He pushed, and I pushed back.
Somehow though, we managed to do it without knocking one another down.
Every night when we walked out of the building together, sweaty with laughter and endorphins buzzing deliriously from the exercise, he asked me to go somewhere with him.
Every night I said no.
But as he turned to me with hope in his handsome blue eyes, his stupid hair tucked away beneath his backward hat, I felt my tongue change direction. I fought it tooth and nail, scrapping and scraping and scratching at the image of my fleeting sanity.
I had my obsession with him managed at this point, but it carved a very tenuous edge. One I knew could be sharpened to the point of irreparable damage with just one night of recklessness.
“Callie.”
“Nik—” I started to say, very much knowing where he was going and needing to fight myself for conviction.
His eyes widened just slightly, the sad look of a puppy at the pound begging for a savior, weakening me at the knees and threatening to display all of my carefully hidden goo.
“Come with me. Please.”
The “please” sealed my coffin, each succulent letter driving in like an individual nail intending to secure my capture.
As the first syllable of my answer left my lips his face reacted minutely, hard jaws flanking a set of pinched pillow-like lips, but it wasn’t to the word I said.
It was to the one he expected.
“Alright.”
He nodded, forcing a gulp through his frustrated throat.
“One day you’re going to say…wait…did you just say alright?” he replied, stumbling over the words in a messy mix of confusion and excitement and screeching his upset nod to a halt.
“I did,” I confirmed with a smirk.
His entire body came alive, kind of how it did before a tumbling pass, energy passing through his fingers and toes and shooting plainly out of his anything-but-plain eyes.
It was boy-like in nature but mature in appearance, and with each second I soaked it in, I knew that the anticipation of my constant ‘nos’ had made a one time ‘yes’ that much better.
For him and for me.
“Good. Good, that’s good,” he stuttered some more, making my smile deepen.
In fact, it was so enthralling, it kind of made me want to drag out every decision and discussion I ever had, making the other party suffer if only for the good of the outcome.
“Don’t even think about it,” he warned, reading the illicit intent in my eyes and the mischief in the line of my mouth.
Normally I kept a vise-like grip on my emotions, but I seemed to defy all normality and logic around him. Emotion bled through not only the bone and the flesh within me, but seeped out the pores in my skin and covered him with their sweat.
Any appeal he might find in it I supposed rested in the circumstances of the situation, much how actual sweat garnered magnetism, during a passionate romp, and repugnance, after a vigorous workout, in equal measure.
The differences in my mood were stark, volleying between comfortable enjoyment and unfamiliar distrust.
I couldn’t figure out what he had switched on in me, where he found the secret key hidden after it spent so many years collecting undisturbed dust. But proximity left me with no choice but to face it, embracing it a little more each day as all of the previously solitary hours of my days filled with him.
I just wondered if I was at all prepared to handle it. I had no real ruler against which to measure my feelings and reactions or the way he felt about me. I didn’t know how to navigate what was appropriate and what wasn’t or if any of it even mattered.
I just knew I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to.
Time seemed to speed up as he handed me the extra helmet out of his saddle bag and climbed astride as he strapped on his own. I wasn’t sure if my anxiety was playing with my perception of the passing of time or if it actually was fast, a desperate method by a man intent on keeping me from changing my mind.
All I knew is that one moment I was saying yes, and the next, I was climbing astride a motorcycle for the first time in my life with little instruction or insight into what I was getting myself into.
Three weeks of familiarity and long surreptitious forays into his eyes had me fairly confident that I wasn’t riding straight to my own murder, but other than that I knew nothing. I still had no personal information about his background or family or what had brought him here. His likes could be extrapolated from genuine smiles and warm excitement, but outside of gymnastics and tumbling, I hadn’t had all that much to apply it to.
And as someone who’d had her future mapped from the first few, not entirely clumsy, toddler steps, the notion of going in blind both boiled and iced over in the pit of my very unsure stomach.
“Nik,” I called as he started the bike and pulled my arms around his taut stomach.
His hand covered mine, and the feel of his fingers sliding through mine started to calm the riotous waters within before he even started to speak.
“Don’t worry, Cal,” he assured me, calling me by a nickname only ever used by my father. The sound of it from his endearing lips made fast work of changing it into something sought after rather than protected against. “I promise you’re going to love it.”
I rolled my eyes, and he laughed at the same time, clarifying, “Or, at the very least, live through it and feel no regret from having been there.”
He squeezed my hand again, and then lifted his hands to the grips, revving the throttle in a teasing exhibition of potential danger and releasing the clutch until we lurched forward in a slow roll.
A squeal escaped my lips uninhibited, and the muscles of his abdomen shook under my hand.
He turned right out of the parking lot and headed straight into the darkness of one of the most rural areas of our town, moving at a leisurely enough pace to set me at ease without adding an extra hour to our arrival time.
As first, I held on tight, focusing my eyes on the road like a professional grade laser in order to be prepared for catastrophe or mayhem. But as the minutes ticked by and the vibration between my legs dulled and smoothed out from adjustment, I finally started to settle.
