Kick

by Dean, Ali

  As if Jack can read my mind, he says, “Kick, no matter what’s going on in that head of yours, I know that this is right. We’re right together. You’re right for me. Nothing else matters. We’ll figure it out, okay?”

  I pull my head away to look up at him. He looks so damn beautiful with water dripping off his lashes, droplets streaming over his forehead and cheekbones. How can he be so sure? So sure of me… of us?

  “I’m going to fuck this up,” I admit, unable to help myself. I want to tell him to stop loving me… that it scares the hell out of me.

  Jack kisses me on the forehead. “So sure of yourself, Fireball, aren’t you?” His teasing words are just what I need.

  “I’ve never done this, Jack. A relationship. And my first one is with a guy who needs to put security on me in case I get attacked by jealous fangirls.”

  Jack grins, showing his dimples. “Hey, it wasn’t my idea to put security on you. The security team suggested it to me when they heard about the photos. It’s been getting a little crazier,” he adds sheepishly.

  “I guess it was a good thing he was there,” I admit.

  “Has that happened before?” Jack’s eyes search mine, and I know he wants to bombard me with questions, but I’ve got no answers. Maybe I do, but I’m not going to go there.

  “No. Maybe it was the crowds, or just stress. Swim meets are about to start back up, and Shay talked to me about going pro with her last weekend. I’ve just had a lot on my mind.” I’ve got to give him something, and this is the best I can do.

  “I heard you on the phone with your mom. You can talk to me, Fireball, you know that.”

  “Yeah, I know.” I swallow, trying to push down the lump in my throat. “I don’t know what I want. I mean, I think I do know what I want,” I admit, eyes on my coral-painted toenails. “But it doesn’t feel real. I don’t deserve it, you know? Shay worked so hard to have a shot at going pro. She’s so focused. Swimming is her passion. She lives and breathes it. It’s more like a constant for me. Something I do and I’m good at and it centers my life, but if I had to choose it over everything else, I don’t know if I would. If I can have it all, keep swimming competitively but have my brand and do my thing too, that would be… a dream.” I want to add that if I can have swimming, the one thing in my life that grounds me, and still have Jack, be a rock star’s girl, go to his shows and dance in his videos, that would be a dream. But I can barely admit it to myself, much less Jack.

  “Fireball, you’ve got what? Eight months to decide? Don’t beat yourself up. Keep being you. I bet the decision will be easier than you think when the time comes.”

  It sure as hell doesn’t feel that way. I’m not sure how much longer I can walk around with bricks piled on my shoulders, weighing on my chest. One of these days I’m going to crack.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Kick

  It’s the first meet of the college season. Maybe my last first meet of my swimming career. I should be excited to show off all my hard work, but I’m encased in darkness. It’s two weeks after my panic attack in L.A., and I’m only getting worse, not better. I want to blame someone or something other than what I know is causing this itchy desperation clawing at my skin. It’s the one-year anniversary of Nolan Hobart and that ugly night. One year after I made a fool of myself at this same swim meet, still half drunk as I zig-zagged my way down the lane.

  I unzip my giant Cal U warm up jacket and shake out my legs and arms in preparation for the 100 breaststroke. I try to visualize the race: exploding from the block, a slick pull-out, strong kicks. Instead, the visual of a black mist snaking around my legs and wrapping around my body, encasing me in a prison-like grasp, makes my muscles go cold. It’s like a dementor in Harry Potter is sucking me down.

  The announcer calls us to the blocks, and I try to take soothing breaths as I step up.

  “Swimmers, take your mark.”

  I lean forward into position, my limbs like lead. The beep sounds and out of sheer muscle memory, my body does what’s it’s supposed to do. I dive forward, relying on years of training sessions to get me through an underwater pull-out. Instead of riding through it gracefully, my chest burns as if I’m on the last lap of a long race. A grip around my heart squeezes, and I break the pull-out early, sucking in air on my first stroke. I can hardly breathe through the tension in my body as I try to move forward.

