It’s nothing,” he snapped. “And it isn’t a secret that I tore open my stitches. If you had cared to ask you would have known.”
She tugged at her hair, trembling fingers seeking that one errant strand that pulled at her scalp. The realization that he would do anything to stop her from hurting like this was a soft tap inside him, right on the nerve that made him want to double over.
He was about to tell her it was okay, lie and soothe her, but she faced him, remorse dimming her eyes. “It’s not nothing. You saved me from getting hurt and I’m so sorry that you hurt yourself.” There was that look again. The one that said I can’t bear to see you in pain. The one that said his pain was her pain. He knew what a lie that was. He knew.
“You’ve apologized already. It hardly matters now. One year ago, you might have cut my career short. But I’m already done with that. Timing is everything when someone inflicts pain, isn’t it?”
Seconds ago he’d wanted to take it all away from her; now he was hurting her when she was down, when she was hurting for him. When the only thing that had distracted her from whatever she was struggling with was his pain.
Her look said she couldn’t believe what had become of him.
He couldn’t believe it either.
“True. Timing is everything.” Those were the words that cracked her voice. A thin hairline fracture that she swallowed around. “And the timing of that video means we can win this, doesn’t it?”
“Any advantage is an advantage,” he said, because suddenly they were both masters of saying one thing and meaning another.
For a breath, her gaze clung to him so tight he almost reached for her.
“If it bothers you so much that the advantage is based on people loving us together, all we have to do is stop acting like it’s a big deal and they’ll stop.”
Shock widened her eyes. Whether it was from what he had said, or the fact that he had said it at all, he didn’t know.
His own heart thundered with realization.
Well, bugger him sideways, the public did have a way of identifying something real. It’s why people loved watching sports. You couldn’t lie on the pitch when the clock was breathing down your neck. There was no way to hide your heart when you locked in on your goal, when winning became the sum total of who you were.
“Why is winning this so important to you anyway?” He had to know. She’d been a madly competitive player, but that part of her seemed to have been entirely snuffed out.
She swallowed, the long column of her neck straining. “If I don’t win, I’ll have to shut my restaurant down.”
Wow. Okay. That explained so much. But it made fresh rage rise inside him. “Then why aren’t you competing harder? Why aren’t you even in that kitchen when we cook?”