AllFreeNovel
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“Why?”
“Because it’s still not good for me.”
“You’re basically drinking nasty coffee because it’s better for you than the fatty, sugary stuff, and you don’t even allow yourself that?”
“I’ve got a goal, Belle.”
“Right. Well, we should get to that, then, I guess.” The woman nodded in the direction of the ice. “Let’s get this over with so we can do terribly, and you can leave this ridiculous idea behind.”
“So, we’re beginning the morning with optimism?” Chandler said sarcastically.
“I’m more of a realist.”
“You didn’t use to be,” Chandler replied as they walked.
“Well, things happened, and my optimism got beaten out of me, I think,” Belle said before she took another sip of her coffee and set the cup down on the bleachers.
“I don’t think I ever had any.”
“You had some, but weirdly, never about skating.”
“What do you mean?” Chandler asked as she sat.
“You were always so hard on yourself, worried you’d fall all the time.”
“We all did that.”
“Not quite like you. I got to have fun. I mean, I knew my parents were barely keeping me in the program, so I took it seriously from the time I realized that, but I still had fun. I let myself be free on the ice. You always seemed so damn tense, even as a kid.”
“You’re not really a kid when you want to be a figure skater. We don’t have a lot of time to make it happen for ourselves. Twenty-six is old in our sport.”
“You played pinball at a pizza place, Chandler. I watched you once when I went to get a slice with my parents after training. You were competing with a pinball machine, yeah, but you also had a smile for a minute or two. You did this thing with your tongue where you kind of stuck it out and to the side a little because you were deep in concentration. I remember thinking it was cute. You had your kid moments. You just didn’t have all that many of them.”
Chandler had finished lacing up her skates and cleared her throat.
“We should…” She pointed to the ice.
“Right behind you,” Belle said.
Chandler headed out to the ice and waited for Belle, who was still lacing up her skates, which looked like they’d seen better days. If this worked out, Belle would have to get new skates, and she would need some time to break them in. Chandler didn’t exactly have a lot of time for that to happen, but they had to get through this little experiment first to even know if there was a reason for those new skates.
“Okay. What do we do?” Belle asked when she confidently skated out to where Chandler was at center ice.
“Well, I was thinking that we just act like we’re two people trying to figure out if we could skate together.”
“You said one skate, Chandler. I’m only here for that.”
“I know. But that one skate is with us together, so let’s maybe just try that.”
“How, exactly?”
“What if we start by skating onto the ice like we would in a competition, holding hands and getting into our first position?”
“Which is?”
“We’ll figure that out when we get there.”
“You had all night to think about how you wanted to do this, and you’ve got nothing, do you?” Belle asked as she skated back to the door and waited for Chandler. “Come on. Let’s do this already. I have to open the concession stand soon. We have games in here all day.”