Deep breaths once again passed through my lungs with ease, and the smell of saltwater tickled the tip of my nose with awareness.
“We’re heading for the water?” I tried to question over the roar.
I swore I could feel his smile all the way into the line of his body, but he didn’t answer.
The exhaust popped a couple of times as he cracked the throttle from open to closed, slowed us to a crawl, and turned off onto a sandy dirt path through a waist-high, grassy field.
I could hear the dull roar of waves, just barely whooshing over the more gravelly hum of his motorcycle.
I couldn’t see it, though, as he pulled to a stop at the back of a tall dune and killed the engine.
Silence rang loudly in my noise-expectant ears for the first few seconds, and his hands moved mine from his stomach to his shoulders in a nonverbal prompt to climb off.
I did as he asked, standing on one peg and swinging the other leg over the back of my seat. He followed me as soon as I cleared his space, reaching for my helmet as I unstrapped it and setting it gently on the seat where my butt had been.
When he had his helmet off too, he replaced it with his hat, having worn it nearly constantly since I’d made the comments about his hair, and reached for my hand.
I took it without hesitation, questioning only where we were going—and trusting him to guide me there.
We climbed the dune together with relative ease, but when we reached the top, I felt my breathing labor.
Stretched out before me, a similar path to the one we’d just been on sliced through another willowy, breezy-blown field, yawned into a beach, and led directly to the moonlit ocean. Blue crystals of gulf water seemed to shimmer above the surface, and the sand took on the motion of active glitter. But what really got me we
re the thousands upon thousands of lightning bugs that danced over the grass of the field, mirroring the luster of the sand and the ocean and perfectly tying together the fantastical location.
Nik waited patiently through my silence, doing nothing but squeezing my hand as a gasp of air escaped my lips.
“What is this place?”
“Well, I guess technically, it’s Riley Beach. The last place I know of this close to the ocean to have lightning bugs.”
I knew nothing about the habitat of lightning bugs, but his words suggested significance. I settled for believing him.
I shook my head in answer to my wonder, but I didn’t look at him—or away from the picture in front of me.
“But to me, it’s the place I come to feel close to my parents.”
“Why does this place make you feel close to your parents?” I asked, turning to look at him at the prompting of his tone.
He shrugged, looking out in front of us, and took one deep breath. “Because it’s impossible to see them again.” My free hand floated to my lips, just as he gripped the one resting in his. “And this place feels like magic.”
“Nik.”
“They died in a car accident six months ago.”
It was fact. It was an admission. It was a functionally large crack in his well-performing heart.
“I’m sorry,” I said, pouring my condolences into the two words and moving my hand from my mouth to his, cocooning it with my hands from both sides.
“Me too, Cal,” he whispered, moving his eyes from the beach to me. “That’s not why I brought you here, though, okay?”
My eyebrows pinched together and my lips lifted closer to my nose.
“I’m sad they’re gone. But they didn’t miss anything, you know? I’m happy and healthy and they raised me to be a person we’re all proud of. They loved each other more than most people think is natural, and they built a life for themselves in a country that wasn’t their own. They treated it like it was, though. You know, they never even talked about Russia to me. Never taught me a syllable of Russian, never enforced customs or traditions.”
I paid attention, trying to soak in all the things he spoke about with such positive conviction without making my own opposing judgements.
“I know,” he said, once again reading my traitorous face. “Trust me, my relatives thought it was crazy too. But see, to me, it was because they didn’t see themselves as Russian anymore. They were American, and so was their baby.” He shrugged his shoulder. “I’m not saying it was right or wrong, but it did make them happy. And now, with them gone what seems like so soon, I’m thankful for that.”
“Me too.”
Not knowing if I should but doing it anyway, I pushed it, noting, “They sure as hell gave you a Russian sounding name though, Nikolai.”
His eyes met mine with a genuine smile, but he didn’t make any moves to explain.
I didn’t really need him to anyway.
He looked back to the ocean, and I followed suit, but when the silence stretched on, I asked a different question that was still unanswered.
“So, why did you bring me here?”
He looked into my eyes again, searching them and my face with an intensity that twisted my insides and lifted my heart as if on a platter.
Another shrug lifted the line of his shoulders, but it wasn’t because he didn’t know. It was a gesture of admission.
“To share it with you.”
I felt uncomfortably cornered, the honesty in his eyes and the soft stroke of his thumb on the back of my hand lulling me into some sort of alternate universe where I was supposed to feel this way for my coach.
His eyes left mine to travel to my lips, and I could feel the pull as my body swayed in an effort to give in.
It was dangerous and tempting, and I scrambled to distract myself with questions that didn’t necessarily need answers.
“Why isn’t anyone else here? Isn’t this the sort of place that would attract a crowd?”
“Most people don’t go to the trouble to find it,” he explained, illustrating his point by asking, “How long have you lived here?”
