On Thin Ice 1

by Victoria Villeneuve

  “Thanks. I’ve never really been here before. Just once, the trainer showed us how to do some exercises.”

  “Cool. Did you like any of the stuff you did?”

  “Not really. I mean, I can go on the treadmill and run for half an hour, or hop on the bike and do something, but I kind of hated it. It was boring.”

  “Did you try lifting any weights?”

  “No, I don’t want to get big and bulky. I’d prefer it if your biceps stay bigger than mine.”

  Daniel laughed, a good natured laugh. Every time I heard that sound I wanted to say whatever I had to in order to get him to repeat it.

  “Don’t worry, Kylie. There isn’t a chance in hell you’ll get bulky like me by accident. Plus lifting weights rules. Let me take you through a routine. If you hate it, we’ll find something else.”

  “Ok,” I smiled. I was apprehensive, but something about Daniel’s confidence and enthusiasm here in the gym was infectious. He led me over to what he called a squat rack.

  “I’m going to start by showing you how to do a squat,” he told me, putting a bar on the rack at about his shoulder height. “Squats give you a great butt, on top of strong legs. And I like a girl with a great butt,” he added with a wink, as my face went crimson. He showed me how to use the safeties to make sure that if I couldn’t get back up I wouldn’t hurt myself, then did a few repetitions of a squat, explaining the importance of form.

  “Now try it here, without the bar, and I’ll make sure you’ve got your form right.”

  At first I was self conscious as I bent down, making sure my hips were past being parallel with my knees, but Daniel was encouraging and positive, and I quickly found myself actually enjoying the burn that came with the workout. I managed to do sets with the 45 pound bar.

  “Hey, congratulations! You’re naturally pretty strong, it’s pretty rare for someone as small as you to be able to do the bar on their first day. I don’t have champagne to celebrate, but you can have some of my protein drink if you’d like,” he told me, offering me the bottle. As I took it from him, my fingers grazed his, and I inhaled sharply. It was like a spark ran between us, a zap that coursed through every vein of my body. My heart began to pound even harder than it had been from the exercise. I raised the bottle to my mouth and took a sip, then immediately scrunched up my face.

  “That’s pretty gross, how the hell do you drink that?”

  “Sorry. I guess you get used to it, I forget that some people aren’t used to the taste of whey protein.”

  “It certainly isn’t champagne, let me tell you.”

  “No, but it helps your muscles recover better than champagne does.”

  “Ugh, surely there’s another way.”

  “Well, if you join me again I’ll make sure to have some chocolate milk for you. It’s not as good for you, but it’s a good post-workout drink since it’s high in both protein and carbs.”

  “Is that you asking me out on a second date?” I teased.

  “Maybe,” he replied, a twinkle in his eye.

  “Well I dunno, this is getting pretty serious for a bunch of maybe-dates.”

  “Alright then, it’s a definite date. Now, let me show you how to bench press. You know, getting to the romantic part of this date,” he continued, and I laughed.

  Daniel had me lie down on the bench after he showed me the proper form. He moved his hands to mine, and again my heart pounded in my chest. I wanted him to touch so much more than just my hands. I wanted him to touch my waist, my hips, my chest, my ass, my thighs. I wanted his hands all over me, I wanted him to discover my body slowly, taking his time as he explored me.

  My mind was suddenly brought back from my reverie, my fantasy as Daniel moved the bar from the hooks holding it in place and above me. It was so heavy!

  “Remember, drive with your feet and arch your back,” Daniel encouraged as he helped me move the bar down towards my chest. Up and down, the bar went, again and again, his hands just grazing mine as he was ready to catch the bar if the weight was too much for me.

  “Awesome, good job!” he exclaimed when I was finished the three sets he got me to do. “Are you enjoying it, or is it just my amazing company keeping you here?” he asked as we took another break.

