He shrugged. “I don’t know. It just came easy, I guess.”

“You’re one of those people who is obnoxiously good at everything they try, right?” I asked, letting out a frustrated huff when I clumsily almost lost my footing again.

Oliver, true to his word, took one hand away from mine and grabbed my waist, refusing to let me fall. “I am good at a lot of things,” he admitted. “Pretty much only physical stuff, though. Sports, stuff like this. Not so much everything else.”

He sounded almost self-conscious saying that, which really threw me off guard.

“So the opposite of me,” I said. “I’ve never successfully picked up a sport in all my years trying.”

That made him smile. “I had to be good at something. Nathan was always the insanely smart one. I had to have my thing, too, or I would have felt completely inferior instead of just slightly not good enough.”

“Your brother sounds like your opposite, huh?” I asked carefully.

The last time I’d tried to bring up his family, he’d changed the topic abruptly. But I was desperate to learn more about him other than the cheery, charming guy he was on the surface.

His eyes met mine before he looked away. He spun around so that he was skating in the same direction as me and held out his arm so I could thread mine through it for balance. He kept his pace slow so that I wouldn’t be left behind or forced to go faster than I was comfortable with.

“Nathan and I have never been anything alike. I’m not sure if we were born that way or if it was the product of how our parents raised us…” His voice trailed off. “But you have a sister. I probably don’t need to tell you about sibling rivalry.”

Something about the pain in his voice told me that his childhood was likely far from the typical sibling rivalry. I decided to tread carefully so that I wouldn’t scare him off.

“Mattie and I were competitive, sure. She was two grades above me and we’d compete over friends or sports. We were both on student government, but she would always be above me. I felt like I had to work twice as hard to get where she was, even though I should have recognized that she was older and it wasn’t a competition.” I licked my lips, glancing over to see him looking lost in thought, staring straight ahead. “But my parents always nipped any real rivalries right in the bud. They didn’t want us fighting or competing. They always told us they were proud no matter what and that we should be celebrating each other instead of challenging. Of course, we were still sisters so we didn’t always listen. I would still steal her clothes, and Mattie still always acted like she knew best, but at the end of the day, we knew we had each other’s backs. My parents too.”

I was oversharing, especially considering this was technically a first date. But this was Oliver. He’d already seen more of me than I’d let anyone see in a long time. I was desperate for him to feel comfortable enough with me to share something—anything—real.