“Point taken.” And it was. I lived a solid seven miles from here, and I’d never known it existed. I’d gone from one place to another on a plan without any attempts to wander.
“And those of us who do know, don’t ever tell,” he whispered, a wink traveling slowly through the iris of his eye like a wave through the nearby ocean.
“Shhh,” he breathed, the warm air from his mouth sending a shiver across my cheek. “Best kept secret in Southern Georgia.”
I wasn’t so sure.
Because hidden in the depths of my pounding chest, controlled by the softness of his eyes and the warmth of his larger than life smile was one very secret thing.
Something I had to fight to keep at bay, when I lay awake at night, when I watched the flare of his eyes, and under the watchful vision of my father and everyone else involved in not only my destiny, but his—
Want.
Rampant and wild and nearly unchecked, it flowed through my veins like adrenaline and only spiked as each annoying moment of this day ticked on.
The frustration of my unsatisfied longing crept into my coaching as I watched her run through her routine with the same indifference she’d been shoving on me since we’d parted ways last night.
Both things were false and contrived, and I could tell she had to actually work at not caring. Her toes only pointed in half measures, and the extension of her core was completely lacking. She sank into herself instead of pulling herself up out of the Beam¸ and the effect on her appeal was deadening.
Her. The same woman who’d enthralled and enraptured me with her movement on this apparatus for the three weeks prior.
Deep breathing before her dismount, a small line of concentration formed between her arched brows for the first time. Minimal effort put in only when needed.
I was supremely underwhelmed, and for as fascinating as I found her to watch, that was really saying something. The judges would be even less impressed if she didn’t dig deep enough to find some heat. All traces of its previous existence had vanished, the spoils of her effort nothing more than a plastic, lifeless veneer.
As soon as her feet hit the mat, I found my voice. It echoed in the mostly empty, large space, and, still used to being the only one in her world, she jumped at the first syllable.
“Great. Now how about you try doing that routine like you mean it,” I boomed. Her narrowed eyes whipped to mine and my voice turned garbled with gravel. “Like it means something to you.” I held her eyes with the contempt of a child robbed of his favorite toy, knowing on some instinctual level that this was all about me. “Because that version was completely devoid of passion. You look like you’re out for a stroll through the grocery store!”
“Who needs passion when you’ve got more than enough for the both of us?” she snapped in reaction to the crack of my angry voice, stalking from the mat to me and looking menacingly into my face.
“Lower your voice, for God’s sake,” she instructed through gritted teeth.
“What’s going on with you?” I asked, lowering my volume painstakingly and pointedly.
“You’re like a different person today. Cold and detached, and it shows in every move you make.” I couldn’t stop the hurt from seeping slightly into my voice.
“That,” she accused in an agitated whisper, her pointed finger aimed directly at my face. “That right there. That’s why I can’t be open and uninhibited. You make that fucking face, and I nearly forget how to put my left foot in front of my right. And Olympians can’t afford to miss a single goddamn step.”
I tried to rein in the anger and embrace her admission instead. She felt what I felt around her in the same confusing swirl.
Calming my attack and considering my words, I tried to explain that not everything was black and white.
“Being strong doesn't mean you can't be soft. Working hard to meet your goals
doesn't mean you can't live. And living a certain way your entire life doesn't mean you can't ever change. Life is fluid. The only way to run yourself ashore is to not follow the change and contour of the curves.”
She shook her head, frustrated.
She wasn’t the only one.
“Listen, Nik. It’s like this.” We’d crept incredibly close to one another at this point, the rest of the gym a memory. Her anger and mine filled the space around us, and her hands moved to illustrated her point as if playing a game of charades.
“I’m already on one high-speed boat, throttle wide open, and the steering wheel pegged. It doesn’t matter if I want to be on another fucking boat, the leap isn’t worth the risk.”
My chest blew back, and my mind reeled that the possibility that she actually thought that was how life worked. That you worked and bled and sweat for one goddamn thing, and any time you wanted anything else you had to choose between it and your fucking life.
“So, what? You’re only allowed to have one thing?” I asked, the concept completely ridiculous in my mind.
“When it takes as much work and doing as this?” Her face and nod were resolute. “Yes.”
I shook me head, resisting the urge to pull out my hair by locking my hands onto my hips. “With all you’re doing, how do you ever make time to dream?”
“Dreamers are weak-willed,” she stated, turning her head away from me and focusing out to the side rather than facing the scrutiny of my eyes. “Instead of working toward concrete goals, they get lost in the fantasy of expectation. I don't think about what I'm going to do. I just do it.”
I softened my voice and attitude, hoping to pull her eyes back in line with mine. “Weak willed doesn't mean weak-minded.” Her head turned back slowly. “Dreamers use every facet of their mind, so much so, their will can't resist.”
The weight of our conversation sagged the line of her shoulders and pulled at the length of her slim neck. Her posture changed from angry to subdued, and trapped under the watchful eyes of an entire gym full of people, I couldn’t do one thing about it.
These Battered Hands Page 6
