These Battered Hands

by Laurel Ulen Curtis

  It’d all gone wrong from the start, the spit that sealed our first handshake seeming to swear me into an alternate universe.

  What was right got twisted upside down, and nothing mattered more than finding the missing pieces of her puzzle.

  “Do you want to go somewhere with me?” I called out into the silent darkness before I thought better of it.

  And before I realized exactly how it sounded.

  “Not for sex,” I clarified loudly, and then rammed my face straight into my palm.

  Really, Nik?

  Smooth.

  It only took five seconds to hear irritated shuffling, a few muttered curses, and an aggrieved but clear, “How’d you know I was here?”

  She still wasn’t visible, hidden by the corner of the building.

  Not wanting to make the whole scenario any more embarrassing than it already was—for either of us—I decided to lie.

  “Your car.”

  A couple additional seconds of quiet consideration passed.

  “How’d you know it was my car?”

  I cleared my throat and called out loudly once more. “I think it was the ‘third Olympics or die’ sticker in the back window.”

  “WHAT?” she shrieked, charging around the corner in horrified displeasure.

  Angry, confused steps ate up the distance between us.

  Of course, when she got there, there was no decal—never had been, thank God.

  “Oh.” A deep sigh. “You think you’re being cute.”

  I smiled deeper into my cheeks, but verbally ignored the comment.

  When the silence became too much, she scrambled to cover herself.

  “I, um, fell asleep in the locker room.” She cleared her throat once, twice, and ended with a third time. “What are you doing here?”

  Her arms crossed over her chest as though to keep out a chill, but the hot air of a southern summer night sat stagnant around us. Any discomfort had to be coming from her encounter with me.

  I wish I could have told her all her bumbling effort to make excuses was for her benefit alone. I didn’t mind that she’d watched.

  But my father always told me to think of a man’s logic and completely reverse it. That’s where I would find the answers for dealing with a woman.

  I thought it was sound advice. My mother had smacked him.

  A confirmation.

  “Tumbling,” I muttered instead, keeping it as simple as possible to avoid getting caught in a knot of unintended words.

  She forced her eyes to widen and her jaw to relax like she didn’t understand.

  “Your dad gave me permission to train after hours. I’m a power tumbler,” I explained simply, cringing slightly on the implication that I still intended to compete. I didn’t.

  I only did it for fun and to clear my head. I wasn’t sure how I’d find mental peace when my body grew old and my joints broke down, but for now, it was my solace.

  Her cheeks pinked just slightly with the embarrassment of her dishonesty and her hands rubbed roughly at her arms. She really thought I didn’t know she’d watched me.

  I let her have it. For now.

  “So…I asked if you want to go somewhere with me.”

  Her feet drew her attention as her weight shifted back and forth between them. Nervous fingers twined and twisted with each other, whitening the skin with simple pressure. Her eyes jumped to mine, and her question was misleadingly simple. I thought I had her. “Where?”

  “Ah, see, I can’t tell you that.” I wagged my brows, leaning my weight casually into the leather seat of my bike. “Ruins all the fun.”

  “You want me to go on that?”

  “That?” I asked, turning to look in the direction she was looking.

  “That,” she said, pointing directly under the cheeks of my butt with emphasis.

  I once again hid a burgeoning smile. “That’s a motorcycle. And, seeing as it’s my chosen mode of transportation…yeah.”

  “I can’t,” she said quickly, looking to her car to me and back again.

  “Why?” I asked, following the trail of her eyes with my own and stopping on her flushed face.

  Her brows pulled slightly together, but it wasn’t in confusion. It was in search of an excuse. “Because I shouldn’t.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. She relaxed, dropping her arms to her side and staring. I took in her markedly less confrontational posture and couldn’t resist trying one more time. “Just…”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “One more question?”

  She nodded her permission, skeptical but listening.

  “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 b
ut 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.”

  She frowned just as my dad came through the door behind me. He heard the conversation, just as it seemed like he always did, and saw it as his opportunity to take it in the direction that he wanted—another common theme for him.

  “That’s not good, Cal,” he preached, moving toward the table and into my line of sight. “You know this is the homestretch. You’ve got just under six weeks before Trials and eight until camp.”

  And ten before the Olympics.

  “I know.”

  I definitely fucking knew.

  “You don’t eat the way you should,” he pointed out just as I reached for a plate with syrup-soaked french toast on it, “and you haven’t been putting effort into your conditioning like you should.”

