by Erin McRae
Brendan’s lips were warm. They fit against hers as if they’d done this for years. Why hadn’t they been doing this for years? She nipped his lower lip sharply. He used to like that. Does he still?
With a soft groan in the back of his throat Brendan opened his mouth to her. So that’s a yes. His arm, slung loosely around her waist, tightened, but he was letting her lead. Given their shared history, that might have been a wise choice. But it wasn’t what Katie wanted. On the ice, this was a man who could throw her across the rink, who ran his hands all over her body for the cheer of the crowd, who pushed and pulled in response to her relentless pursuit. Now that they were finally doing this, Katie wanted all the intensity they’d bottled up and poured out only onto the ice.
She cupped his face in her hands and pushed her fingers up into his hair, pulling at it, daring Brendan to respond in kind.
He did.
He slid his hand under the hem of her shirt, his palm warm against the small of her back, his fingernails pricking her skin. Heat unfurled from her core. Reflexively Katie shifted to wrap her leg around his waist. That was like being on the ice; Brendan being absolutely, definitely, achingly hard against her was not. He wanted her, too, and Katie needed so much more than she currently had.
Awkwardly — the space was so small — Katie helped Brendan struggle out of his T-shirt. In the dim light she could make out the strong lines of his chest, all the defined muscle that was the result of hours spent in the gym and on the ice. Katie was a world-class athlete surrounded by world-class athletes; there was no shortage of eye candy in her life. But after years of competing together she knew Brendan’s body and what it could do so intimately it couldn’t help but be her favorite.
Brendan tossed his shirt to the side and rolled on top of her. His knees straddled her waist; his weight was braced on his arms. Finally it was his turn to dig a hand into her hair. He kissed her until they had to break apart for breath. With his bare skin pressed to her, Katie never wanted to be anywhere else, even if there were too many people far too close to them for her to get what she really wanted.
Because if she could hear her tour mates, they could hear her. And she could definitely hear them. Shane and David were arguing about hockey again. Andrej was listening to Czech pop music without his headphones. Haruka and Yume were playing cards. And somewhere, Natalya was snoring. Katie didn’t think athletes were supposed to snore. Especially really pretty Russians. But what did she know? Right now, she wasn’t sure she knew anything except Brendan’s body and her own.
Despite her concerns, Brendan was heedless of their lack of true privacy. He slipped a hand into her pajama bottoms and between her legs. “You’re soaking wet,” he murmured, pressing kisses down the line of her throat.
Katie gasped at both his touch and at his words.
“Do you think you can be quiet?” he asked.
“Obviously not,” she hissed in his ear. “And I think almost everyone’s awake to hear.”
Brendan dropped his hand to her thigh and his forehead to her chest. “Why can’t anyone on this bus sleep like normal people?”
Katie curled her fingers into his hair to hold him there. She had a million responses to that. Starting with the fact that they weren’t sleeping like normal people either. Above them, his phone advanced to the next episode of the makeover show. “Do you care if they hear?” she asked.
“No.” Brendan’s reply was immediate. “Do you?”
Katie had spent her entire life worrying about what other people saw when they looked at her. Sometimes reasonably, sometimes not. Perhaps it was time to let that go. Or at least try. She shook her head.
As if to comment on that choice, the bus started to slow. Then it jolted. Hard.
Katie yelped.
“Well there’s no need to advertise it,” Brendan whispered in her ear, aggrieved. He kissed her.
Whether that was to muffle any other sound she might make or for the sake of kissing her, Katie didn’t know. She also didn’t care. She laughed into his mouth. Brendan’s body pressing down on hers was ecstasy.
After a moment, the bus started moving again, leaning into some sort of turn. The curve of it was long, the bus was fast, and the driver seemed to think he had a bobsled in his hands.
Brendan shifted onto his back as his body was pulled away from her by the force of the turn, taking Katie with him. Skating habit or desire made her go with him, but then she kept going, her body rolling over his and to the outside edge of the bunk.
She was going to fall.
She reached out to him. But just like in Annecy, her fingers slipped through his.
With a startled shriek, Katie fell out of the bunk and dropped several feet into the aisle. Curtains up and down the length of the vehicle snapped open. Everyone stared down at her, knowing exactly what she had been doing and with whom.
Brendan’s head appeared last. He must have been trying to figure out an appropriate response. Not that there was one. He still wasn’t wearing his shirt.
“Are you okay?” he asked sheepishly.
Katie stared up at his infuriating, genial, too-handsome face, his tousled hair, and his wry grin. She felt herself turn red. Not — despite his bare torso and kiss-bitten lips — with embarrassment, but with fury.
Physically she was fine. But in every other sense, she was a mess. Perhaps if she stayed very still, she would somehow be rendered invisible to the eyes of the other skaters. At least Leo, their tour manager, slept with earplugs.
“Seriously, Katie, are you okay?” the no-longer-snoring Natalya asked.
“No!” Katie snapped at her, slowly sitting up from where she was splayed on the bus floor. She didn’t think she was hurt. At least not physically. But every one of her fears had come true, and the risk they’d taken had ended in humiliation. As she should have known it would.
