Imperfectly Beautiful (Jordan Knight Fanfic, Liadan #3)

Twirlers and Theaters

-NATALIE-

After a while of torturing myself with watching all of the chipper couples navigating throughout the rink, I forced myself to get up from my bench and seek out Logan and Danielle.

Carefully balancing on the thin silver blades of my skates, I weaved in and out of the various people standing around until I spotted Danielle stepping off the ice.

"Hey Dani," I said as I came over to her and put on a smile. "Where's Logan?"

"You just missed him," she said as she held onto the railing to balance herself. "Him and a bunch of the guys are heading outside to the outdoor rink to play hockey against guys from the rival school. There's too many people inside to play in here."

"Oh," I nodded. "Well are you still going to be in here? We can skate together."

"Well, I would, but I've almost fallen five times and actually fallen twice. Apparently skating isn't really my thing," she scrunched up her face and shook her head, causing her high brown ponytail to sway behind her. "I've already almost fallen about five times. I'm just going to sit and cheer for the BJH guys outside with some of the other girls. You can come with if you want?"

I wasn't exactly sure that I wanted to be stuck with a bunch of middle schoolers, but when I glanced out at the ice I spotted DJ and Maya holding hands and skating together on the other side of the rink while Aiden and Samantha practically danced in the middle of the ice like they belonged in the Olympics as a team.

"I'll probably be working on my sketches, but I could do a little people watching out there," I agreed and she nodded as she hobbled over to the bench and set to work on getting her skates off.

"Okay, just let me remove these death traps first."

I chuckled and nodded before sitting down next to her to take my own skates off and switch back to my sneakers.

Danielle decided to return her skates back to the rental area, but I held onto mine for a while longer just in case I changed my mind and wanted to hit the ice later.

I clutched onto my sketchbook and zipped up my jacket as I followed her to the outside rink where Logan and some of the other guys from Barrett Junior High were gathering away from their rivals, Northside Junior High.

"Let's go BJH!" Danielle called in her cupped hands and hurried on ahead to the circle of girls leaning over the side of the rink to watch while I sat on one of the outdoor benches and rubbed my arms up and down.

After a bit of shivering, I took in the entire scene to try to spark some type of inspiration for anything other than a romantic picture. Logan, ever the competitor had clearly taken on the role of team captain and I considered trying to come up with something to represent leadership or something inspirational, but I was drawing an absolute blank.

Sighing, I flipped back to my drawings of eyes and reached into my purse to pull out various shades of colored pencils to try out different eye shades beyond the dark brown ones that I had already created. However, as soon as I played out my pencils on the bench next to me, a gust of wind came by and sent the pencils rolling onto the ground.

"Great," I muttered and tried to retrieve the drawing instruments quickly.

After a bit of searching, I'd gotten most of the back, but my most used pencil of all, the dark brown was still missing. I looked everywhere, but nothing.

"Looking for this?"

I popped my head up from looking underneath my bench and turned to see the guy from the skate rental counter sauntering in my direction. He looked just as intimidating now as he had earlier with his brown hair tussling around in the wind and his dark eyes dancing between me and the cigarette hanging between his lips.