And unfortunately, he noticed me just as speedily.
“Hey.”
Panicked, I immediately accused him of the nearly impossible. “Did my dad send you here? How does he know I’m here?”
He looked around briefly, understandably confused, before excusing himself out of line and approaching me where I’d frozen the moment I’d spotted him.
When he got within two feet, my already tight body strung even tighter.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Callie. I’m here for a Quarter Pounder.” I relaxed for a second…until I realized how embarrassing my whole episode was.
He shrugged. “I would have snuck you in line too, let you order with me, but you kind of stopped moving.”
“My dad…” I searched for words, “doesn’t like when I eat McDonald’s.”
Understatement.
“Oh,” he breathed through a smile. “Well, your secret’s safe with me.”
I very nearly smiled back. “Thanks.”
He shrugged. And then winked.
Sweet good gracious.
“We’ve all got secrets, right?”
I sure as hell did. By supposition, I assumed everyone else did too.
“Yeah.”
I just wondered how many people’s secrets were of omission and how many were—
Lies.
They aren’t always intentional. And sometimes, we only tell them to others because we first tell them to ourselves.
Likewise, pictures aren't always what they seem to be on the surface. Ninety percent of perception is influence, and Callie had perfectly persuaded me to see her role in the gym how she did. Unwanted and resented and well past idolized.
But the more I watched her, the more I learned.
Each snub she felt was fictitious, each sneer a vivid falsity concocted only by her own self-esteem issues.
These kids still idolized and watched her, but her cold, uninterested vibe held them at bay and forced wide-eyed wonderment to hide within side-eyed glances.
I'd have to figure out a way to shift her view and unveil theirs.
After the way yesterday had gone, I knew that I would need to plan for it to be a time-consuming endeavor. There was no hope of convincing her in a single day—especially not this early on in the game.
The right time would eventually come.
“Good,” I called as she landed her layout at the end of her series on beam.
She flashed one quick, cocky—thrilled—smile in my direction.
We’d already practiced the other three events, and I’d been relentlessly critical. I’d been surprised to find her teeth still intact when she opened her mouth, her agitated grinding had been so relentless.
But this—this was something different.
She handled beam more confidently than any other event, it seemed, ignoring the danger of fours (four inches wide and four feet tall) with the ease of a tightrope walker. I didn’t have all that much experience in this apparatus, but every female gymnast I’d ever encountered—including my mom—talked about it like it was the bane of their existence. And I had enough practical knowledge to know what looked good and didn’t.
But Callie wasn’t like the others.
She seemed at home there, the soft thump of her landings resonating with precision. There were no sloppy stumbles, no unsure missteps.
When she was on beam, she just was.
A few artistic steps led into a full turn, her leg raised and extended well past the end of its execution, and finished with the flourish of an impossibly flexible arabesque. Her eyes zeroed in on the end of the beam in front of me, and the toe of her extended leg tapped the back end of the beam intentionally on its descent. It was a safety measure, a pretty way of ensuring proper positioning on a limited-length beam before her dismount. But, as I’d learned today, she did it with practiced regularity, and she did it beautifully.
I could hardly take my eyes off of her.
She had talent in dance and artistic movement in a way that not all gymnasts did. Fluid motion came naturally, and transitions from one skill into another bled as seamlessly as a singular thought being strung together.
My breath caught as she executed her round off, her hands leaving the beam several moments before being replaced by her feet. Precision was key on the round off before a difficult dismount. One mistake or misplaced foot could set a chain of unstoppable disaster in motion.
Once you started a dismount off of the Beam, you really couldn’t stop.
A loud thwack rent the air as her feet planted themselves on the mat, knocking my held breath out of my overinflated lungs.
Screams and cheers echoed in the background from the younger team girls on floor from some other noteworthy performance as she turned to approach me, but I ignored them.
Callie’s eyes were smug and challenging at once, and I couldn’t look away as the light reflected to make the normally hard chocolate look melted.
“Well?”
She obviously thought I was only there to be critical.
“You were incredible,” I admitted immediately, painting her face with surprise and bewilderment. “If you were like that on everything, I wouldn’t need to be here.”
She rolled her eyes, their warmth cooling a little with resentment. “You just had to bring it back to the negative side, huh?”
Uncrossing my arms from my chest and reaching out, I grabbed her shoulder gently and shook amiably back and forth. “No. That was absolutely not meant to be a dig. You’re incredible to watch on beam. Comfortable and sure and completely settled inside of your skin.”
Just her eyes smiled as I rounded the conversational corner to my point.
“You don’t look that way anywhere else,” I stated matter-of-factly. “And watching it just now…I couldn’t take my eyes off of you.”
She shrugged sheepishly at the compliment, unsure how to handle it. A flush stole across her features and her hands fidgeted in front of her.
“It’s always been that way. I’m just comfortable here.” One corner of her dusty pink lips tipped up in thought. “Happy, I guess.”
My eyes narrowed, and my curiosity piqued.
