From Lukov with Love

by Mariana Zapata

  But I had to.

  Ignoring that awful, uneasy feeling in my belly, I blinked one more time, steeling myself for her response—I could handle it, I would handle it—as I asked in a steady voice I could be proud of even while my hands got clammy, “You don’t think I can do it anymore?”

  Sometimes I regretted how brutally honest my mom and I were with each other. She might mince her words for my older sister, Squirt, and every once in a while she might try and word things more pleasantly for the rest of my siblings, but with me, she never had. At least not as far as I could remember.

  If she said yes—

  Her head snapped up so sharply, it eased the ache that had instantly built in my chest at the idea that she didn’t think I could do it anymore. “Don’t fish for compliments. You’re better than that.” She rolled her eyes. “Of course you can do it. Nobody’s better than you, don’t act like you don’t know that. Sheesh.”

  I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath.

  “What I’m thinking,” she emphasized, still squinting that one and only eye, “is that I’m not sure if it’s a good idea.”

  Umm….

  It was my turn to squint at her. “Why?”

  She eyed me back. “You said they asked you to be his partner for next season… what does that mean?”

  “It means, just for a season.”

  That timeless face scrunched up in confusion. “Why only a season?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. All they told me was that Mindy was going to take the season off.” She had always been pretty decent to me. I hoped she was okay.

  My mom’s facial expression didn’t change. “So, what happens after that?”

  Of course she’d ask. I just barely held in a sigh and picked the most promising part of what I would get from a partnership with Ivan. “They said they’d help me find another partner.”

  Her silence was so stiff and fucking weird I couldn’t help but stare at my mom, trying to figure out what she was thinking.

  Luckily, she didn’t make me wait long. “Have you talked to Karina about it?”

  “No. I haven’t talked to her in a month.” And it wasn’t like I was going to call her to ask her about her brother. What kind of shit would that be? We never talked about Ivan. Plus, we didn’t talk as much as we used to before she’d started college and got busy with school. We still liked each other and cared about each other, but… sometimes life split people up. It had nothing to do with caring about someone less. It just happened. And it wasn’t her fault I hadn’t been as busy as I was used to. Before that, I hadn’t really noticed much how we’d grown apart.

  My mom hummed, and her mouth twisted to the opposite side like she was still in deep thought.

  I watched her carefully, ignoring the weird feeling in my belly. “You don’t think I should do it?”

  She glanced at me and tipped her head to the side, hesitating for a moment. “It’s not that I don’t think you should do it, but I want to make sure they’re not taking advantage of you.”

  What?

  “I barely made it last year without getting arrested, Grumpy. I don’t think I can handle keeping my hands to myself if somebody else screws around on you,” she explained, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

  I blinked. “You were just defending him two hours ago.”

  She rolled her eyes. “That was before I heard he might be your partner.”

  How did that make any sense?

  Then it was her turn to blink. “What I want to know is why you didn’t automatically agree to it.”

  All I could do was answer with one word. “Because.”

  “Because what?”

  I shrugged the shoulder closest to her. I didn’t want to tell her my worry about not winning and everything that would come from it, so I kept that part to myself. “I’m working more hours for Matty now, Mom. I’ve made plans with Jojo to go to the gym twice a week even though he half-asses every workout. I’ve made plans with Sebastian. I’m going out rock climbing with Tali once every other week. I don’t want to just back out on them. I don’t want them to think they don’t mean enough to me.” Especially not when they already assumed I was a flake who didn’t care about them, when it was the total opposite.

  Mom’s forehead scrunched up, and her face was a little too watchful. “Is that it?”

  I lifted my shoulder again, the lies and the truths clotting up my throat, trying to pour out of my mouth.

  She didn’t look like she totally believed me, but she didn’t make another comment, when she normally would have. “So, you’re worried about the time aspect of it?”

  I swallowed. “I don’t want to go back on my word. I’ve done it enough.” I hadn’t realized how much I missed them—my siblings, her—but I did. I had. It was just easy not to think about what you didn’t have when you had your mind on other things.

  A small, sad smile crossed her mouth, but she knew better than to try and baby or coo at me. But the words that came out of her mouth next went totally against the expression on her face. “That sounds like a bunch of BS to me, Grumps, but okay. We can focus on one thing at a time for now.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her.

  “Talk to Matty about your hours. You weren’t working that many before and he was surviving. Talk to your brothers and your sister. If you start training again, you can still spend time with them, Jasmine. All they want is to be with you, it doesn’t matter what you do together.”

  My stomach clenched in frustration, but probably mostly guilt at her words.

  “They don’t each need six hours a week from you. They don’t even need three. Just some. Not even every week either, I bet.”

  I grit my teeth to keep from wincing, but I wasn’t sure it worked.

  She knew what I was thinking and feeling but didn’t give a shit because she kept going. “You can have a life outside of figure skating. You can do anything you want, you know that. You just have to make it work.”

  How many times had she said those exact same words to me in the past? A hundred? Thousand?

  I swallowed but didn’t shift my gaze. “What are you trying to say?”