  I’ve never been so terrified in my life. Tears burn inside my goggles as I gasp for air, wheezing like I’m having an asthma attack. My vision starts to go hazy, and I’m not at the wall yet. It feels a lot like the concert in L.A. except it doesn’t make any sense. I’m not standing, I’m swimming, so how could I possibly faint? As the world around me goes fuzzy, I grasp desperately for the lane line to hold on to, catch me before I can go under.

  I’m fighting disorientation as I feel arms wrap around me, my sister’s voice in my ear. I can’t understand what she’s saying but her voice comforts me even as I recognize she’s hauling my limp body through the water, while I stare at the bright lights on the ceiling, which seem to be flashing on and off.

  It takes a moment to realize they aren’t, it’s dark spots in my vision. We reach the edge, and she props my arms there. I rest my head back and Shay’s face appears in front of mine.

  “Kick,” she says, her voice filled with suppressed panic, her eyes threatening to fill with tears. “What hurts? What happened? Talk to me.”

  It takes a minute to process, to realize I’ve got to calm her down before they call an ambulance or something. “I’m okay. Just a fainting thing,” I manage to get out.

  Shay’s face clouds with confusion.

  “Let’s get her out of the water,” the head coach of the men’s team declares, and I don’t even protest when strong arms hoist me out. I’m too confused and shocked to be embarrassed by the whole ordeal.

  I’m able to walk, and Shay guides me to the coaches’ offices, where two people from the sports medical team show up and take my vitals, ask a bunch of questions. Shay stays by my side, and as my mind settles, I’m thankful my parents couldn’t make it to watch the meet today.

  With only Shay in the room, and my vitals normal, I’m able to convince the medical people it’s a mental thing and not a physical issue. Shay’s grip tightens on my hands when I tell them I’ve fainted before. If this had happened anywhere else, at any other time, it wouldn’t be such a big deal. As it turns out, having a panic attack in the middle of a pool at a college swim meet is a fairly dramatic event that draws quite a bit of attention. I promise them I won’t race or swim anymore today, and I’ll check in if I have any symptoms.

  Then, it’s just me and Shay. She holds my hands, and when I look into her eyes, I know I’ve never seen her look so distraught in our lives.

  “Shay, I’m fine, really.”

  “You didn’t tell me this had been happening. Why didn’t you tell me? Kick, when I saw that happen, at first I thought maybe you had some weird leg cramp or something. That’s the only thing that I’ve ever seen cause someone to stop mid-race. Then you just started going under, and you weren’t even moving, and I flipped my shit. Jumped in like a crazy person.”

  She lets out a weird laugh that’s almost like a sob.

  “I thought you were having a heart attack or a stroke.”

  I squeeze her hands, not wanting to break the connection. God, I hadn’t realized how much I needed her until now. There’s no one else I want holding me right now.

  “Do you remember this meet last year?” I ask her.

  “Yeah,” she says quietly. “You were a mess.”

  Taking a deep breath, I open my mouth to start talking.

  A knock at the door startles us. Beatrice pokes her head in. “Can we come in?”

  Coco pokes her head under Bea’s arm, looking slightly frantic.

  “Yeah, come in.”

  Coco and Bea are nearly as frazzled and confused as Shay when I tell them I think I basically fainted or had a panic atta
ck thing. Coco asks, “Like at the concert?”

  When I nod, Shay and Bea shoot me slightly accusatory glares. “What the hell is going on, Kick?” Bea asks. “Tell us,” she urges.

  I need to tell all three of them what happened that night. I know that I’ve been holding it in for too long. It has to come out.

  “Last year at this meet, I was really fucked up.” Bea nods, remembering, and Coco takes my other hand in hers. “I had met Jack for the first time a couple of weeks earlier and I’d been feeling a little off. I thought I needed to hook up with someone else to get me out of the funk. Anyway, I went to a concert the night before the meet. I didn’t even really like the band, I just, I don’t know. Needed a release.” The admission doesn’t cause as much embarrassment as I expect. I’ve never talked openly like this about my past habits hooking up, but this part of the story, at least, isn’t as hard to admit.

  I look up from the ground at my three closest friends watching me, the concern and pain on their faces already lifting some weight from my chest. They don’t even know where this is going, but they are willing to share some of my distress.

