Free Home Ice by Catherine Gayle

do.
    “You won’t mean to.” She shrugged and gave me the most pathetic look imaginable. “Why couldn’t you have been mean and horrible? All of this would have been so much easier if you were awful, you know.”
    I laughed. “Depending on who you ask, they’ll tell you all about how mean and horrible I am. Burnzie might have a few choice words to say after the way I laid into him last night, for one, and I lost track of how many guys have called me the meanest son of a bitch they ever played against a while back.”
    She shook her head. “But that’s… That’s not you. It’s not the real you.”
    I wasn’t sure who the real me was. It probably depended on whom I was with. There was the version that Linnea saw…the one that came out when I was with Paige and her girls. And then there was the other version, the one that everyone else saw.
    Arguing about it wasn’t going to change anything, though. I held out a hand for her. “Come on. Let’s go have some fun and worry about all of this later.” Not that I expected her to ever stop worrying. It went with the territory when you had a daughter with Down syndrome. Still, she had the whole weekend free from her kids, and I intended to make good use of that time in getting to know Paige .
    She picked up her purse and put her hand in mine. “Fine. No worrying, at least for now.”
    Little did she know, I intended the for now part to last the entire weekend.

    MATTIAS TOOK ME to dinner at El Gaucho for our Valentine’s Day date, an upscale steak restaurant downtown that I would never consider going to under normal circumstances. Granted, normal circumstances meant having all of my girls with me, since Dan only kept them one weekend a month, on average. He was supposed to have them every other weekend, but his job prevented that from happening. With tax season coming up, he might not be able to keep them at all after this weekend for at least the next couple of months, so I was determined to enjoy this one with Mattias, whether my girls were with us or not.
    Fun, bright places were always better when they were along—Sophie, in particular—and El Gaucho was dimly lit, elegant, and exceedingly romantic.
    It was easy to fall right back into the trap of falling for Mattias in that sort of setting. There were candles and more flowers on our table, and he kept leaning in closer to me, resting his chin on his hand and staring so deep into my eyes it felt as though he could see all the way down to my soul.
    A Latin band was playing off in the distance, and our waiter flambéed parts of our meal directly beside our table. I oohed and aahed more than I expected I would, but how often could I experience something like this? Not very. As a single mom, I had more academic meets, soccer games, and laundry days on my calendar than dates. But I couldn’t imagine anywhere I’d rather be or anyone I’d rather be with.
    Once the waiter left us with our meal, Mattias leaned in again, thoroughly invested in me in a way that made me feel heady. “You’ve never told me how you got into massage. Did you always want to do it?”
    I shook my head, sipping from the robust red wine he’d ordered for us. “Not always, no. I came to it in a roundabout way.”
    He raised a brow, a silent encouragement for me to continue.
    “I was in college when I met Dan. We were both accounting students. We got married when he graduated, in the summer after my sophomore year. I was pregnant with Zoe before Christmas break in my senior year, and I never ended up finishing my degree. We decided it would be better for us both if I was a stay-at-home mom, at least while the girls were little. By then, he was getting ready for his CPA exam, and he was already making a decent living. But then Sophie came along, and she needed a lot of extra care—like daily massage. When she was a baby, her therapist taught me to massage her little body, to help with her blood flow and to increase her muscle tone and