  She slid me another look. “You know what I’m trying to say. You can do whatever you want in this life, Jasmine. But I want you to be happy. I want you to be appreciated.”

  My nose started to sting, but I couldn’t help but hang on to the caution in her voice. “So you don’t think I should do it?”

  The woman who had gone to every single competition she’d ever been able to afford, who had always made sure I had a ride to every lesson I’d ever needed to take, who had cheered me on even when I sucked, cocked her head to the side and raised up a shoulder. “I think you should do it, but I don’t think you should sell yourself short. There’s no one else he could ask that’s better than you. Even if it’s only for a year. He’s not doing you a favor by asking. You’re doing him the favor. And if he’s dumb enough to screw this up somehow—” She smiled. “—I’ll be your alibi if something happens to that fancy car of his. I know what it looks like.”

  I didn’t want to smile at her offer, but I couldn’t help it.

  My mom’s face softened, and she touched my cheek with her fingertips. “I know you miss it.“

  Miss it? This swell of emotion, or some shit awfully close to it, made my throat close up, and just like that, I wanted to cry. Me. Wanting to cry. It had been a long time since I’d thought about doing that.

  I more than missed it—competing. Figure skating in general for a purpose. For the last year, I’d felt like a part of me had been ripped away without my consent one night while I hadn’t been expecting it. And since then, every night, it was like I waited for it to be returned to me. But it hadn’t been.

  And my eyes must have agreed with how much I missed it because they started to burn as I sat there. And if my voice cracked, neither one of us paid attention to it, and I told her the truth that she didn’t need to hear, “I’ve mi
ssed it so much.”

  That beautiful face fell, and her fingertips turned into her palms as she cupped my cheek. “I want my normal, happy grumpy old woman back,” she said carefully. “So if he tries to do something like that son of a whore….” Mom hooked a thumb out and brought it up to her neck, dragging an imaginary line across it, her smile as weak as the coffee Ben made.

  I smiled at her as one tiny tear welled up in my right eye, but fortunately the bastard didn’t jump out and shame me. My voice did sound watery though as I practically croaked, “Have you been watching The Godfather again?”

  She raised her red-blonde eyebrows and smiled her creepy, crazy woman smile she usually only brought out around her exes. “What do I always tell you?”

  “If you’ve got it, flaunt it?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Besides that. We always do what we gotta do in this family. You’ve always tried harder at everything than any of the rest of your brothers and sisters combined, and I never wanted that for you, but it’s never stopped you from anything. I’d tell you, ‘no, don’t jump on the bed,’ and you’d wrap a sheet around your neck to jump off the roof instead. Maybe you make terrible decisions sometimes—”

  I sniffed. “Rude.”

  She kept on going, reaching out to take my hand. “But you’ve always jumped right back up after a fall. You don’t know anything else. Things don’t always work out the way we want them to, but no girl of mine, especially not you, is a quitter,” she said to me. “And whatever else happens, you’re more than this sport. Understand me?”

  And what was there for me to say after that? Nothing. We’d sat there for another half hour before she begged off, claiming she needed her beauty sleep, leaving me to dwell on everything we had talked about and everything we hadn’t.

  But one thing was for certain: my mom hadn’t raised me to be a quitter.

  I had a serious fucking decision to make.

  So instead of sleeping, I tried to think through all the pros and cons of Coach Lee and Ivan’s proposal while I lay in bed that night.

  What I came up with as pros were: I’d get to compete again. Obviously. My partner would be someone who didn’t just have a real chance of winning, but someone who probably wanted it just as much as I did. Even if I didn’t get another chance to continue after our year was up, it would be the best fighting chance I’d ever have. But if I did manage to snag a partner after this was over….

  A shiver had run down my spine at the possibility.

  When I tried to think of cons, I couldn’t come up with a single one besides my pride getting injured if we didn’t win. That I might not get a partner at the end. That I would be left with nothing.

  But what the hell did I have now anyway?

  What did I have to be proud of? Failing? Getting second place? Getting remembered for being dumped?

  Nothing else about the situation worried me. Not all the work I’d have to put in to learn the way Ivan moved and the way he held, and the speed and length of each glide of his blades on the ice. I wasn’t worried about all the falls I’d probably take until we figured out how to work with each other doing lifts and throws—which were exactly what they sounded like, when a male partner threw his partner across the ice with the expectation she’d do some rotations and land on her own. I was also okay with having to watch my diet again. Sure, I loved the hell out of cheese and chocolate and not having bruises and being sore daily, but there was something I loved more. Much more.

  Plus, maybe this time, maybe, if I was really good, I could figure out how to balance having a tiny personal life with the huge job I’d have ahead of me. Everything in life required a sacrifice. Being able to see my niece more often just meant that instead of going home and doing my best impersonation of a beached whale every chance I had, I could go see her instead for an hour.

  I could make it work.

  When you want something bad enough, you can always make it happen.

  Waking up before the sun rose, I got dressed and followed my usual morning routine perfectly. I didn’t know if Lee or Ivan would be at the rink so early, but if they were… then I’d talk to them. I thought about writing my friend an e-mail but didn’t bother. It wasn’t like she would tell me not to partner up with him.