  “As amazing as your company is, I actually am enjoying this by itself” I replied, and it was the truth. I had never expected that I would be the type of person to lift weights. After all, I’d never been athletic growing up, and while I had seen a lot of amateur athletes at the physiotherapy clinic I volunteered at when I was a undergrad, it had never seemed to be the sort of thing that would interest me. And yet, I was finding that I actually really liked it. The burn at the end of the sets, the determination it took to get the weight back to where it should be, the feeling of satisfaction when I was finished were all huge adrenaline boosts.

  As soon as I realized how much I loved this I began to feel guilty once more. I wasn’t allowed to enjoy things. It was bad enough my panties were soaked without having anything to do with the sweat pouring from my body, it was bad enough that I spent half the morning fantasizing about Daniel, about wanting his hands all over so much more of me, but that I was also enjoying the actual workout was just the icing on the cake. I wasn’t allowed to enjoy things, and I wanted to refuse to enjoy this. I just couldn’t help it.

  “Why are you doing this for me?” I asked suddenly after getting a drink of water. “There’s a lot of other girls in here, why me?”

  Daniel looked amused at my question. “Why do you think?”

  “I don’t know, honestly.”

  “There’s something about you, Kylie. You just seemed to be the type of girl that I wanted to know more about, and when I saw you sitting alone at dinner, you looked like you needed a friend. So I figured I could get to know you, and you accepted. Now I get to solve the enigma of Kylie.”

  “Enigma. That’s a nice way to put it. I don’t think I can be solved though, I’m a puzzle that’s been broken a million ways to Sunday.”

  “What about me? If you’re so broken, why did you agree to come here?”

  “I don’t know. I guess there’s something about you too. For one thing, you’ve been here three days, you should be detoxing from your drugs right now. I know everyone reacts differently, but when I was at the stage you are I was curled up in a ball in my bed wishing for death.”

  Daniel’s face hardened somewhat. I noticed his eyes darkening, the pools becoming deeper.

  “It’s hard. Yes, it’s hard. I’m trying to keep my life as close to what it was before, although it’s not the same. I feel what you feel. I just want to scream. I want to cry out, I want to hit anything I can get my hands on.”

  “I guess you just have better self control than I do,” I replied.

  “I wouldn’t say that. But you’re right, it’s very, very difficult. Now, why don’t we try lunges?”

  “I’d like that,” I replied, smiling as Daniel helped me up from the bench I was sitting on.

  “First I’ll show you how it’s done,” Daniel told me. He stood up straight, then explained what he was going to do. “I’m going to step forward, bringing my front leg down to a 90 degree angle, until my back knee just about but doesn’t quite hit the ground. Then I get back up and repeat the same thing with the other leg.”

  I watched from my bench as Daniel began the movement. As soon as his front knee bent to 90 degrees however, I saw the pain in his face. He was brave, he pretended it wasn’t there, but I had seen it.

  “God, Daniel, your knee!” I exclaimed, jumping up from my seat.

  “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it, it’s nothing,” he replied, sitting on the ground clutching at his right leg.

  “Don’t lie to me, I know that’s not nothing.”

  “The pain will go in a minute.”

  I was shocked by the amount I cared about this injury.

  “Was it an injury to your knee, the hockey one?”

  “Yeah.”

&n
bsp; Immediately I went into doctor mode. Well, wannabe doctor mode I should say, seeing as I never managed to finish medical school, and never would now.

  “Come here, I want you to sit down on the bench. Let me help you.”

  “I swear, Kylie, it’s fine.”

  “You’ve been showing me your skills all day, now it’s time for me to take charge. Get up and I’m going to help you move over to the bench.”

  I guess my voice must have held all of the authority I wished it always had, since Daniel stopped protesting. I sat down next to him and wrapped my arm around him. I still felt that spark passing between us, but I forced it away. I had to be serious here, Daniel was dealing with an injury, a bad one.

  He hobbled over to the bench and sat down, still wincing. I handed him my bottle of water.

  “Drink. It won’t do much, but seeing as I’m not going to give you so much as a 200mg pill of ibuprofen, you get to consider this water as your painkillers for a while.”

  Daniel chugged my water. “Thanks,” he muttered, throwing the empty plastic aside. I looked at his knee. “Lie down on the bench,” I ordered.