Katie pushed her hair out of her eyes and looked up at Brendan. His face was a mixture of hesitant concern and amusement.
“I am making all the worst choices!” she hollered at him, fairly or not. “Again! And they’re all your fault!”
Chapter 4
THE DAY AFTER THE BUS Incident
Portland, OR
BY THE TIME THEY ARRIVED in Portland, Brendan was tired, annoyed, and more than a little off-balance. He’d spent the rest of the night bunking with Andrej and his music. Katie, who’d shared a bunk with Natalya, didn’t look any more well rested.
When they traveled for competitions and tours, he and Katie shared a room — or a bunk. Other pairs handled it differently, but for them, being within arm’s reach of each other was a necessary part of their process. In fact, the only time they spent nights apart was when they were home in Denver. Even then Katie often slept on the pull-out couch in his apartment, or he crashed on the leaky air mattress in the living room of the house she shared with a rotating cast of skaters. Was it codependent? Probably. But did it work? Absolutely.
After being at odds with Katie and sharing a bunk with someone else for half the night, Brendan felt out of sorts and lost. He caught up to her as they were all grabbing their bags out of the luggage compartment under the bus before heading into the rink for practice. He tried to ignore the other skaters on the tour watching them curiously.
“Hey. You okay?”
Katie gave him a sidelong look, shook her head, and kept walking. Brendan sighed to himself and followed her into the rink. When something was bothering her, she never could just come out and talk about it; she had to worry it to death first. The cruelly interrupted events of last night were definitely bothering her. Even though she’d started them. Probably especially because she’d started them.
The routine of getting ready for practice helped center him, at least a little. Worry about the ice. Don’t worry about anything else. He changed out of his shorts and hoodie into skate pants and a T-shirt. As he laced up his skates, he let the usual locker room chatter of his tour mates wash over him. Skating would save him. He and Katie could w
ork this out — as they had so many other things — on the ice.
He loved Katie, desperately and completely, and had never been able to understand why she thought it was such bad luck for them to be together outside of skating. Yes, their hookup in Annecy had been followed by an embarrassingly bad free skate and a lot of ugly arguments. But they’d been kids: young, scared, and inexperienced both with relationships and with competition at that level. Given time, surely they’d have worked it out. Given time, he hoped, they could work it out again.
But until they did Brendan respected Katie, her feelings, and whatever fears and desires for space she had. If she didn’t want to talk about what had happened last night — much less try for a repeat — that was fine. If she didn’t want to talk about anything else either, that was also fine, but it was going to pose some difficulties for getting any work done today.
Brendan stretched out the kinks from a sleepless night on the road as he waited for her in the hallway outside the locker rooms. Luckily they didn’t have anything scheduled for this afternoon; he was going to spend every minute he could crashed on a hotel bed in blissful unconsciousness.
Except he and Katie were rooming together, and after last night, she was unlikely to want any kind of excessive proximity to him. Brendan cursed under his breath. They had a tour to get through. He needed to step back, focus on their professional partnership, and tackle the personal problems once they were both on an even keel.
Which meant he’d have to find somebody to switch rooms with. Sleep could happen after that.
With that plan solidifying in his mind, Katie emerged from the women’s locker room. Brendan held out a hand to her. The gesture was one of their little rituals that pre-dated their breakup and reunion; he’d done it when they were kids, too, long before puberty and any of this drama. The way she responded would tell him a lot about how the next few hours were probably going to go.
She gripped his fingers tightly. Too tightly. She was scared. And probably angry. Likely at herself, possibly at him too. Not ideal, but he could work with it.
Brendan squeezed back, gently, trying to be reassuring. You’re fine. We’ll get through this.
Katie shook her head as if she’d sensed the thought he hadn’t voiced aloud. Brendan felt his body tighten in resonance with the tension in hers. If they could put that energy into skating, they’d be brilliant, even if they needed to have a shouting match in the middle of the ice. That was something that could be fuel and, sometimes, fun. But if Katie was too upset, if she pushed too hard because she was being reactive to something ... that tended to have real consequences for her physical and mental health.
Practice that afternoon was mostly focused on polishing some of the group numbers. Only when that was over did he and Katie have some time to work on their own routines. On past tours they’d performed slight variations on whatever programs they’d skated at competitions that year. But while their free skate in Harbin had been their absolute favorite, they hadn’t been able to touch it since the Olympics.
Katie had stress injuries in her knee. They weren’t serious, but that continuing to be the case wasn’t guaranteed. On one hand, needing to take a post-Olympic break to address injuries was about as good as it got for a skater. But on the other, they now had an opportunity to shape their entire post-competitive lives, and Katie, understandably, didn’t want to be sidelined.
Unfortunately, working around Katie’s knee and hoping it didn’t get worse meant that every time they looked at their Harbin free skate the rehearsal turned into a war. Brendan was trying to find ways to modify the program to accommodate both Katie’s body and her ego, but nothing satisfied her. Eventually, Katie would heal or they’d crack the problem together, forcing the program into a new and improved shape, but for now it was not to be.
