by Erin McRae
Portland, OR
BRENDAN HAD WANTED to go out with Katie and enjoy some quality time away from the ice with her. A good dinner. Maybe a movie. Things normal people did. Breathing space from their jobs would do them good. But Katie wasn’t speaking to him at the moment, which he was self-aware enough to consider fair. He hadn’t meant to be a dick about farms in general or cows in particular, but Katie was often sensitive about where she’d come from, and he had been thoughtless.
With his initial plan for the evening scuppered, Brendan knew he should spend his time doing something reasonable. Work out. Tend to his too-often-ignored social media. Sleep. But the disagreement with Katie had left him feeling antsy and wired, and if he stayed at the hotel he wasn’t sure he could resist the temptation to go find her. Brendan always felt at loose ends without her by his side.
Which was all the more reason to get out, clear his head, and try not to be a codependent mess for one evening.
Rounding up a crew for a night at a bar was an easy proposition. Sure, tours were hard work, but so was any job. A few drinks, a little less sleep than was a good idea — stuff like that could make or break a competition season, but on tour, fun when it could be had was fair game and eagerly sought after. A quick flurry of texts and some knocking on hotel room doors and Brendan soon had a group together: Haruka and Yume, David and Lena, Shane, Natalya, Justin, Andrej, and Tyler.
Stepping out onto a street wearing jeans, a dark blue button-down shirt, and a coat that didn’t have a Team USA or Olympic logo on it was always a slightly surreal experience. So often Brendan only went outside to drive to and from the rink, the grocery store, or the airport. On tour, which added the unpleasantness of long-distance bus travel, any decent clothes he had with him were mostly reserved for media appearances. Nice clothes for a night out felt unnatural.
He covered his mouth to hide a yawn and jogged ahead a few steps to catch up with the rest of the crew. David had his arm slung easily around Lena’s shoulders. Yume, Andrej and Shane were arguing about the latest superhero movie. Natalya had taken a picture of the group and was typing rapidly into her phone as she uploaded it to Twitter.
The bar they eventually found — mainly by failing to find the bar the concierge had recommended to them — was the ultimate in obnoxious hipster bars. It had wood paneling, an excess of faux oil lamps, and, inexplicably, a shuffleboard court that people were actually playing on. Brendan took a picture of the latter and reflexively texted it to Katie before he remembered that he’d meant to get some space from her. Oops.
She didn’t reply. He couldn’t blame her.
The bar was occupied only by a handful of locals, probably because it was a weeknight. Brendan and the others staked out an entire corner, talking over each other to discuss drink choices, practice schedules, mistakes in that night’s performance, and whatever TV anyone was watching. Brendan got drawn into a conversation with Shane, Natalya, and Haruka about choreography and the headache of the group numbers, which still weren’t coming together.
Not having Katie by his side was a peculiar feeling. Brendan kept turning to say something to her, only to remember with a jolt that she wasn’t there.
“Hey, man. Brendan. Brendan!”
Brendan snapped out of his reverie to look at Shane. “Sorry. Zoned out.”
“I could tell.” A smile quirked up at the corner of Shane’s mouth. “Don’t look now, but I think that girl over there is checking you out.” He tilted his chin towards a table behind Brendan. “The one in the yellow dress.”
“How do you know she’s not checking you out?”
“Because her friend is checking me out,” Shane said. “You should go say hi.”
“You go say hi.” Brendan could feel himself start to blush. Also Shane had terrible logic.
“My relationship rules do not cover girls in bars on tour.”
Brendan could barely manage being away from Katie for a few hours. He didn’t know how Shane handled being separated for weeks at a time from someone he was actually dating. “I would humiliate myself. Better let them admire from afar.”
“Boys.” Natalya gave a long-suffering sigh. Haruka smiled at her from behind her glass. “Katie’s not here, and you want to get over her. Go talk to them.”
Brendan shook his head. “I’m good. Really.” He also didn’t have any actual desire to get over Katie, despite what he kept telling himself, but that wasn’t a conversation he wanted to get into here and now.