  “What are you going to do?” Daniel asked.

  “A few tests.”

  Daniel obediently lay down on the bench. It wasn’t as long as I liked, so I dragged another one over and had him lie flat along the two benches.

  The first thing I did was a Lachman test to test Daniel’s ACL. I bent his knee slightly, stabilized his thigh with my left hand and pulled his shin forward with my right. I was only too aware of the fact that my left hand holding his thigh was only inches away from his shaft, I was so close to his most intimate areas I could feel my breath catching in my throat. I forced the thoughts away, ordering my body to forget its desires and focus on the task at hand.

  I instantly knew from the movement in his leg that his ACL was torn. I was far from an expert on the topic, but I was also fairly confident it was a bad one.

  Next I performed a Valgus test, which was pretty similar to the Lachman test.

  “Tell me if this hurts,” I ordered, keeping Daniel’s knee bent slightly and applying outward pressure on his leg.

  “Yeah, fuck” Daniel replied almost instantly, wincing.

  “Sorry, I just had to check. Do you know your ACL and MCL are both torn?”

  Daniel grinned at me as he sat up. “Yeah. Believe it or not, the Sea Lions’ payroll involves more than seven figures a year being spent on doctors. At that price, I would hope to hell they can diagnose that sort of thing. But how come you know the Lachman and Valgus?”

  “I used to be in medical school. I finished pre-med, did a couple years of med school, and while I was studying as an undergrad I volunteered at a physiotherapy clinic. I didn’t really do more than organize charts and get coffee, but once the doctor showed me how to perform the tests.”

  “You were in med school? Wow, pretty and smart,” Daniel complimented, winking at me as he said it. The blush crawled up my face again as I remembered just how close my hands had been to his most sensitive areas.

  “Yeah, well, I never finished. I’m not going to be a doctor, but I can tell a knee injury when I see one.”

  “Can I ask you a sensitive question? You don’t need to answer if you’re not comfortable with it, but I’d like to know why you’re here.”

  “I’m an alcoholic,” I answered. I had no problem telling him that. If he wanted to know all he had to do was ask around, everybody knew alcohol was my personal demon.

  “What triggered it for you? Again, don’t answer if you’re not comfortable with it, but I’d really like to know if you’re willing to tell me.”

  I looked into Daniel’s eyes. They were so earnest, so genuinely interested in my life. Suddenly, my brain flew backwards. Memories flooded my brain. Crying, sitting in the ambulance, someone wrapping a blanket around me. That feeling of absolute despair. The desire to kill myself. Being unable to look my parents in the eye. The knowledge that my life would never be the same.

  It was three days later that I walked past the liquor store and went in on a whim. I bought a bottle of vodka. I had never been a huge drinker. I would get drunk from time to time at parties, or with friends, but it was never more than once every two weeks or so. Usually if I went out for dinner with anyone I’d have a glass of wine or something, but that was it.

  It took three hours for the entire bottle of vodka to disappear. That was how it started. The more I drank, the more the memories disappeared. The more I could pretend everything was like it had been before.

  When I said I was broken, I didn’t mean the alcoholism. That was just a symptom of what had happened, of that night, the worst night of my life. The alcohol made the pain go away for a while, and now, now that I no longer had the alcohol, I begged for more pain. I deserved it all.

  I didn’t realize I was crying until Daniel’s finger, like velvet against my skin, stroked the tear away and brought me back to the present.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry Kylie. I can tell you don’t want to talk about it, and that’s fine. But hey, if you ever need a shoulder to cry on, I’m here” he told me, wrapping his arm around me.

  I was sweating and gross, and so was he, but I couldn’t have cared less right then. His arm was so strong, so hard, so comforting wrapped around my shoulders, I felt like I belonged with him, I melded in with him absolutely perfectly. I buried my face in his chest and cried for a few minutes, silently sobbing, my tears mingling with his sweat from earlier.

  Daniel stroked my hair until I finally came back from my complete collapse.