  “I know,” I said, stopping mid reach and retracting my arm obediently.

  I always said.

  “Frank—” my mom attempted to cut in, but he just kept talking.

  “Hopefully Nik can teach you some work ethic in this short amount of time.”

  I fought the downturn of my lips, but I sure as shit didn’t win.

  “You should have told me you hired a new coach for me.”

  He looked mystified. “I thought that’s what I did yesterday?”

  My mom shook her head along with me. Men.

  “Oh come on. It’s not like he’s some old guy. He’s a really talented tumbler. Maybe you’ll even become friends.”

  I could practically hear the scoff of disbelief as he said it.

  “Anyway, I didn’t seek him out.”

  I looked to my mom in confusion, but she didn’t know what he was talking about either.

  She shook her head before turning back to the sink.

  “I don’t get it. Why’s he here then?”

  “Friend of a friend thing,” he muttered, stabbing his own piece of French toast and bringing it to his mouth. A couple of chews cleared his mouth enough that he could talk.

  “You know the Callhoun’s? They have the gym up in Moswego?”

  Moswego Elite was a competitive gym about two hours north of Ringwood. More backwoods southern Georgia, less coastal small town. I’d been doing competitions with and against them since I was little.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, they heard from one of their friends that Nik was looking to come on staff at a gym somewhere around here. Something with his parents and having to move or I don’t know. Like I said, kind of a grapevine of information.”

  I wondered briefly at what the story behind all of that half information was, but my dad didn’t give me long to think on it, moving on swiftly to his next thought.

  “But, anyway, they took him on for a while, said he had a real eye for all of the women’s apparatuses even without extensive hands on experience. They didn’t have a spot to keep him on permanently, so they called me to check in.”

  That made my brows pull together too, the idea of a permanent position at our gym ridiculous too. Working with me, at least, would be a very limited time thing. I was already in the homestretch.

  “We really don’t need anybody, but once I did the research on him, I couldn’t turn him away. He’s the third ranked power tumbler in the world, you know?”

  My mom’s head whipped back to the conversation once more.

  “I know,” I admitted sheepishly. My dad didn’t notice.

  “After watching him yesterday, I realized he’d be perfect for helping you. You know, make him work really hard for his money,” he ribbed.

  After yesterday?

  I didn’t laugh.

  “Frank,” my mom admonished.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, Dad,” I cut in, just wanting this conversation to end. “I have to go. I’m gonna grab an egg white sandwich on the way in to open.”

  My dad smiled proudly.

  There
was no fucking way I was getting an egg white sandwich.

  I knew I shouldn’t encourage him by catering to him in these conversations, but he was like a dog with a bone. His way wasn’t the right way. It was the only way.

  If I didn’t cave, he’d go at me until I did.

  Don’t get me wrong, my dad was a nice guy. He didn’t yell at me or hit me. He didn’t even withhold love. I had all of the good stuff, and frankly, I was twenty-six and I’d yet to see pressure to contribute more financially or pull more weight. I worked at the gym doing office work in the mornings and worked on my gymnastics the rest of the time. That was good with him.

  But that was all good with him because it was what he wanted.

  I wasn’t just his daughter. I was his Olympian.

  And he made sure I never forgot it.

  The hands of the clock moved lethargically, seemingly struggling to tick from one minute to the next all morning.

  I worked to busy my hands and mind, collecting checks from all-too-eager parents, and filing several updated medical release forms. Some of the homeschooled gymnasts trickled in little by little, gabbing and gossiping with each other and glancing my way fearfully as they did.

  When noontime finally rolled around, I couldn’t get out of the desk chair and out to my car fast enough.

  Pulling open my glove box, I checked to make sure I had the air freshener—I did—and then fired it up and pulled out of the parking lot. I had to get out before my dad got in or I never would.

  McDonald’s lit up like a beacon twelve blocks later, and I flicked the turn signal on in my Honda Civic with avid anticipation.

  Everything felt good. I executed a perfect parking job in a spot close to the door. The sun shone vibrantly, warming my bones and radiating outward. And the line inside looked blessedly short.

  Apparently, my good mood made me oblivious to the shiny motorcycle parked three spaces down from me.

  I awoke swiftly at the sight of Nik, though. Floppy, ugly black hair tucked discreetly under an all black, backwards facing ball cap, well-fitting jeans, and another bright white t-shirt practically slammed their way into my vision like a brick wall.