After a lot of discussion with the tour management and their coach back home, they had shifted to their free skate from their first year back together after Stockholm. Their Harbin program had been huge, bold, daring. Even overconfident. And sexy enough Brendan had been slightly embarrassed to have his grandmother watch videos of them performing it.
But the post-Stockholm program was softer and at least somewhat more conventional in terms of what judges and audiences so often expected. At least for the first two minutes, before they came to the music change and all restraint shattered in desperate pursuit.
The shift took audiences by surprise, and Brendan loved that he could always somehow hear that over the music and his and Katie’s ragged breath. They were four years older and so much closer than when they had first performed it together, which showed in the mood and expression of the performance. What had been genuine tentativeness then, was coy flirtation now.
The program was a massive amount of fun when Katie was with him. And a boring mess when she wasn’t. Today, as Brendan had feared, she was pushing too hard and avoiding his eyes. She was always a fraction of a second ahead of him, and in response Brendan very nearly fell trying to keep up with her. She was just never where he expected her to be.
“All right,” Brendan said as they came out of a spin. He kept a hand around her waist in silent entreaty that she not tear off for water in order to avoid a conversation. “Can we talk about this?”
“There’s nothing to talk about.” Katie tossed her head so that her ponytail swished violently.
“Okay, except, you’re pissed and running away from me on the ice. We almost fell because we’re rushing. I’d prefer to get through this tour without breaking anything.”
“You’re not going to break anything,” Katie said scornfully.
“Your confidence in my ability to keep up is flattering, but I’m not the only one in this pair.”
“My knee is fine, Brendan. Don’t coddle me.”
“I’m not coddling you. And I didn’t mention your knee. I get that you’re upset about last night. For the part I played in that, I am sorry.”
“Yeah, you definitely tried to cool it down,” Katie said.
“You kissed me first.” This was not the argument Brendan wanted to be drawn into, but it was, apparently, the argument available to him.
“I’m aware of that!” Katie snapped.
Not that that’ll stop us from fighting, Brendan thought, although fighting wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Yelling at each other allowed them to let off steam, mainly because it was what they did instead of screwing. Which was possibly a little messed up. But they also strapped knives to their feet and jumped very high for a living, so messed up was relative.
“I’m just saying, whatever you’re angry about, please, can we deal with it before we fall all over ourselves out here?” he said.
Katie glared at him. “If you could keep up, we wouldn’t be in any danger of falling.”
Exasperated, Brendan let go of her waist and dug his hands through his hair. “Okay, that is really not fair. Or accurate. And the music can’t keep up with you either. So cut it out. Either talk to me about what’s wrong, or chill out and stop being so pissed off about everything!”
Brendan knew it was the wrong thing to say before the words left his mouth, but he couldn’t stop himself. Katie threw out her hands and glided smoothly backward away from him.
“I don’t know what I’m angry about, Brendan. I just know nothing is right and everything is changing. I am terrified, and you want me to shrug and get on board with how much you don’t care.” She turned sharply away from him. “And, by the way, asking me to be less angry is making me WAY GODDAMN ANGRIER.”
IN THE DRESSING ROOM Brendan leaned his head against his locker. Then he picked it up and thunked it back against the metal. Repeatedly.
Shane patted Brendan on the shoulder as he walked past. “Hey man. How’s it going?”
“Situation absolutely normal.” Brendan looked sideways at Shane, not bothering to hide how tired and annoyed he was. “Thanks for asking.” Complaining out loud made everything feel marginally less shitty, though.
Shan
e shrugged. “Don’t worry. She’ll come around.”
“Keep dreaming,” Tyler, Brendan’s least favorite person on the tour, said. Brendan decided to ignore him.
“Well, she hasn’t yet,” he said to Shane. “And she’s had twenty years. Or four years. Or ten hours. Depending how we’re counting.” His relationship with Katie was so long and so complex, sometimes it exhausted even him.
“You need to be clear about what you want,” Shane said unhelpfully, pulling open his bag and rifling through it. A few feet away Justin, two-time men’s world champion, was putting the finishing touches on his hair. They’d gotten off the ice less than ten minutes ago, and already he was showered, dressed, and perfectly styled. Brendan didn’t know how he did it.
“Oh, I’ve been clear.” Brendan straightened up and reached for his towel, scrubbing it through the sweaty mess of his own hair. He never tried to hide the torch he carried for Katie. Skaters were the most gossipy people in the world, and Brendan had no poker face, so why waste the energy?
David gave Brendan a sympathetic look from where he was sitting on a bench unlacing his skates. He and his wife Lena were a Canadian ice dancing pair from Vancouver and had taken silver in Harbin. They’d been skating together almost as long as Katie and Brendan, but their off-ice relationship was much more functional: They’d gotten married four years ago, the summer after Stockholm. Brendan and Katie had gone to their wedding. Not as dates. Technically.
“Have you talked to her?” David asked quietly.
More than I talk to any of you. That was half the problem wasn’t it? The only person Brendan wanted to go to for advice about Katie was Katie, which was easier said than done.
“Sure. We talk all the time.” And that was the other half of the problem. They didn’t need to communicate more, they needed to communicate more relevantly.