“And you’re not happy on Bars, Vault, and Floor?”
Her spine straightened as her admission cleared the fog, and her face slammed closed once more.
“That’s not what I said.”
I wanted to delve into the reasoning behind everything she’d said and the sensitive way with which she reacted.
But raucous sounds from behind me interrupted and curtailed my thoughts.
“1, 2, 3, GO GYMSTARS!” we heard screamed from the floor. The group made a clean break but dispersed unevenly from there, some heading for the locker room and others the front or the bathroom up front.
For me, it was a cue of opportunity. What opportunity, I wasn’t sure. I kept telling myself I just wanted to get to know her better so I could be a better coach, but each statement held less and less professional conviction and, instead, built an abundance of uninvited personal investment.
Knowing didn’t seem to stop me though.
“You want to hang out tonight while I tumble?”
Her head whipped back to me, the long glossy tail of her hair cutting through the air like an expertly wielded sword.
“What?”
“I just asked if you want to—”
She shook her head rapidly. “I know what, I guess. I meant why. Why are you asking me to stay?”
I didn’t have a good answer. I knew I shouldn’t and at the same time I couldn’t stop myself. Instead, I shrugged. “Because I can’t think of a good enough reason not to.”
The line was getting slicker by the minute, the feel of it slipping out from underneath my dangerously treading feet oddly enjoyable. As a guy who lived most of his life on the opposite side of that line, I couldn’t even begin to understand what was happening.
All I knew was that I liked it.
She searched the g
ym with her eyes and landed on the locker room. Back they came to me once more, and then back to the locker room.
This time their movement was slower, but it was infinitely more confident.
An unhurried smile crept onto her normally taut lips as she teased, “Are you any good?”
I couldn’t stop my cheeks from lifting as I replied, weaving my head back and forth between my shoulders as I did. “A couple people are better.”
“Just a couple?” she pushed as if she knew.
I narrowed my eyes, trying to see the proof that she’d looked into me written somewhere legible and obvious, but settled for a brisk nod when the search came up predictably empty.
Straight white teeth cut a soft line into the line of her bottom lip. They weren’t plump or overfilled. They were just normal. And plenty damn pretty.
“Then I guess I’ll stay.”
“Yeah?”
“Yep. I’m gonna need you to prove your skill to me.”
White hot lust shot down my spine and into my balls at the double entendre in her words. I knew she hadn’t meant it. She didn’t even realize the blunder herself.
But my dick had been noticing lots. The innuendo and her body and the way a touch to her shoulder fired my nerves better than the well-placed touch of an experienced woman.
“I…Ah…Um…Yes…Okay,” I stuttered. In actuality, I was impressed. As much as I’d struggled, my brain had done the talking despite the death grip my dick had on my voice box.
Shaking my head and my thoughts, I tried to talk myself off the ledge of self-sabotage and back to the land of reality.
This woman was a gymnast I coached. I was her coach, for fuck’s sake. It would be totally douchey of me to exert my power and influence as a figure of trust in her life in order to get in her pants.
Leotard.
Fuck. No.
I wasn’t getting inside of anything.
“Nik?” she called, focusing my attention on something other than the brain versus biology war being fought in my head. My brain used logic and strategy and well-placed task forces to talk me around to the right side of battle, but strategy didn’t mean much when biology bombed the living hell out of my synapses.
“Sorry. What’d you say?”
“Ummmm,” she said, sounding perplexed. “Nothing. Just your name.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“For the last minute and a half.”
Well that’s embarrassing.
“Sorry, I was…thinking.”
Explicit thinking was still thinking.
“Alright, well, everyone else is packing up and getting ready to leave, so I’m gonna go change.”
“You’re not going to tumble with me?”
“What? No! I’m not even in the same league as you.” Covering, she added, “I wouldn’t imagine I am anyway. I’ll just watch.”
“Come on, tumble with me.”
“No—”
“Callie.”
“Nik.”
“Callie.”
“Nik.”
“Callie,” I said once more, knowing that if you held out long enough, people normally became annoyed enough to give in.
“Okay! Fine! I won’t change!”
The last stragglers of the night looked on with avid interest as they crossed the floor to the exit.
“Yelling is kind of becoming our thing, you know?” I offered, ignoring their nameless faces and smiling at hers.
“Shut up,” she snipped playfully.
“No, really. I don’t even think they’ll call us by name soon. We’ll just be ‘those people who yell’.”
She tilted her head forward and raised a brow in disgust.
A warning.
I kept talking anyway, standing proudly with my hands on my hips. “The Yellertons.”
I stumbled and tripped, the result of her shove catching me off guard.
“What?” she asked when I looked at her with surprised hostility. “Now they can call us ‘the people who shove each other’.”
“Cute,” I laughed, adjusting my hair by pushing it out of my face.
“One of us has to be,” she poked in jest, shoving a finger in my direction as if plotting a poke in my chest.
“Whatever,” I mocked, hands to my forehead in the shape of a ‘w’.