  “I’m sorry,” I apologized, wiping my eyes. “I have no idea why I just did that. It’s been ages since I’ve just broken down and cried like that.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Exercise can bring out emotion in people, especially when they haven’t really done much before, and I shouldn’t have brought up your past. It was my fault.”

  “Thanks, Daniel. Thanks for... everything.” I looked up at him and smiled. God, not only was he so hot my body could barely stand it, but he was so nice. I had always assumed professional athletes were douchebags, hell bent on sleeping with as many women as they could while they made millions of dollars. But Daniel didn’t seem to be like that at all.

  “Listen, I guess with this knee problem we’re going to have to cancel our next date, or at least move it into a less physical part of the building,” I finally told him, trying to change the subject.

  “Why would we have to do that?”

  “Well for one thing, the two most important ligaments in your right knee don’t work. You need to see a doctor, so that you can get referred for surgery.”

  Daniel shook his head. “No, I’m not getting surgery.”

  “What? Why not? Both of those are definitely grade 3, if you were a normal person you might be able to get by for a while by rehabbing and resting, but for an athlete like you, you have to get the surgery as soon as you can, or you’ll never play professional hockey again.”

  “That’s the thing, I’m not going to play hockey again.”

  This revelation surprised me. I had always assumed that while he had become addicted to painkillers, Daniel would be trying to get back on the ice as soon as possible.

  “What? Why not? If that’s something you’re willing to talk about,” I hastened to add, not wanting to intrude.

  “Yeah. I have a feeling you might understand. It’s not that my body isn’t in good enough form. I know guys can come back from complete ACL tears in six months, and I know from the doctors that mine isn’t that bad, if I have the surgery soon I’m looking at maybe four months. It’s August now, I could be back playing a month into the regular season next year. But it’s just... the fire is gone. Do you know what I mean?”

  Daniel looked me in the eye, and I took his hands in mine. I felt a connection with Daniel, unlike anything I had ever felt with anyone before.

  “I know exactly what you
mean,” I replied. “You think it’s hopeless. The desire to continue, to go on is gone. You think you’ll never get back what you lost, you think that no matter what you’re going to fail. You wonder what the point is, and eventually you realize there is no point.”

  “Yes. That’s how I feel, precisely. You know Kylie, you’re the only person I’ve met since my injury who really truly understands that.”

  I nodded. “I know it all too well. I was going to become a doctor. Now, I’m not. The fire is gone in me too. I ask myself, what’s the point? After everything that’s happened, after what I’ve gone through, I don’t believe I should be a doctor. What’s the point? People die every day. I know exactly how you feel.”

  We sat there in silence for a minute. I looked at Daniel, and he looked at me. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest, my body aching for him. I wanted him so much, he was so perfect. Just as I didn’t think I could take any more, he leaned in and kissed me.

  It was like fireworks went off inside of me. It was like I had been in a deep sleep for all these years, leading up to this very moment, which suddenly awakened in me a passion, a deep seated desire that I had never known.

  I closed my eyes as Daniel’s lips explored my own. My lips parted slightly to allow him better access. His kiss was confident and strong, but his lips still soft, sending fire coursing through my veins. His hands found my hips, pulling me to him gently as I wrapped my arms around his shoulders. I wanted this so badly. Ever since I had first laid eyes on Daniel I had wanted this.

  “You’re amazing, Kylie,” Daniel murmured quietly before kissing me once more, his hands making their way up my body. I could only moan in reply, my body so overtaken by passion and desire that words wouldn’t form in my head.

  I wanted Daniel so bad, I could feel my nipples pressing hard against my sports bra, wanting to press against him. I threw my chest against his body, shivers running through me. Subconsciously I spread my legs open against him, wanting Daniel in so much more than my mouth, and he replied by pulling me to him even harder, slipping his tongue inside of my mouth.

  I didn’t realize how much I had needed this. It was like a cold drink for a thirsty man in the desert. Daniel’s hands moved to the hem of my shirt, and with a single quick motion he ripped it up over my head and off me, letting it fall to the floor.