This woman was a gymnast I coached. I was her coach, for fuck’s sake. It would be totally douchey of me to exert my power and influence as a figure of trust in her life in order to get in her pants.
Leotard.
Fuck. No.
I wasn’t getting inside of anything.
“Nik?” she called, focusing my attention on something other than the brain versus biology war being fought in my head. My brain used logic and strategy and well-placed task forces to talk me around to the right side of battle, but strategy didn’t mean much when biology bombed the living hell out of my synapses.
“Sorry. What’d you say?”
“Ummmm,” she said, sounding perplexed. “Nothing. Just your name.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“For the last minute and a half.”
Well that’s embarrassing.
“Sorry, I was…thinking.”
Explicit thinking was still thinking.
“Alright, well, everyone else is packing up and getting ready to leave, so I’m gonna go change.”
“You’re not going to tumble with me?”
“What? No! I’m not even in the same league as you.” Covering, she added, “I wouldn’t imagine I am anyway. I’ll just watch.”
“Come on, tumble with me.”
“No—”
“Callie.”
“Nik.”
“Callie.”
“Nik.”
“Callie,” I said once more, knowing that if you held out long enough, people normally became annoyed enough to give in.
“Okay! Fine! I won’t change!”
The last stragglers of the night looked on with avid interest as they crossed the floor to the exit.
“Yelling is kind of becoming our thing, you know?” I offered, ignoring their nameless faces and smiling at hers.
“Shut up,” she snipped playfully.
“No, really. I don’t even think they’ll call us by name soon. We’ll just be ‘those people who yell’.”
She tilted her head forward and raised a brow in disgust.
A warning.
I kept talking anyway, standing proudly with my hands on my hips. “The Yellertons.”
I stumbled and tripped, the result of her shove catching me off guard.
“What?” she asked when I looked at her with surprised hostility. “Now they can call us ‘the people who shove each other’.”
“Cute,” I laughed, adjusting my hair by pushing it out of my face.
“One of us has to be,” she poked in jest, shoving a finger in my direction as if plotting a poke in my chest.
“Whatever,” I mocked, hands to my forehead in the shape of a ‘w’.
“Go change!” she demanded, throwing her hands forward in the direction of the bathroom. “Unless you’ve changed your mind and don’t intend to tumble?”
I threw up both hands in useless defense and backed slowly toward the exit. “Alright, alright. Relax. I have to go get my bag.”
An unexpected chill hit me as I shoved through the door into the warm, muggy air of a Southern Georgia summer night. I could hear the echoes of my flirtation following me the entire walk to my motorcycle, and my euphoria skirted the edge of dismay and back again.
It felt good to want something.
But why did I have to want something I shouldn’t?
Frustrated and flustered, I snapped open the saddlebag in a rush, grabbed my bag, and nearly slammed it shut.
My feet itched to jog on the way back, but I forced them to walk, the anticipation roiling rigorously between sour and sweet in my gut with each step.
The door felt lighter on the swing to enter, but I didn’t seek out the cause. Instead I headed straight for the bathroom and changed quickly, doing all of the necessary taping and preparation that I always did.
When I exited to the gym, the lights were down except for the one we needed, and Callie lounged on the end of the rod floor with her legs extended in front of her and crossed at the ankles with the weight of her trim body settled into her forearms behind her back.
My bag hit the ground just in time to set off her giggles.
Hunched and pressed into herself, her stomach muscles contracted with each peal, and her toes curled until they folded backwards into the floor.
“What?” I asked, knowing the object of her laughter had to be me, but at a loss for the exact reason why.
“Nothing,” she avoided.
“What?” I persisted.
She rolled her eyes and gave in, sitting up slowly as she did.
“It’s just…your hair. It’s…well, it’s—”
“Funny,” I finished for her.
That didn’t stop her from getting the last word, a cute scrunch of her nose cushioning the effect of her words. “Looking. It’s funny looking.”
“Thanks?”
“Oh,” she said in realization, squealing her laughter to an immediate halt. “Sorry.”
I didn’t want to make her feel bad. It wasn’t like this was the in-style and I’d perfectly crafted it to look this way. It was just a convenient fact like a million other things I hadn’t bothered to change.
“No worries. I’m not particularly fond of it or anything. Just haven’t put any effort in to cut it in the last six months or so.”
“And the headband?” she questioned with a flick of her dainty chin.
My eyes rolled up as though I could see it atop my head. “It’s just practical.” I shrugged. “Messes with my tumbling if it gets in my eyes.”
Her cheeks pinked as she nodded in reply. The rosy color softened her eyes again, and I had to turn to my phone to keep from getting distracted by them.
Finding the song more easily than the night before, I turned up the volume, dropped it to my bag, pulled my shirt over my head and walked over to the end of the floor with Callie.
She scrambled up quickly, moving out of my way as though too close of a proximity would result in an electric shock.
And hell, maybe she was right.
“Metallica?” she asked with surprising musical knowledge. I, on the other hand, knew very little. I only knew this music because it had been ingrained in me from the time I could listen.
“Yeah,” I confirmed before admitting, “My dad’s favorite band.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” I chuckled, the memory of my mom yelling at my dad to listen to something with an actual melody making me smile. “My mom hated it too.”
I could picture her face so perfectly in my mind, the way she nagged and nagged at my dad to find something better to love. He always told her he already had. And, as their child, I normally left the room thoroughly grossed out.
“I don’t hate it,” Callie qualified. “It’s just intense. Kind of makes my heart feel like it’s going to beat out of my chest.”
I pulled myself out of my nostalgia and focused fully on her and her explanation.
“Funny. That’s what makes me like it.”
The dichotomy of our opinions of the same visceral reaction astonished me.
“Really?” she asked, putting a hand flat to her chest to feel the effect the music had on each beat.
“Definitely,” I confirmed, putting a single hand to my own chest and harnessing it. “It’s perfect tumbling music.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. To me, the reasoning was simple. “Music feeds power, and tumbling thrives off of it.” I searched my brain quickly and came up empty. “I can’t think of a more symbiotic relationship actually.”
“Not even peanut butter and jelly?”
“No way,” I denied. “Compared to music and tumbling, it’s like peanut butter fucking hates jelly.”
A small laugh of disbelief bounded out of her throat like a cough, but the tide of consideration rolled in slowly and changed it to interested acceptance.
“Teach me your ways,” she offered easily, a smile curving the corners of her mouth fully this time and completely transforming her face while one hand gestured gallantly to the floor.