“How do you know you shouldn’t?”
Distress lined the corners of her eyes, looking eerily like the narrow end of a spider web, as she fought to maintain her normal detached interest.
“I…I…”
My heart thudded in my chest and clamminess formed a pond in the palm of my hand.
“I can’t.”
Unfamiliar disappointment cracked in my chest and splintered all the way into my gut. I normally did far better with hope management. Today had me all fucked up.
There was no reason to push her though.
“Okay.”
She looked disappointed.
Not in me. In herself.
Lifting the corners of my mouth into an easy smile, I sought to put her at ease.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, then. What time do you like to get started?”
Perhaps surprised to have someone else relying on and managing their life off of her schedule, it took her several seconds to think it through. “I come in pretty early to help out with office work. Condition around noon, take a short lunch break and then start event work and drills.”
“I’ll be here at one then.”
“Okay.”
I almost balked at the simplicity with which she agreed, but I was done contemplating for the night. I needed a break and clarity and to not overanalyze every single encounter.
I hoped a good night’s sleep would teach me how to do that.
With a nod-salute combination I’d never even considered trying to pull off in my entire life, I turned to my bike, simultaneously shut my eyes in frustration and grabbed my helmet, slapped it on my head, and climbed astride.
It took effort, but I managed not to look back.
Okay. Everything was A-fucking—
Okay.
I thought I’d known, but I’d actually had no idea.
Nik, Nikolai Bagrov, whatever…was a pretty big fucking deal. He wasn’t just “a power tumbler.” He was considered third best in the world.
The world.
Like, the entirety of Earth.
I didn’t waste time when I got home, rushing to my computer to let Google school me on my lack of knowledge.
And boy, had it. It told me to the tune of sixty YouTube videos and six thousand search results.
Every click of my mouse had me asking one thing over and over again.
Why the hell was he even remotely interested in coaching me?
Coaching anybody, really. He should have been training all the time. Living…well…my life.
The more I watched and read about him, careful to keep to career facts only rather than personal information, the more I started to relate to him. I didn’t want to know about his personal life.
No, that wasn’t true.
I didn’t want to know unless he told me himself. It felt like an invasion of privacy, and more than that, like I might unearth something I wasn’t equipped to handle.
Raised in the life, he’d started tumbling at the ripe age of four and never, ever stopped. A brief foray into Men’s gymnastics proved uninteresting at which point he turned all of his energy into tumbling. Building an early career, competing in as many competitions as possible, and largely dominating all that he entered. He’d made several trips to the World Championships, his last one putting him impressively on the podium for bronze.
But watching him tonight, I couldn’t help but think he was maybe even better than third in the world. That he could achieve even better if he wanted to.
It was different, but not enough to not be the same. I felt like Nik knew where I was coming from in a completely different way than anyone I’d met before.
Which freaked me the hell out. Relating led to liking, and liking led to losing my mind—and a good chance of disappointment.
It was around the ninth full body shiver that I decided something had to be done. Something preemptive and preventative, and it had to happen now.
With two clicks of the mouse, I pulled up a picture of him and proceeded to pick it apart.
Lips—fucking awesome.
Eyes—unreal. So blue, so water-like, they invited you to dive right in.
Smile—to die for.
But his hair was kind of stupid.
No.
I strengthened my resolve.
Not kind of stupid. It was the epitome of stupid. All floppy and long and mop-like in structure. And the whole headband thing was a mockery against men.
Yeah. That was better.
And the motorcycle. That was stupid too!
What was he thinking taking chances getting hurt like that? They were deathtraps.
I mean, it was a little hot.
My fingers pinched close to one another in example, and one eye narrowed as I talked to myself.
A skosh.
Admitting to a skosh was totally acceptable, I reasoned.
My head tilted thoughtfully to the side, and the shape of my lips pursed into a heart.
His hair really wasn’t that bad.
Immediate realization of my backpedaling thoughts made my head snap back to straight.
Shit.
Exiting out of my browser quickly and shoving away from the computer, I hung my head in my hands.
I was just tired. That was all. It was going on one thirty in the morning, and my self-imposed bedtime was a memory.
I still lived with my parents, which, quite frankly, grated, but I knew they had been soundly sleeping for hours at this point. And that kind of ruled out slamming things around the kitchen in a confused rage while mixing a batch of cookie batter to eat straight from the bowl.
So sleep was the answer. Everything would feel normal again tomorrow, surely.
A team picture from my Level Seven days looked on from my dresser top as I let my freshly showered hair out of the confines of its ponytail, stripped off my sweatshirt, and climbed under the down, white comforter on my bed.
With nothing but a lean and a flick of my wrist, the light of my bedside lamp extinguished and plunged the quiet room into nearly complete darkness. The moon shone a sliver of light through my dormer window and settled it directly on the clasp of my hands.
Slowly, I turned them over and studied them, the angry red divots left in the absence of skin and the ugly yellowing of years worth of hardened callouses standing out against the rest of the pale expanse.
I tried to follow the lines of my palm prints, having read in an article online once that the shape of them said something about you as a person.
Try as I might, I couldn’t remember what the writer had said.
I imagined, though, for a woman like me, the lines broken by scars and bloody holes and the would-be curves covered by ugly, thickened, abused skin—the answer wouldn’t be good.
“Good morning, Callie,” my mom called from the sink as I entered the kitchen at the pace of a snail the next morning.
For having only completed what amounted to half of a normal workout for myself, I was worn the fuck out.
Apparently, a day and night full of foreign thoughts and emotions had worked all kinds of mental muscles I had no idea I had. And just like any change in routine, the aftermath was fraught with fatigue and sore.
“Morning, mom.”
She turned at the sound of my voice and immediately zeroed in on the dark, unflattering circles under my drooping eyes.
“You look tired.”
“Yep.”
“You sound tired too.”
Shaking my head at the ground, I sighed.
“That’s because I am tired.”