Julie didn’t seem impressed. “I noticed Corey attended that race.”
“So did I,” Tigger jumped in. “Team USA all the way.”
Corey couldn’t tell if the kid noticed the shift in the tone of the interview or if she merely wanted to be included, but Corey could’ve kissed her for the response.
“And none of you are staying in the athletes’ village?” Julie pressed.
“No, the athletes’ village is in the center of town. I wanted to be away from the distractions and closer to the mountains.”
“And you, Corey?” Julie asked coolly.
“The same. I travel with my coaching staff and my sister, while Tigger has both her parents on the trip. We wanted a more family-friendly set up.”
“And by we, you mean you and Elise are sharing the same house?”
Corey shot Elise a WTF expression, which Julie clearly caught.
“So you rearrange your competition schedule to train with Elise and attend her races, while Elise breaks with ski team tradition and rents a house with you during the highest profile race of her career?”
“What kind of story are you working on, Julie?” Elise asked, ice in her voice.
“I’m a ski reporter, not a gossip columnist,” Julie said, but the way she clipped her words didn’t ease the tension tightening Corey’s back and neck. “But your comeback is the big story of the games. People will want the human interest angle.”
“Even when it’s irrelevant to my performance on the slopes?”
“I guess it’s for the readers to decide what’s relevant information.”
“I expected a high-caliber journalist to show more restraint than an all-out info dump.”
“I expected a woman of your caliber to show more restraint in the company she keeps. I guess we’ve both fallen a little short of our school-day ambitions.”
“All right,” Corey snapped. “We’ve all had a big night. The kid has a curfew, and we’ve all got races to prepare for. This interview is over.”
“I agree,” Elise said sadly.
Julie didn’t seem gleeful either, but certainly resolved. “Yes. I’ve got everything I need. Best of luck to all of you in the days ahead.”
Corey turned to go, catching Tigger by the shoulder and wheeling her around as Elise closed in on the other side.
“No one look back,” Corey whispered. “Not another word until we’re in the van. In the meantime, smile and wave.”
They all raised their chins, plastered celebratory grins on their faces, and strode on through the crowd toward the pick-up area where Paolo would be waiting. To the outside observer, they probably looked like three women ready to take on the world. Any opponents they happened to pass along the way would likely shake in their brightly colored jackets and matching boots, but competition was the farthest thing from Corey’s mind. She suspected she and Elise were about to have their mettle tested on a much bigger stage than any mountain they’d ever faced.
• • •
“Another One Bites the Dust, Olympic Skier Falls Hard for Bad Girl of the Mountain.” Elise read the headline and tossed the paper aside before grabbing another and flipping to the sports section. “Olympic Score: Snowboarder Lands Top Prize on Opening Night.”
“At least they’re clever,” Paolo said.
“Not this one.” Holly picked up a paper with the headline LaCroix Adds Skier to Her Olympic Collection. “They didn’t even try to make a pun.”
“I don’t think this is helping anything,” Corey said, setting another cup of coffee in front of her. She’d been so calm and steady over the last 72 hours. Julie’s story broke early the morning after the opening ceremonies, and to her credit she’d managed to land her blow discreetly in a larger piece about how various ski competitors celebrated the start of the Olympics. She’d talked at length about how some skiers were sharing dorm rooms in the Olympic village, while others had rented a slope-side house together so they could focus on all skiing all the time. Then almost as an afterthought she’d slipped in that Elise was “the only American skier to have broken from the pack, choosing instead to share a private rental with her girlfriend, snowboarder Corey LaCroix and another snowboard racer.”
Tigger had seemed a little torqued off to not even be named, but Elise had initially hoped such a small line buried deep in a mid-level piece from a mid-level reporter might go unnoticed amid all the other excitement. Corey’s grim smile and sad eyes when she’d said it could’ve been worse told Elise she didn’t share her optimism. And Corey’s unspoken fears had come to fruition as the story caught like a fire to paper.
At first it spread slowly, little references online, followed by a brief mention on another bigger piece about athlete housing at the Olympics, but then the Austrians got ahold of it, and when the Austrian press got ahold of ski news there was no stopping the fire. By nighttime, the celebrity sites all ran stories on them as part of their attempt to “cover the Olympic games,” though they didn’t mention a single competitive result. The next morning every major LGBT outlet carried features on them, and by noon Holly had fielded interview requests from the Today show and ESPN. Elise’s head swam with all the interest in not only an Olympic couple, but a gay Olympic couple. She could hardly fathom why anyone should care so much, but at least the initial inquiries were pleasant. Corey, however, remained steadfast in her insistence that they stay in the moment and focus on what mattered, which meant no personal interviews. Elise soon found out why.
By the next morning, everything had changed. The stories were no longer sweet little fluff pieces about a budding romance. They weren’t romantic at all, or flattering. The tabloids had taken off, and the pictures they painted were tawdry. Every one of them suggested Corey led Elise astray. They treated her like some sort of cavalier Casanova who often wooed women and left them. Elise had been uniformly constructed as a good girl gone wrong, a woman in a weakened condition who’d fallen prey to Corey’s good looks and charm to the point she’d put her own recovery at risk. All the reporters spun elaborate webs out of mere kernels of truth and fabricated tales of how Corey had blown off the X-games so the two of them could have an X-rated adventure in the Alps.
