Nikolai shrugged, managing to look both bashful and unrepentant at once.
I turned away, headed back to the chalk bowl, and started my process all over again, talking through my back as I went. “Listen, Nikolai—”
“Just call me Nik.”
I rolled my eyes knowing he couldn't see it. “Listen, Nik, I’ve been coaching myself for the last four years, aside from my time on the actual Olympic team. I think I’ve got it handled.”
I gasped as his face appeared right in front of mine, his body stooped low with his white t-shirt-covered shoulders curling in toward the front while his eyes worked at pinning my jumpy ones down with a spear-like intensity.
“All due respect, Callie, but if you weren’t lacking something, you would have been satisfied two Olympics ago.”
My eye started to twitch way in the back, where the muscles attach to the socket, the way it always did when someone hit a particularly sensitive nerve. He wasn’t saying anything I didn’t know or hadn’t realized, but the fact that he thought he had me all figured out when the complexities of my psyche were still a twisted mess to me really irked me.
At one point, I’d been so lost inside of my own inner workings, gridlocked by the traffic noise of my insecurities and an equally powerful stubbornness to “hard-work” my way out of them, my mom had suggested I see a therapist.
I hadn’t done it, obviously; bullheadedness had always been my more dominant emotion.
After rejecting someone’s psychoanalysis who literally studied, practiced, and got paid to do it, I wasn’t about to let some stranger step into my life one minute and mindfuck me the next.
My mind wasn’t nearly that loose or easy—even for criminally attractive men with uniquely layered, multifaceted, dangerous-as-fuck blue eyes.
What an—
Asshole.
Opinions are like them in that everybody’s got one.
In Callie’s case, as a world-class athlete, there was no question in my mind that people fed them to her like potato chips, unable to stick to just one. The salt would no doubt eventually numb her to the taste and the sensation, and I had a feeling she didn’t particularly like Sour Cream and Opinion fucking chips anymore.
But I had a feeling my vision of her wasn’t far off. She was missing something, and even she knew it.
I could see it in her eyes, the way they narrowed and twitched. Her face bled emotion despite her efforts to disguise it, and in my experience, no one ever got that annoyed unless faced with the unwelcome truth.
“Look. I realize we don’t actually know one another—”
“At all,” she interrupted with a dirty raise of her dark eyebrow.
Carrying on as though she hadn’t spoken, I expanded on my point. “But when it comes to gymnastics, it’s my job to make assumptions about you.”
I had to judge her as an actual competition judge would, not as though I knew her or the reasons behind her actions, but as though her actions alone spoke for themselves. It was a sport of snap judgements really, deciding in an instant if a toe was pointed enough or if a leg had a slight bend.
“We’re going to become close over the next eight weeks before training camp, and you’re going to learn to trust me and my opinions.”
We had to. She had to learn to trust me, and I had to do the things to earn it. If not, I didn’t know where I’d be. And she’d be exactly where she was now, searching for some unknown something.
“You sound pretty sure of yourself,” she accused.
“No. I’m not sure of myself,” I corrected. “Not like you’re thinking. I am certain of your determination though. That kind of fight, that kind of grit that goes into the amount of work you’ve put in…”
She was attempting to win a bid to her third Olympics for God’s sake. There was no doubt the woman knew how to work.
“There’s no way you’ll let it all go to waste just to spite some asshole coach.”
She considered my words carefully, her eyes jumping around the room as if searching for a physical loophole. Cognizant of the precarious state of her opinion of me, I had to fight to keep my bubbling laughter from boiling over.
Eventually, inevitability won out and her pinball eyes transitioned into a much more subdued glare.
I watched her settle into the anger, accept it, and fuel herself and an equally strong emotional wall with its power. She didn’t want me close, she didn’t want me thinking I could get that way, and anger was a good way to reinforce her point.
But I honestly didn’t mind. That kind of fire and drive was what made her an elite level athlete, and there’s no way she would have been at this point in her life, needing somebody like me to step in, if she hadn’t harnessed it successfully.
I wouldn’t have let some random fucknut come in and tell me what to do on day one either.
Her ponytail swung violently over her slender shoulder as she turned and callously ripped the freshly stuck together velcro of her grips apart. Each ridge of her starkly cut muscles shimmied and danced with the movement, trailing into the darkness of cover provided by her purple, crushed velvet leotard.
Her face was hidden but her hunched shoulders expressed every vivid detail of her emotion as though they were wired directly to it. I didn’t bother to hide my smile knowing she wouldn’t see it, but I did manage to stop myself from pointing out that she had yet to complete even one skill on Bars before leaving. I knew she wouldn’t want to hear it, and I knew she needed to release some steam out of the valve of my unintentional pressure cooker.
What I didn’t know was her. What made her tick and smile and what I could do to enhance it. And something in me burned to change that.
I didn’t know what it was. If I felt like I had something in common or if the buttons in her personality just felt instinctually like they lined up with the holes of mine.
It was human nature to wonder and ponder and work at sorting it out. But you couldn’t find the answer when you didn’t even know the exact question.
“What’s with the pariah status you have going?” I asked as she walked in front of me, changing the subject and looking everywhere but at her in order to keep my thoughts professional.
Her body was spectacular—something I wasn’t surprised by given she spent thirty plus hours a week in the gym completing rigorous physical activity—but something else about the way she carried herself had my eyes itching to take a closer look. At the line of her back. The curve of her hip as it settled into her perfectly tight ass. The rock-solid definition of her thighs.
Okay. So maybe I’d looked a little.
“What?” she asked, whipping her ten inch long, glossy ponytail over her muscular shoulder once more. It was obviously a signature move. At least around me.
When her chocolate eyes met mine they sparkled with something unmistakable.
Dislike. Strong dislike.
With thirty hours a week of togetherness ahead of us, I’d have to work on that.
“I thought Olympic medals made you into more of a celebrity than the vibe I’m getting here,” I explained, completely ignoring the stank eye and focusing instead on the lush lashes around it.
Two Team Silvers and an individual Bronze on the Beam, Callie was accomplished. I’d gotten lost in watching old YouTube videos of her, the memories of watching her when the games had aired on TV coming back as I did.
Her name might not be commonplace the world over, but anyone with any association to the sport of gymnastics knew it well.