  “I ended up hanging out with the band afterward. It was at a house party somewhere. This guy who wasn’t even in the band, just a piano player who did a couple songs with them, he was into me. I was sort of into him, but…” I pause, unsure how to explain it.

  Taking a shaky breath, I tell the truth. This part hurts to say aloud, there’s so much shame wrapped around how it all went down.

  “I flirted with him at first, I think I probably gave him signs I was into it, but I changed my mind.” It was like with Chris Sweetwater, except with Chris, I’d given very clear signs I wanted him. We’d even started hooking up already by the time I changed my mind. Yet he stopped. And Nolan didn’t.

  “After meeting Jack, I wanted to go back to my old self, but I couldn’t,” I say quietly. I don’t know why, but as soon as I say it, I know it’s right. I couldn’t have gone back to being that girl, and that was true before Nolan Hobart. Jack did that. And the clarity of that settles something inside me. It’s as if I can let her go. Now that I know that it was something, or someone, good that made me change that part of myself, it’s easier to let that side of me go.

  “I don’t remember exactly how I ended up in a bedroom with the piano player. I know that I told him I wanted to get home, needed to figure that out. That I didn’t want to hang out anymore, didn’t want to go up to the bedroom. I know that once he started to touch me, kiss me, I pulled away and told him not to, but he kept talking, saying I’d like it, that this is what I wanted. He wasn’t rough, I didn’t push him away.” The words spill from me, and as they do I remember I was sore the next morning, and not just between my legs. “Maybe he was a little rough,” I add.

  My eyes stay lowered; I notice Coco’s little hands are balled into fists, and Bea and Shay are holding each other’s hands, knuckles white. I keep going, needing to get through it. Needing to explain it as honestly as I can so they can understand. It wasn’t black and white.

  “Mostly, I didn’t fight harder because I was embarrassed. I thought I’d given him mixed signals and it was my fault. That it wasn’t fair to change my mind on him. That I –” A strange gasping noise escapes my mouth and I don’t even realize I’m on the verge of crying until sobs erupt and the words fall from my lips. “That I deserved it. That that was what happens to girls like me.”

  Three sets of arms tangle around me, and the emotion in their voices as they deny what I’ve admitted, that I deserved it, causes more sobs to burst from me. It hurts. Letting it all out. God, it’s a scorching pain, worse than the final meters in the 200 breaststroke, but it’s necessary.

  My face ends up in Shay’s chest at some point, and she rocks me back and forth. The words keep coming as the crying stops.

  “I didn’t want it, Shay, and I told him that. I didn’t exactly fight him off, but I think I pushed him away, tried to leave. He wasn’t brutal or anything. If I had tried hard enough, I could have left. I didn’t though.”

  She strokes my hair, allowing me to spill all the words and confusion twisted up as I try to understand what it means. I let someone have sex with me when I didn’t want to. Does it matter that I said no and tried to stop it? Does it matter that I flirted all night? Does it matter that I might have been able to get away if I’d tried harder?

  “He kept talking, saying it’s what I wanted. Saying that since seeing him on stage, bumping into him in the alley after the show, I’d wanted him. He made me feel so ashamed and guilty, like I couldn’t walk away from it after flirting with him earlier.”

  When I finally look up, I register the expression on my twin sister’s face. She looks like she wants to beat the crap out of Nolan Hobart. “Keep going,” she grits out, face red, hands squeezing mine tightly.

  Shay never looks emotionally out of control. There are two times I’ve seen her lose it. The first was when she didn’t make the Olympic team at Olympic trials and she cried. The second was after Julian Reed tried to force himself on her, and even then, she was just distant and detached, not red-faced with anger.

  Maybe that’s why she’s so mad now, because she understands how I felt. Wondering if I did owe the guy something, if I was the one who deserved it, if my past behavior gave him permission to do it. How did I never realize that Shay can relate on some level to what I’ve been feeling? Or can she? Shay didn’t invite what happened to her. That’s the difference. I invited it. Even as my best friends deny it, I still can’t let go of the idea that I deserved it.