  I ate my first breakfast, made my second breakfast and lunch, ran through my list to make sure I’d done everything I needed to do, and collected my things for the day before getting into the car. When I got in, I hooked my phone up to listen to one of my playlists, keeping my nerves nice and even on the drive to the rink. In the lot, there were only eight other cars, including a shiny black Tesla I knew had to belong to Ivan because no one else could afford one, and a gold-colored Mercedes that I recognized as Coach Lee’s.

  But when I went inside, I didn’t find them in the general manager’s office. So, I decided to go about my routine like I was used to, finding my little spot of quiet on the side of the rink furthest from the changing rooms. Forty minutes of solid stretching and then twenty minutes of practicing my jumps on solid ground, I eyed the clean, barely used ice. And I felt this weight lift off my chest; it was the same effect the rink always had on me.

  I could look for them after my morning skate.

  I’d been on the ice for forty-five minutes when I noticed the two well-dressed figures sitting in the stands, watching.

  Watching me specifically.

  Watching me go through the same section of the only short program I could remember from my singles days, more than likely because the two minutes and fifty seconds of choreography had been my favorite. For me, memorizing programs—one of the two routines you perfected and then competed with each season—was hard enough. I had to rely on muscle memory more than actually thinking about what I was doing, which meant I had to do every move and sequence over and over and over again because my mind might struggle with what was next, but my muscles wouldn’t. Not after enough repetitions.

  My old coach, Galina, used to say that specific program I was doing was a jump extravaganza. It was one hard jump after another; I hadn’t wanted to hold back. Sure, I’d never done the program perfectly, but if I had, it would have been magical. I’d been too stubborn to listen to her when she said the routine was too difficult and that I wasn’t consistent enough when it mattered.

  But like my mom had always said, usually shaking her head or rolling her eyes as she did it, I “came out doing things the hard way” because I’d decided to come out of her feet first. And ever since, nothing had ever been easy for me.

  But it was fine. Challenges were only hard if you went into them expecting not to succeed.

  So, when I spotted Ivan Lukov because of his gray pullover sweater and that hair the shade of the purest black—which he probably spent fifteen minutes styling every day until every strand was perfect—and the much shorter, equally dark-haired woman beside him, I kept going. I turned my body around to skate backward so I could go into a triple Lutz, one of the hardest jumps I could do, mostly because you had to counter-rotate your body in the opposite direction of how you went into it. It was my favorite, even though I realized it was a huge factor in all my back pain over the years. Your body didn’t want to turn in a different direction than the rest of it. It was awkward and hard, especially when you had to go into it as fast as possible.

  I hadn’t been able to land anything for days, but on that day, thank God, halle-fucking-lujah, at that moment, I landed it as good as I ever did. That was the thing about figure skating: it was all about muscle memory, and the only way to make your body memorize anything was to do it thousands of times. Not hundreds. Thousands. Then, once you did that, you had to make it look effortless when it was anything but. And that triple Lutz I had worked on twice as much as any other jump because I’d been determined to make it my bitch, and I had. I’d been able to do a decent triple Axel on a good day, and had landed quads in practice when I attempted them in practice for the hell of it, but the 3L—what we called the triple Lutz—that’s what I had
focused all of my energy on in my singles days. It was one beautiful thing that no one could take away from me. Or do as well, I thought.

  Even though I realized it was stupid to cut my time short because I’d already paid for it, I decided to go ahead and get this next conversation over with. I didn’t want to get to work late if I didn’t have to.

  Work. Shit.

  I was going to need to talk to my mom’s longtime friend about my hours again. Not that it would be a problem, but I hated bailing on him after I’d made a commitment to work more, months ago. He would understand and even be overjoyed, but it still made me feel like a flake. Plus, I was going to need the money. I was going to have to figure it out. More money and less hours. That wasn’t going to be easy.

  With my heart still racing from the series of jumps I’d just done in the routine before the 3L, I skated toward the exit of the rink, passing by the other skaters on the ice but keeping my attention mostly downward as I did it. It wasn’t until I got to the wall right beside the opening in it that I looked up and found Galina leaning over the edge a few feet away, her eyes intent on me.

  I dipped my chin at her.

  After a moment, she nodded back at me, a strange expression on her face that I couldn’t remember seeing before. She looked really thoughtful. Maybe even sad.

  Huh.

  Putting my skate guards on, I grabbed my bottle of water too and asked myself if I was sure—really, really sure—this was what I wanted. If I wanted to get back into this world with a partner who more than likely didn’t accept mistakes any better than I did. A partner that I couldn’t talk to without bickering with. A world with people judging every single tiny thing about me. A world with zero guarantees. I was going to have to work harder than I ever had before to get this to work in a season. Was I ready for it?

  I sure as fuck was.

  My mom had been right. There were very few things worse than regret. And I would definitely regret not taking this chance—even if it meant stretching myself thin—more than I would taking it and getting nothing out of it.