“We can’t keep doing this.”
I looked up at the unexpected words and pulled back out of her arms to see her eyes not on me, not open and honest, but on the ground. I kept mine on her and searching, willing her to lift them and look at me on her own. To come back into herself and the connection she knew we had with one another.
“Can’t keep doing what?” I asked when her eyes refused to meet mine, a lead ball taking over all of the empty space in my stomach.
I knew where she was going, but some naive part of me hoped I could stop it. That she’d listen to me and herself and realize that each word she spoke came directly out of someone else’s mouth.
“Us.”
“Us,” I repeated, rolling the word on my tongue and flicking a tone of disbelief off the tip.
“Come on, Nik,” she whispered, her tongue flashing out to lick the dry of her lips. “I’m leaving for Olympic training camp. The back and forth, the arguing, all of this…” She pointed between us. “Sleeping with my coach,” she added, her voice hushed even more. “What about all of that seems healthy for focus? People are counting on me.”
I knew people were counting on her.
I was one of them.
But my interest was completely different from everyone else’s.
Unable to hold my tongue anymore, I asked the unthinkable. Something no person had ever dared to ask an athlete right before they headed to Olympic training camp.
Was any of it worth it?
“Why are you still here?” Her muddy, moist eyes jumped to mine in question. I didn’t make her wait. “Still doing this? Because from watching you, from feeling you, I can’t figure it out.”
Her eyes jumped around furiously, trying to find her clarity, trying to find an answer she’d lost a long time ago, but potential tears never fell.
“I can’t just be done. I don’t know how I know, but it’s not over. Something is supposed to happen. Something significant.”
Her words turned desperate, and her tone reeked of pleading. “It has to happen. You don’t swim twenty-one fucking miles across the English Channel just to get in a boat fifty feet from the shore.”
Accusation bled from her eyes, and distress and desperation morphed to anger. “I can’t quit now.”
“I’m not telling you to be done.” My mind reeled, and hurt poured around my heart like fresh, wet cement. “Jesus, you think I’d expect that of you?”
“I don’t know!” she yelled, confused and feeling trapped in her skin. I could see it in the agitated frenzy of her movements and the flush in her chest. She felt like she had no way out, no way to maintain both facets of her life and everything about it killed me.
It killed me to know she couldn’t commit to something I felt so strongly about.
But mostly, it killed me to know I couldn’t have her.
“What am I supposed to think when you say things like that?” she accused.
That I loved her.
God.
That was what she was supposed to goddamn think.
The words lodged in my painfully clogged throat, and I couldn’t say it though. Not like this, not out of anger or spite or some last ditch effort to control a spiraling situation.
When I said those words to her, there would be no reproach or consequences. It would be me and her, and she’d damn well know before I said it.
“I want what you want, Cal. Not what your Dad wants or what’s expected or what you think is the only option. I want you to be fucking happy, and I don’t want it tomorrow or next week or four fucking years from today. I want it now, this moment, and I want it goddamn always.”
“Goddammit!” she yelled, pulling at the skin of her face and turning away from me. “Why are you so good at putting everything together and making sense with your words when mine get jumbled and confused and come out all wrong all the time?”
I thought back to the many zingers she’d delivered in the past and couldn’t say that I agreed. I never thought she’d had a problem yelling at me about what she felt, but maybe this was her way of telling me that’s what was happening now.
I scrubbed a hand down my face and willed myself to calm down.
“Tell me what’s going on, Cal. You just explain, and I’ll listen.” She turned back to me and her eyes searched mine. “I’ll listen,” I reiterated. “Okay?”
“I don’t want it to be over,” she whispered her heart splattered plainly across her entire face.
“Neither do I,” I agreed, coaching myself to keep my spot, my distance, and not pull her into my arms.
“I just need time.”
I expelled a heavy breath.
“Time to go to camp and concentrate on that and nothing else. I can’t think about you or anyone else.”
All I could bring myself to do was nod, wanting so badly to argue but knowing I’d do anything for her at the same time.
Even if it meant doing the one thing I had no desire to ever do.
“I can give you time,” I forced out on a whisper, feeling my jaw hardened with frustration as I said it.
My words sliced open her chest, letting the relief, air, and bloody evidence of her turmoil spill out all over the place.
I worked to calm myself, knowing that she relied on me to be the calm one, the collected one—the one who could rationalize that not right now didn’t mean not ever.
I started to form words several times, but none of them seemed like the right ones. When I finally spoke, it was to spew the only thing I could think to ask that didn’t include begging and a profession of love.
“You know the exact mileage of the English Channel swim?”
She was surprised at first, but nearly instantly settled into the escape my simple question provided. She could concentrate on what was coming without me making it even harder for her, and the knowledge of it washed her pretty face with ease.
I knew I’d done the right thing.
She waved it off. “I wrote a paper once.”
Awkward and uncomfortable we stared at one another as she rubbed the fingers of her hands together in anxiety.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, turning to leave without a touch or a hug or a kiss on the lips.
I’m not.
I couldn’t change what was happening, but I wouldn’t even if I could. Every moment with her was just a piece of the ultimate puzzle that we’d eventually get solved.
I didn’t try to stop her, knowing this wasn’t the end.
It wasn’t for her, and it wasn’t for me.
It was just a pause in time.
Just a little time—
Off.
My gymnastics, my mood, my rhythm and tempo, and the way I tumbled—all of it had turned straight to shit.
Even Beam was feeling and looking wrong, several falls a day clouding my vision and throwing me for a complete loop.
And Coach Banning, the Olympic Team Coach, had noticed. But she wasn’t the type to yell and demand, and for that I was thankful. Instead, she’d pulled me aside with a kind word—and a kick in the pants. Get doing or get gone. She wasn’t mean, but facts were facts. Girls were lined up across the country just waiting to take my spot, and if I wasn’t cutting the fucking cake, there was no reason to keep me.
Still, as nice as she was, I didn’t end my talks with her feeling uplifted at all. I felt down and out and on the last leg of survival.
I always found that to be one of the most interesting things of the Olympic system, having to go from training with someone you know and trust to a stranger for one of the most important events of your life.