“Have you ever dated anyone who wasn’t Katie?” Natalya asked. The question didn’t sound curious so much as judgmental.
“We’re not dating,” Brendan snapped.
“I know that,” she snapped back.
“Go on.” Shane gave Brendan a friendly nudge with his shoulder. “Tell her about your Great Dating Mishaps with Women Who Looked Like Katie but Couldn’t Hold Your Attention.”
“They weren’t that bad,” Brendan protested. “I wasn’t that bad!”
Shane followed up. “Are you still with any of them?”
“No,” Brendan admitted.
“Have you dated anyone since you and Katie started skating together again?”
Brendan stared at his beer. “... No.”
“The relationships were that bad,” Shane told Natalya and Haruka.
“Okay, I don’t know why I’m defending myself here, but ...” Brendan sat up a little straighter in the booth. “None of this is complex. I dated a couple of girls — this was way after Katie and I broke up romantically and as partners. They were nice girls. I liked them. I even got kind of serious with one of them, but in the end she broke up with me. She said with Katie in the picture there wasn’t enough room for her in my life. We weren’t even skating together then! So that felt a little unfair to me.”
“I bet it felt more unfair to her,” Haruka said. She looked like she was enjoying herself immensely.
“They were ‘nice girls?’” Natalya repeated, her tone somewhere between disbelief and scorn.
“They were! I would have been very happy had things worked out differently than they did.”
Natalya took a delicate sip of her drink. “And yet you don’t know why these relationships did not last.”
“If you think only one of those people broke up with you because of Katie, think again,” Shane put in helpfully.
“So, anyway, yeah.” Brendan really, really wanted to sink through the floor and never see his friends again. “I don’t know how to talk to girls. Or boys. Or really any people at all. For any reason. Just Katie.”
“If you knew how to talk to Katie, you wouldn’t be in this mess,” Shane said.
“Harsh,” Brendan protested
Haruka made an evaluative face. “He’s not wrong.”
“Great. Thanks.” Brendan turned in his seat, looking for some sort of escape. Instead, he quickly became aware that they weren’t the only ones discussing relationships.
Tyler, perched on a bar stool, was enumerating to Andrej the attributes of the various women of the touring group. The others at Brendan’s table noticed, too.
“I hate when he does that,” Haruka muttered into her drink.
“Hey, man, not cool,” Brendan called out. He may have been bad at dating, but he was crystal clear that no woman wanted a coworker talking that way. But Tyler was either ignoring him or hadn’t heard.
“Okay, but the one I would really want to get with, no chance,” Tyler went on. “Not so long as she’s got her knight in shining armor around. But if he would ever give her up, let me tell you, everyone would be fighting over her. Katie Nowacki is the hottest piece of ass on this whole tour.”
Other people finding Katie attractive was fine. Katie finding other people attractive was also fine. Jealousy over the idea of Katie being in a relationship with someone else wasn’t part of Brendan’s emotional landscape. Heartbreak, sure, but not jealousy. Like him, she’d dated other people before. Maybe they both would date other people again in the future, to
o.
What was absolutely not okay, however, was a man talking about Katie in those terms or anything like them.
“Hey, Tyler. Can you maybe fucking not?” Brendan spoke up again, more sharply.
Tyler spun lazily around on his bar stool. When he saw Brendan glowering at him, his mouth opened in feigned surprise.
“Oh, so sorry, Reid. Didn’t realize you were there.”
“Bullshit, man. Stop talking crap about the girls, yeah? You sound like an even bigger asshole than usual.” Brendan knew he was getting loud and, frankly, didn’t care. He was stressed and tired and angry, and here was the perfect outlet.
“Like you give a shit what I say about the rest of them. You’re just pissed someone else is looking at your girlfriend.”
Brendan’s hands clenched into fists on top of the table. He didn’t try to loosen them; he was too angry. Dimly, he was aware of everyone else at the table staring at him and Tyler and this mess that was suddenly unfolding. “She’s not my girlfriend, and I don’t need to be dating her to be pissed at you for being a dick.”