  I force myself to keep analyzing it, look at that night, and speak my thoughts aloud. I know that I can’t keep brushing it off. That I need to reach some kind of understanding and acceptance about it if I ever want to get some kind of peace.

  “Look, I know I flirted with the guy at first, but I really don’t think I led him on. I’ve done that before, and I know the difference. With Chris Sweetwater, I started hooking up with him, we made out, and then I realized my head was still wrapped up in Jack, and I stopped. Just stopped, left him on his bed, and walked out. Now that I did actually feel guilty about—not the fact we didn’t hook up, that I led him on. But he let me go. I led him on and changed my mind and it wasn’t nice, but I could still make the decision not to keep going.”

  Shay looks confused now. “Whoa, wait. When did you hook up with Chris Sweetwater?”

  “Sorry, I’m all over the place. It was the weekend I met Jack. I’m not talking recently. I was trying to get him out of my head then. Go back to my old ways, but I couldn’t. I haven’t been able to since meeting him. Jack. Since meeting Jack.”

  Shit, I’m a disaster.

  Obviously, what happened is still fucking with me. I know it’s not just Nolan Hobart, and his sudden appearance on stage with my boyfriend. It’s more than that. It’s everything colliding at once, all the pressure mounting. I’m being forced to face fears I’ve tried to ignore for years. My future. A relationship. A relationship with a celebrity at that. And the one-year anniversary of being taken advantage of. I can’t say the “r” word, because I still don’t think that’s really what happened.

  I finally allow myself to remember more details. I’ve tried hard not to think about it, convincing myself I was too drunk to recall correctly. But the image is so clear when I open the door I know it’s the truth. “When he entered me, it hurt. Not in a good way. I wasn’t turned on at all. I started crying. He just kept going, telling me I wanted it, like he was trying to convince both of us. Like if he kept saying it, I’d remember it differently afterward. But I was crying. I didn’t want it.”

  Shay is still red in the face, looking like she wants to physically unleash her fury. Beatrice has gone pale, and tears slide down her face.

  “I don’t know if it’s because it’s exactly one year later, or because he’s in Jack’s band now, and I have to see him and hear about him, but –”

  Shay cuts me off. “What?”

>   Beatrice follows up with, “What did you just say?”

  “He’s the keyboard player!” Coco exclaims. “That’s him. Isn’t it?”

  When I fill them in on how that all went down, they’re outraged. It’s weird seeing all the emotions I’ve been dealing with storm through my three best friends as I catch them up. It dawns on me that this is what’s been going on inside of me except I haven’t been expressing it.

  “You need to tell Jack,” Shay says quietly.

  “No. No way.”

  Beatrice agrees with Shay. “Kick, he wouldn’t have the guy playing in the band if he knew this.”

  “But Nolan’s just subbing. They’ll be done with the tour in a couple months and then Nolan will be out of the picture.” A couple months sounds unbearable even to my own ears, but telling Jack sounds worse.

  They do their best to convince me otherwise, but it’s my relationship, not theirs, and even if it does help to finally confide in my closest friends, I can’t tell my boyfriend. A guy will see it differently. The girls are on my side, they’re adamant I was the victim in the situation. Jack will probably want to make sure I got tested. Maybe he’ll kick Nolan out because he doesn’t want to play alongside another dude who hooked up with his girlfriend, but he might not even want me to be his girlfriend once I tell him. Of all the times I hooked up for fun, thought I was empowering myself, that one night with Nolan told me I wasn’t powerful at all. It was all a lie. And once Jack knows the truth, that love he’s declared for me will turn into something else.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Jack

  Backstage with the guys after the show, and I’d never been more ready for a break in my life. We got a few days off for Thanksgiving before heading back on the road until Christmas. After that, no tours planned, and I was keeping it that way. We’d do a few festivals next summer but we needed a fucking break. I was all about working hard, riding the momentum as we built up our audience, but shit, I was finally getting to understand that burn-out could happen even doing what you loved. I wanted to be home with my girls, all three of them. Tinker around at a casual pace with new songs. Just take a fucking breather.