“Good,” Frank muttered as I finished, grabbing the paper from my hands and putting it behind him on his desk. “Now get the hell out of my gym.”
“Gladly, sir.”
I pictured my dad’s hand on my shoulder, guiding me through one of the toughest moments I’d ever faced as a man.
A moment where I wanted more than anything to let all my anger out through punches and slurs and the behavior of a boy.
A moment where, for Callie, I needed to be a—
Good man.
It took twenty-six years and basically no looking—but I’d found one.
He’d practically fallen straight into my lap, and what a good thing that was since I had absolutely no time or prospects for meeting him or anyone else otherwise.
I was feeling good as I walked into the gym that afternoon, three batches of cookies baked contributing to a healthy amount of raw dough consumed.
It supposedly wasn’t good for you, and my father certainly didn’t approve, but I’d enjoyed every second of it.
Glancing back at Nik’s empty spot in the parking lot, I wondered what was keeping him.
As the glass door swung closed behind me, I hitched my bag higher on my shoulder and headed straight toward the locker room to put my things away.
A few of the homeschooled gymnasts were scattered about the apparatuses, pointing and flexing and running at full speed depending on where they were.
Just when I got to the edge of the half wall that separated the front-of-house from the floor, my dad’s head popped out of his office door.
“Cal?”
His face was an unreadable mask.
“Yeah, Dad?” I asked, wondering how he’d known I was here so quickly.
“Come in here, would you?” he told me while pretending to ask.
Eager to get it over with and knowing Nik wasn’t there, I changed directions and headed directly into his office. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted and the last thing I felt like doing was having a sit down with my dad. My good mood would surely be ruined by all of the things I should be doing.
He shut the door behind me, gestured that I should sit down, and leaned up against the wood edge of his desk.
The fake leather of the chair I sank into was warm to the touch, and the air in the room felt oppressively hot.
My heartbeat sped up to compensate for the extra energy used to cool myself down, and I had to choke my way through several shallow breaths.
His eyes were watchful and assessing, and I got the distinct impression that his mood for this particular talk was anything but warm and fuzzy.
“What’s going on?” I asked when he didn’t say anything.
“Why don’t you tell me, Calia,” he said, using the full version of my name how parents tended to do when you were in trouble.
Searching my mind, I tried to put together some sort of a progress report, but it was hard when I didn’t know what I was looking for. “I don’t—”
“Sleeping with your coach!” he interrupted with a boom.
I shot back in my chair as though I’d been slapped.
While I sat stagnant, tongue-tied with surprise and the absolute worst kind of dread, he was the one to find his voice again first.
“Do you have any idea what kind of scandal this would be?” His voice was quiet in volume but sinister in intensity and meaning.
I tried to form words, to defend myself and Nik, but nothing I had to say happened fast enough.
“You’d be ruined,” he declared in my silent void. “The media would turn it into a fucking circus. You’d be slut-shamed and he’d be labeled an opportunist weasel. You might even be kicked off the Olympic team for misconduct, I don’t know.”
They couldn’t do that. Could they?
I didn’t know the exact rules, but I couldn’t imagine that a consensual relationship between two of-age adults was grounds for legal action. But the truth was, I really didn’t know. I knew what I thought everyone would think all along, that it was inappropriate and a precedent for crossing a very technically tricky line, but I had no clue when it came to the actual ramifications of our relationship from a rulebook standpoint.
My mind reeled and roiled, and my stomach’s behavior wasn’t far behind.
I felt sick, like I could ralph right there, right on the floor at his feet, and when I thought it couldn’t get worse it did.
Fear, foreboding and powerful, washed over me at the realization that Nik’s absence was so out of the ordinary, so unlike him, so something he wouldn’t do.
Not today, not any day, and not unless he hadn’t had some kind of choice.
“What’d you do to make him go?” I whispered, knowing it had to be true.
Knowing he wouldn’t have left unless he’d been forced to. Counting on it and waiting for confirmation because I needed it.
“Nothing.” My dad’s voice was like a whip, meant to lash and sting with every strike. “I explained the options, and he chose to go.”
“No,” I whispered, not believing that everything we’d been through, everything I knew about him, and all the things he’d helped me learn about myself could culminate in something as hypocritical as this.
He would have spoken to me. I knew he would have.
I shook my head, swallowed roughly, and blinked at a rapid pace. “He would have—”
A paper landed in my lap, unwelcome, just as my dad’s words overpowered my own.
“He signed an agreement, Cal. No contact with you whatsoever until the games and any subsequent contracts are through.”
I shook my head as I looked at his name, staring at me mockingly from the bottom.
My dad softened his voice and squatted down in front of me.
“Look at it this way. He obviously cares about your future a little, agreeing to start over so you won’t have to.”
Disbelief and hysteria swirled just under the surface until I couldn’t stand to sit still any longer.
When I jumped up, it forced my dad out of the way, his back hitting the edge of his desk, but that didn’t slow me down as I grabbed for my phone from my bag and pulled it out frantically.
I jogged out of the office without another word, my father calling my name behind me as I went and my hands shaking violently all the way.
I didn’t stop, unwilling to compromise and unwilling to believe Nik wouldn’t be waiting on the other end of my call.
Pushing send as I shoved out the main door into the parking lot, I brought the phone to my ear and listened to it ring in time with a series of full body shudders.
Four rings and a click left nothing but disappointment to greet me on the other end.
From the top of my head to the bottom of my soles, every inch of my body felt alone and cold in a way it never had.
Because now I knew what it was like to have it.
And you never truly missed something until it was—
Gone.
As fast as my two wheels would take me, I flew down the road headed for nowhere.
Nowhere to go and nowhere to be, the loss of my parents weighed its heaviest since the day it happened.
I drove toward their old house without thinking, without considering that it wouldn’t do me any good, and with no regard for the laws of the road.
It was the only place that made sense in my heartbroken chest and rationale rattled mind, and I couldn’t think of a better idea than the three hours it took on my bike to get there.