Tyler rolled his eyes dramatically, impervious to Brendan’s insults and oblivious to the awfulness of his own behavior. “I’m sure everyone in the audience tonight was convinced. Watching you two skate is the most public form of foreplay I have ever seen. Except for the part where she won’t fuck you. Half the dudes in the arena wanted to be in your place and get into Katie’s fine frigid pants. If they only knew!”
“Try to have a little respect, yeah?”
“What’d I say? Knight in shining armor. Too bad she kicked you to the curb years ago.”
That was more than Brendan could take. He may have been a figure skater, but that didn’t mean his athleticism was limited to the ice. He spent an annoying amount of his life doing strength training. He could lift a fully-grown person into the air, over his head, with one arm, if not easily, at least confidently, with grace, and with small risk to himself or that person.
He was strong. But that didn’t mean he was dangerous. And it definitely didn’t mean he had aim.
Because without nearly enough thought, he lunged to his feet, took a few steps, swung at Tyler, and missed spectacularly. His fist hit the bar behind his target with enough force to shock his arm numb and possibly break his fingers.
He had only a fraction of a second to process that — and the startled gasps and excited whoops from the people around him — before Tyler landed an only marginally better aimed punch just off-center from Brendan’s nose. He stumbled backward, more from surprise than pain, and knocked into a chair, tipping it over.
“Hey. Hey hey hey hey HEY!”
Through the sudden confusion, Brendan was aware that the bartender, a burly, ponytailed guy in plaid, was coming towards them. Before Brendan could get his bearings, the bartender grabbed the back of his jacket and herded him and Tyler out the door.
The cold outside was yet another blow, one that made Brendan stand up straighter, suck in a lungful of air, and put a hand to his throbbing face. “Oh, shit,” he hissed.
“You okay, man?”
Brendan looked up to see Tyler standing in front of him, looking much more sober and vaguely remorseful. “You punched my fucking face,” Brendan said.
“Yeah, sorry, dude. You came at me, I just ....” Tyler trailed off.
“You gotta not talk about the women that way.” The heat of the moment had passed, but Brendan was not going to let the perfectly reasonable explanation for his wildly unreasonable behavior go.
“Fucking knight in shining armor,” Tyler muttered. “Are you sure you’re not Canadian?”
As the rest of their group filtered out of the bar onto the sidewalk around them, Justin and Natalya both had their phones out and were, presumably, recording what had happened.
Great. All I need is for this mess to wind up on social media.
Across the street someone wolf-whistled at them. A fan? A totally random bystander? Brendan didn’t know, but the absurdity of the entire situation suddenly washed over him. He met Tyler’s gaze, and they both started laughing.
“No seriously man, are you okay?” Tyler asked, grabbing Brendan by the shoulder and shaking him gently. “Shit, you’re bleeding. You wanna see the doc?”
Brendan dabbed his nose with the back of his hand. Sure enough, it came away bloody. “Please tell me it’s not broken.”
Tyler shrugged. “Hell if I know. You don’t look as ugly as any of the hockey jackasses I train with, so you’re probably okay. Still ....”
“Yeah. Sure, and tell her what, that I walked into a tree?” Fighting was definitely going to be an obstacle to future tour-related employment.
“Fuck. We’re going to get in a ton of trouble aren’t we?” Tyler had apparently just come to a similar conclusion.
Brendan’s stomach sank. If he screwed up this opportunity for Katie — or Tyler or anyone else — he’d never forgive himself. “What do we do?” he asked.
“We lie, obviously,” Tyler said matter-of-factly.
“And say what? That we just wandered into the middle of a fight because we went to the rough part of Portland?”
“I don’t think Portland has a rough part,” Tyler offered in a manner which was the opposite of helpful.
“That,” Brendan sighed, “was kind of my point.”