“Go change!” she demanded, throwing her hands forward in the direction of the bathroom. “Unless you’ve changed your mind and don’t intend to tumble?”
I threw up both hands in useless defense and backed slowly toward the exit. “Alright, alright. Relax. I have to go get my bag.”
An unexpected chill hit me as I shoved through the door into the warm, muggy air of a Southern Georgia summer night. I could hear the echoes of my flirtation following me the entire walk to my motorcycle, and my euphoria skirted the edge of dismay and back again.
It felt good to want something.
But why did I have to want something I shouldn’t?
Frustrated and flustered, I snapped open the saddlebag in a rush, grabbed my bag, and nearly slammed it shut.
My feet itched to jog on the way back, but I forced them to walk, the anticipation roiling rigorously between sour and sweet in my gut with each step.
The door felt lighter on the swing to enter, but I didn’t seek out the cause. Instead I headed straight for the bathroom and changed quickly, doing all of the necessary taping and preparation that I always did.
When I exited to the gym, the lights were down except for the one we needed, and Callie lounged on the end of the rod floor with her legs extended in front of her and crossed at the ankles with the weight of her trim body settled into her forearms behind her back.
My bag hit the ground just in time to set off her giggles.
Hunched and pressed into herself, her stomach muscles contracted with each peal, and her toes curled until they folded backwards into the floor.
“What?” I asked, knowing the object of her laughter had to be me, but at a loss for the exact reason why.
“Nothing,” she avoided.
“What?” I persisted.
She rolled her eyes and gave in, sitting up slowly as she did.
“It’s just…your hair. It’s…well, it’s—”
“Funny,” I finished for her.
That didn’t stop her from getting the last word, a cute scrunch of her nose cushioning the effect of her words. “Looking. It’s funny looking.”
“Thanks?”
“Oh,” she said in realization, squealing her laughter to an immediate halt. “Sorry.”
I didn’t want to make her feel bad. It wasn’t like this was the in-style and I’d perfectly crafted it to look this way. It was just a convenient fact like a million other things I hadn’t bothered to change.
“No worries. I’m not particularly fond of it or anything. Just haven’t put any effort in to cut it in the last six months or so.”
“And the headband?” she questioned with a flick of her dainty chin.
My eyes rolled up as though I could see it atop my head. “It’s just practical.” I shrugged. “Messes with my tumbling if it gets in my eyes.”
Her cheeks pinked as she nodded in reply. The rosy color softened her eyes again, and I had to turn to my phone to keep from getting distracted by them.
Finding the song more easily than the night before, I turned up the volume, dropped it to my bag, pulled my shirt over my head and walked over to the end of the floor with Callie.
She scrambled up quickly, moving out of my way as though too close of a proximity would result in an electric shock.
And hell, maybe she was right.
“Metallica?” she asked with surprising musical knowledge. I, on the other hand, knew very little. I only knew this music because it had been ingrained in me from the time I could listen.
“Yeah,” I confirmed before admitting, “My dad’s favorite band.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” I chuckled, the memory of my mom yelling at my da
d to listen to something with an actual melody making me smile. “My mom hated it too.”
I could picture her face so perfectly in my mind, the way she nagged and nagged at my dad to find something better to love. He always told her he already had. And, as their child, I normally left the room thoroughly grossed out.
“I don’t hate it,” Callie qualified. “It’s just intense. Kind of makes my heart feel like it’s going to beat out of my chest.”
I pulled myself out of my nostalgia and focused fully on her and her explanation.
“Funny. That’s what makes me like it.”
The dichotomy of our opinions of the same visceral reaction astonished me.
“Really?” she asked, putting a hand flat to her chest to feel the effect the music had on each beat.
“Definitely,” I confirmed, putting a single hand to my own chest and harnessing it. “It’s perfect tumbling music.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. To me, the reasoning was simple. “Music feeds power, and tumbling thrives off of it.” I searched my brain quickly and came up empty. “I can’t think of a more symbiotic relationship actually.”
“Not even peanut butter and jelly?”
“No way,” I denied. “Compared to music and tumbling, it’s like peanut butter fucking hates jelly.”
A small laugh of disbelief bounded out of her throat like a cough, but the tide of consideration rolled in slowly and changed it to interested acceptance.
“Teach me your ways,” she offered easily, a smile curving the corners of her mouth fully this time and completely transforming her face while one hand gestured gallantly to the floor.
This.
God, I’d have to recreate it. Every night if I could.
Her personality morphed into a less structured version of itself and her figurative hair came down.
She was—
Relaxed.
It went that way for the next three weeks straight. Workouts swung from high to low as he criticized or praised, and my favorite time to be in the gym stayed very much the same.
But the company was oh so different than it had been for the majority of my life.
Sometimes we meshed and sometimes we didn’t, but we found a rhythm and routine. And I finally admitted to myself that I was happy to have him there—no matter how mixed up and jumbled he had my emotions.
These Battered Hands Page 5
