Sugar and Ice - RJ Scott Page 0,2

morning. I managed to get up and out of bed, the cool air of the room hitting my naked everything.

Shit. Had Josie seen all this? What must she have thought? But more importantly had she got an eyeful of my…

I couldn’t even go there.

I moved so slowly that a snail would’ve overtaken me on the outside, but I swear the carpet was making a loud noise, or the wall, or maybe it was the vibrations in the air, because my head hurt with the hell of it.

I headed for my kitchen which was left from there. I think I’m going left; the wall is really fucking loud right now, as I trailed my fingers along it. Then there were the voices. Not ghostly voices in my head. This was my baseball pro brother arguing with my actress sister.

“—Yeah right,” Logan said, and he sounded exhausted.

“You want me to delete the entire freaking Internet?”

“Whatever, JoJo, just don’t let him see it.”

“It’s on TMZ, she’s plastered it all over her Instagram, and she tweeted it and the tweet is freaking trending, Lo, there is no way he’s not going to see this.”

I heard a scuffle. “Give it to me, I’m gonna break the Internet,” Logan snapped.

More scuffling, and when I stepped into the kitchen I saw a typical Collins standoff. Logan holding something up high and Josie trying to reach whatever it was, which was my brand new iPad.

“Hey,” I croaked, and both of them whirled to face me so fast that Logan threw my iPad, which hit the wall on the other side of the room and smashed in slow motion to the floor. Damn Logan and his freaky throwing arm. I couldn’t even be bothered to care; they were there for me, and I was so grateful.

Josie reached me first, guiding me to the kitchen table, a seats-twelve affair made of glass, with chrome legs. It was shit to keep clean, so I never used it. What was the point; it wasn’t as if the team was over here having pizza and beers.

I can’t even think about beer.

Silently she placed water in my reach, and then a magic plate of pancakes with maple syrup and bananas appeared in front of me. My favorite, and she knew it, although she couldn’t cook if it was a matter of life or death, so I knew Logan had made them. I forked up a mouthful, swiping the pancake in the syrup and stabbing at a banana, then chewed and swallowed. I wasn’t sure that my taste buds would have survived last night, but after a few bites the banana-pancake-syrup goodness hit me right where I needed it to.

“What did she say?” I asked after I’d finished my first entire pancake. If I knew Logan there would be a whole pile of them somewhere; he stress-cooked, and this right there, his little brother trying to drown his sorrows on the worst day of his life, was definitely going to stress him. Logan didn’t understand half the things that had gone wrong for me, and told me so, often, but he had my back the entire way.

“You don’t want to know,” he said

I looked up at a face so similar to mine, his eyes narrowed, and temper creating twin flags of scarlet on his cheeks.

Josie started, “I’m sorry Tate, but she shared a photo with bed hair in her jammies, pouting—”

Logan cursed, “With a face full of makeup—”

“Logan, shut up. The caption was that she wanted privacy on this terrible day, but that she had someone who was helping her find her inner light, or some shit.” She air-quoted the last part.

“The usual places picked it up, TMZ ran an article on what happened, blah blah, the ongoing new start.”

“What a bitch,” Logan snapped, but I placed a hand on his arm.

“No. She’s not, Lo. There’s something wrong with her, she’s so unhappy, and I should never have asked her to marry me. But now, I don’t let what she says hurt me.”

“She is hurting you, little brother,” Josie murmured and patted my cheek.

“I can’t think about that, I just want to play hockey.”

Logan smacked the counter, making me jump. “I don’t get this, Tot. All you need to do is tell people what she was really like, explain that the person you fell in love with changed, and that she blackmailed you into marrying her—”

“She didn’t blackmail me. She was honest with me about the despair she felt with life, and I knew I