Chapter 7
AFTER THE SHOW
Portland, OR
WITH EVERYONE ELSE out at a bar for the evening, Katie was glad for a few hours to herself. She needed time to process everything that had happened over the last couple of days and to regroup. At least she and Brendan had fixed their issues on the ice. But she was furious at him again — furious, and hurt. If he simply hadn’t loved the farm Katie had grown up on, that would be one thing. Farming was hard work and not for everyone. But since she had been nine years old, Katie had been acutely aware of the differences between her and Brendan and the circumstances in which they had each grown up.
Their families lived less than an hour apart from each other, but they’d lived in different worlds. Brendan had been in Minneapolis, where his parents had well-paying office jobs and never had to worry about fitting his skating expenses into their budget. Katie had been out in the country, on a dairy farm owned by her mother, her uncle, and her uncle’s partner. Every lesson and costume and hour of ice time was carefully calculated against her family’s income. They had never begrudged her the money spent, but Katie had also never stopped feeling guilty and acutely conscious of it. It had only gotten worse the older and better she got. Sure, there were eventually sponsors that took some of the pressure off, but that could never make up for her not being another set of hands at home to help get the work done.
That burden was her own, her choice to make peace with in private, but Brendan’s contempt for where she was from was unbearable. Oh, sure, he liked her people well enough, and he was always polite whenever he came over. But who didn’t Brendan like? Who wasn’t he polite to? He never seemed comfortable at the farm, whether he was there for a few minutes dropping Katie off after one of their road trips from Denver, or for a few hours for dinner on a weekend while they were both home. Brendan, who was warm and so kind everywhere else, was stiff and ill-at-ease on the farm — and so damn cruel when he talked about anything that wasn’t a city.
Even if, and it was a big if, they could figure out everything else that was going on between them, Brendan could never love where she was from. Brendan loved her, she was sure of that, but only the her as she was on the rink and on the road: Stylish. Ambitious. Determined. One day, maybe one day soon, that version of her was going to end. What would Brendan do with Katie as she was on her family’s farm, up before dawn and dirty and daydreaming in ratty jeans and muddy boots?
It doesn’t matter, Katie told herself. Because we are light years from that ever being the most pressing issue on the table.
Her knee hurt. She needed an ice bath. And she needed to call her family.
She w
as extra glad Natalya wasn’t there as she filled the bathtub with cold water and ice from the machine down the hall. Ice baths were just one of many common unpleasantesses among skaters, but she hated to do it in front of anyone other than Brendan. It felt too much like admitting weakness.
Katie changed her pants for a pair of shorts, pulled on a sweatshirt, and zipped a light jacket over that. Ice was cold, whether on the rink or in a tub, and she wasn’t going to be working out to make up for the lost heat. She slid into the freezing water as quickly as she could, holding up her sweatshirt and jacket so they wouldn’t get wet. With her top half bundled up and her legs stretched out in the cold water, Katie scrolled through her contacts to her Uncle Rob and punched the call through.
She watched as he answered and the video call took a moment to settle into focus.
“Katie! How are you, sweetheart?” Rob asked once the connection was stable.
He was her mother’s brother, and Katie had lived on the farm with them and Rob’s partner Jesse for as long as she could remember. Her father had left when she was three and had never even appeared out of nowhere to borrow glory when she and Brendan started winning everything.
Rob was a big man, with graying brown hair and a thick beard. He wore overalls and plaid flannel shirts completely unironically. Now, he sat at the table in the kitchen as they spoke. Over his shoulder Katie could see the beams running across the ceiling and hear the chug and mutter of the ancient refrigerator. Katie felt an immediate lurch of homesickness at the familiar surroundings.
“Is this an okay time?” Katie asked. “I know it’s getting late there.” Farms woke up earlier — and went to bed earlier — than other places.
“For you, it’s always a good time. We’re just working on the books. Your mom’s out at the barn, do you want me to get her?”
Katie shook her head. “No, that’s fine.” She didn’t want to disrupt their evening any further, not when there was so much work to be done. “Is everything okay?”
