Kiss and Cry

Wet, naked Theodore had been very, very real.

I’d apparently imprinted on him like an infant duck, much to my horror and humiliation. Other people seemed to shrug off embarrassing incidents and blithely forget them, but I couldn’t fathom how.

Even now, my heart pounding as I raced through the trees in an outlying Toronto suburb nine years later—nine years—I imagined what grown-up Theodore would look like wet and naked.

Light brown hair, thick lips, dimples, lean muscles, and dark hair scattered over his pale chest, accentuating pink nipples. A trail of hair below his navel leading down to…

I roared in frustration, sending a flock of birds flapping out of a birch tree. I shouldn’t have been thinking about this. Normally I could quell this sort of distraction. Though occasionally, I’d been tempted to finally shrug off what had happened the first time I let down my guard and trusted a guy…

Acid flooded my stomach with the surge of familiar anxiety. I wanted to crawl into a hole with the shame of it, which was pitiful all on its own. It’d been three years and eight-point-five months.

I’d left Vancouver. I was an adult now—twenty-four. I should have been able to put that incident behind me. I shouldn’t have felt like I was still a gullible teenage virgin.

The ground was soft in a shady gully with a few lingering puddles from rain the day before. My shoes squelched as I ran and ran, my head a jumbled mess. Theodore Sullivan had nothing to do with my humiliation in Vancouver. I had to focus.

My stubborn, pathetic attraction to Theodore didn’t top the list of why I hated him. No, the worst thing was that it all came so easily for him.

He didn’t follow the unwritten rules. He was famous for skipping practice. For partying. For making a joke out of hard work by winning anyway with undeniable natural talent. He made a joke of the blood, sweat, and tears I’d dedicated to skating my whole life.

It wasn’t fair.

And I knew my resentment was petty and beneath me, but he seemed to have this way of charming everyone, including the judges. It was natural to be jealous of other skaters once in a while. But they worked hard. They didn’t get PCS handed to them on a silver platter like Theodore. Our program component scores were supposed to reflect artistry and skating skills.

My component scores should have been higher due to the quality of my musicality, deep edges, and transitions between elements—but with every quad he landed, his PCS went up. The two scores shouldn’t really be related, but the better you were at jumping, suddenly your artistry improved in the judges’ eyes too.

It had taken a lot of work with my sports psychologist not to obsess about how the judges scored me. So much of it was politics and which federation had which judges in its pocket. Still, it was a challenge not to examine Theodore’s scores with gritted teeth.

Every tenth of a point had grated. For years.

I was an excellent jumper, but that was because I worked at it constantly. He’d seemed to learn new quads overnight and started reeling off quad-triple combinations like they were nothing. He’d stopped losing concentration and rushing takeoffs.

Now I’d be stuck with him in my face every day being charming and perfect and lazy and gorgeous and infuriating.

Taking a deep breath, I raced up the other side of the ravine, legs burning and sweat sticking my T-shirt to my back. Manon and Bill were right. This was the final push I needed. I hated Theodore Sullivan, and I was going to use every ounce of that loathing to fuel me straight to the top of the podium.

Chapter Two

Theo

The hair of the dog theory was bullshit.

I nursed my pint of some local IPA the airport bar was pushing, ordering myself not to puke. LAX was crowded—shocker—but at least I’d snagged a stool, squeezed between a man in a cheap suit and a bleached-blonde woman wearing too much flowery perfume. I should have known better when Emily suggested we all go out for “just one drink” as a bon voyage.

I figured I deserved one last night out with my training mates, especially since Toronto was going to be all business. If it wasn’t the Olympic season, there was no way I’d voluntarily spend every day with Henry Sakaguchi, but Mr. Webber really wanted me to go.

My fingers slid on the condensation as I took a gulp of beer, and I almost dropped the glass. My throat was too tight, and I coughed, pretending that’s why my eyes were watering. Cheap Suit shot me a glare, and I pretended he was a Ukrainian judge and gave him my most charming smile.

It was a game I played when I was traveling—deciding which strangers were the judges from various countries. The woman who reeked of roses could have been an Australian judge who randomly showed up on panels sometimes. The bartender with a man bun was too young to be a judge, but he did have nice forearms displayed as he poured a pint.