From Lukov with Love

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?