“Shouldn’t we release some sort of statement?” she asked.
“No,” Corey and Holly answered in unison.
“They’re printing lies.”
“And they’ll keep printing them until a bigger story comes along,” Corey said softly. “We need to ride this out. It’s not important. Eyes on the prize.”
Paolo’s phone rang, and he glanced at the screen. “It’s the publicist for the ski team.”
“Again?” she asked, dropping her head into her hands. “How is it I don’t hear from her for eighteen months, and now it’s three calls in two days?”
“Good question,” Holly said, pushing up from the table and taking Paolo’s phone out of his hand. “One I intend to ask her right now.”
“You?” Paolo asked hopefully.
“Yes, honey, but step outside with me so I can show you how it’s done.”
She then lifted the phone to her ear and headed for the door. “This is Holly LaCroix. I’m currently acting as the publicist for Ms. Brandeis. Any inquiries you have may be directed to me.”
Paolo turned to Elise. “Is this okay? She knows more than I do.”
She shrugged. “Yeah, fine. I should’ve hired her three days ago, but go with her in case they actually have some questions pertaining to skiing.”
Corey snorted, but waited until Paolo left the room before putting an arm around her shoulder. “It’s going to be okay.”
“How do you know?” she asked, leaning into the comfort Corey’s body offered.
“Because it always is.”
“Always?” For some reason the word struck her.
“Yeah, every time something like this flares up, it seems terrible for a few days, and I freak out, and Holly springs into action . . .” Corey’s voice trailed off as she must’ve noticed
a change in Elise’s expression. “What?”
“You’ve been through this before,” she said flatly, wondering why the idea hadn’t occurred to her sooner.
Corey’s face flushed. “Not exactly this.”
Elise grabbed the papers and sifted through them once more. All the allusions to another one, or going there again, or being added to a collection. They all implied a pattern of behavior, but since they’d blown everything else so wildly out of proportion, Elise hadn’t stopped to consider whether their previous knowledge of Corey’s escapades had legitimately colored the lens through which they viewed her current situation. “You’ve had other scandals with other women, other athletes.”
“This is hardly a scandal.”
“Corey,” she pleaded, “have you slept with other Olympians? Never mind. I know you have. The goalies, the bobsled team.”
“I didn’t sleep with the whole bobsled team.”
“When, Corey?”
“Not since I’ve been dating you,” Corey said, her tone shifting from sweet to defensive. “Not even since I’ve known you.”
“During the last Olympics?”
A muscle in her jaw twitched. “Yes.”
“And in Vancouver?”
“Yes.”
“What about Turin?”
Corey sighed. “I understand you’re upset, but you’re being unfair right now. I never judged you for your illicit prep-school liaisons.”
“My what?”
“You know, your little friends-with-benefits, trust-fund club where you trade sex like stocks and bonds with members only.”
“Well, that sounded awfully judgey to me.” Elise pushed away from the table.
“Only because you opened the door. At least the women I’ve been with were friends, or colleagues who I had a good time hanging out with. Not just people who happened to wear the same class ring.”
“And I chose to surround myself with people who shared my background and an understanding of the pressure inherent in it. Women who were discreet and stayed above the fray, at least far enough to keep my personal life from being splashed across every trashy supermarket magazine in America.”
“Really? Because, unless I’m mistaken, one of those blue-bloods did exactly that.”
Elise froze. Corey was right. Julie had been her contact. Without her, none of this would even be an issue right now. And yet, the sense of betrayal at having one of her last bastions of respect and safety compromised didn’t even rank compared with the thought of Corey sleeping her way through the Olympic village.
She sank back into her chair. “What are we doing?”
Corey sighed. “I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to go through this again, but more than anything, I don’t want to put you through this. I’m so sorry.”
Elise reached out and cupped her face in her hands. “It’s not your fault. You’re right. Julie did this. My contact. My fellow alum. I can’t even imagine what would cause her to stoop so low.”
Corey scoffed and pulled away. “I’ve got a few ideas, mostly having to do with her inability to accept someone of your stature slumming with someone like me.”
“I’m not slumming with you.”
“The rest of the world thinks you are. No, only half of them do. The other half think I’m some lesbian predator who seduces nice girls and gets them in trouble.” Corey shook her head. “Maybe I am, or maybe I used to be. I never saw myself as predatory, but I used to think it was all a party. God, Elise, I won so young. When someone puts an Olympic medal around your neck at eighteen, you can’t possibly understand what that means. Maybe you would have, but I didn’t.”
“No,” Elise admitted. “I can’t imagine you in that situation.”
“Oh, I enjoyed myself, and everyone else around me enjoyed themselves, too. I went from being a boarder bum most people didn’t want on their mountains to a household name. Then when it happened again four years later, this time with the gold, my world exploded.” Corey paced now as she talked, her gestures growing more animated as she went. “I couldn’t go anywhere without women throwing themselves at me, and I didn’t say no nearly as often as I should have. I liked being liked. And I had more money and fame than I could figure out what to do with, so I threw it all around. Parties, women, some of whom ended up in my bed, some of whom ended up on my payroll. I had an entourage the size of a marching band.”
“But Nate and Holly? You keep such a close circle now.”
“I wasn’t always like that. I was stupid. I got swept up in the circus. I kept making the big top even bigger. Then in Sochi, everything came crashing down.”
“Fucking Sochi,” Elise said under her breath. “Two-tenths of a second.”
“I didn’t even get that close,” Corey admitted. “I washed out in the quarterfinals. The boarder in front of me bit it hard, and I hit her, and we both went down. Done. Over. Not even my fault. And I didn’t even care. That’s the bullshit. Nothing about me changed because all I only ever cared about was the next race. But suddenly the spotlight focused on someone else.”
Elise reached for her hand, but Corey kept pacing in circles around the table. She’d never seen her like this, so wrapped up in the past, so full of regret and pain and perhaps something more fresh.
“The press turned on me. All the reporters who’d found me cute and endearing before labeled me reckless. While they used to see me as suave, they now painted me as a womanizer. Never mind those women all got a lot more out of me than I ever asked for in return.” She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. It was never real. None of it. Nothing but the racing, anyway.”
“How did it end?” Elise asked. She had to know, and not just for her own fear of being swept up into a similar cycle. She needed to know how the Corey in these stories grew into the woman before her now.
“My results went down with each passing season, and so did the interview requests. The whole ‘drink water’ thing pissed off the sponsors. I went from being a celebrity to a counter-culture hero to a washed-up has-been who now apparently spends her time preying on younger, brighter stars.”
“Corey,” Elise said softly. “You know that’s not true, right?”
“Which part?”
“Any of it.”
“Really?” she asked, clearly rhetorically, because she plowed right on. “You’re on the rise. These stories in the papers should be about your comeback. They should talk about your triumphant return, the way you stormed back into the top of the pack.”
“And they should talk about your results, too.”
“My results have been shit. All reporters have asked me all season is when I plan to retire. They all see these Olympics as my swan song. I was stupid to believe I could escape all that, but this is your time.”
“What about your time?”
“They all think my time is past. My story is set. They don’t care about who I’ve become. I’m always going to be who I was at eighteen, but you didn’t have to get sucked into that.”
“I don’t intend to. I’m not dating eighteen-year-old Corey. I wouldn’t have liked her much. I didn’t sign on for your past. I got invested in the idea of your future.”
“You can’t,” Corey said quickly. “You can’t go there anymore than I can go back and undo what I did. You have to stay in this moment. We have to live right here, right now.”
“We have to think about the future at some point.”
“No.” Corey’s voice sounded strangled and raw. “Haven’t you learned anything from what I told you? Nothing’s guaranteed. We have no idea what’s coming next for us. It’ll be what it’ll be.”
Something twisted her stomach again. Corey didn’t see a future for them. She wasn’t thinking about what came next. Her own trauma or fears held her back, or maybe she didn’t want to go forward. Maybe that’s why she insisted on answering every story with “no comment.” If they did interviews together, she’d have to answer questions about the nature of their relationship, where they were he
aded as a couple, and she couldn’t or wouldn’t let herself go down that path.
“This story will be old news in two days,” Corey finally said. “No one will even remember us rooming together in three months.”
The sentiment did little to calm the doubt swirling in her. Where would they be in three months? What did her unwillingness to plan for their future mean? And perhaps more importantly, what did it say about Elise that she’d spent the first three days of the Olympics she’d worked so hard to reach dodging questions about a relationship Corey didn’t even want to talk about?
• • •
“Hey,” Holly said, looking up from her computer screen. “You’re home early.”
“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” Corey said, tossing her coat over the back of the couch and then crashing into it herself. “The men are on the boarder cross course today, so we can’t get out there. I managed to get a quick workout in the athletes’ village, but I can’t eat down there or go for a walk without the press hounding me, and God forbid I try to go watch an event. I’m under fucking house arrest.”
Holly closed her laptop and came to sit beside her.
“What?” Corey asked, scooting up until the back of her head rested on Holly’s legs.
“I thought you might be ready to talk.”
“Talk about what?”
Holly rolled her eyes. “Okay, maybe not.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.” Corey folded her arms across her chest like a pouting child. “The press is acting like a pack of ripe assholes, like they do.”
“And?” Holly pushed.
“And it sucks, but I can’t stop them.”
“You could make a statement.”
“I shouldn’t have to make a statement about my personal life. I’m sick and tired of having to defend myself to people who don’t know me, who have never known me. I’ve only ever been some cartoon character to them. No matter how much I win, all they want to talk about is who I partied with afterward, and maybe I earned that early on, but I’ve worked hard to become better on and off the course. They don’t care.”
Edge of Glory Page 27