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“I still think you should, Flygirl. I’m not ready for you. You should send me out to practice on someone else.”
Nothing in the tone of his note or the way he was holding her, feet off the ground, suggested he believed that, but she had to ask. “You want to be with someone else?”
“Fuck no.” He bent his knees and lowered her to the ground. “Last night.” His voice hitched, he buried his face in her neck, whatever he was going to say was lost, instead she got, “Run away with me.”
She ruffled his hair and laughed, trying to give him light for the darkness he carried.
He straightened up. “I’m serious. I have to get out of town for a while. I have to be uncontactable. Not in the apartment, or I have to hole up here until it all dies down.”
“You’d better tell me what you’ve been doing.”
She served lunch and he told her about his morning. Not a play by play, not the details, the themes: winning and losing, friendship and business, trust and fear, ignorance and devotion and Indian grandmothers.
He barely ate, he hadn’t slept. He’d spent the last few hours talking to journalists, explaining how he’d gotten it wrong. And he still wasn’t done fixing things, and the more he talked the more he distanced himself.
He sat at the kitchen counter, his head in his hands, and she felt his despair as spinning too fast, slipping from the pole, as attempting a move you’d not trained well enough for and getting hurt.
A shove made him turn to her. She pulled his hands away from his face. “You’ll get there.” He didn’t trust it. She’d been in his shoes doubting, fearing, feeling she’d topped out, couldn’t spring higher, twist faster, land steadier.
The day she performed badly in an Olympic trial event and expected to be thrown off the team, Costin had said one thing to give her back her confidence. The last day she saw him he used the same words, but they didn’t stick. She’d used them on Therese. She didn’t know if this would work for Reid, but it was all she had.
“I believe in you.” Eyes unsteady, he frowned. She said it again. “I believe in you.”
“Why?” It came out in a rush of breath, but his shoulders went slack.
“Because you commit. Even if it’s only to wasting yourself every night.” His frown morphed into a confused look and she laughed. “Eck, bad example.”
She brushed a hand over his forehead then ran her finger down the stubble on his jaw, how to explain it? He was a man of deep passion to the point of overbalancing, there was nothing halfhearted in what he did, from building his business to the way he was about sex. She touched her forehead to his. “You committed to me.”
It was the right thing to say. Some of the tension in his chest eased, and his hands came to her hips. “Couldn’t help myself.”
Couldn’t help herself kiss him. Couldn’t help herself climb into his lap or tug on his hair or flick into his mouth with her tongue. She’d rattled around the apartment thinking about him, missing him, worried for the things he’d have to do to change what he’d set in motion, the cost to his reputation, the toll on his relationships.
She had his damage in her arms and like last night she wanted to make it better. She put all of that in her kiss and hoped he could feel it. But truly making it better meant allowing him the space he needed to get the job done.
“When I failed to perfect a new sequence of moves, a new level of difficulty, Costin would order me to go in the corner.”
Reid frowned. “Like a naughty child.”
Not quite. “First time he said it I thought I was in trouble. It’s a little counterintuitive for a coach. He meant to stake out a space on my own and work at the problem until I understood what I needed to do to break through, no excuses, no distractions. When I’d worked out what I was getting wrong, then he could help me.”
“And you understood this at sixteen.”
She’d understood it at thirteen. And Reid did too, that’s where he was, in the corner, working his problem and the only way to help him was to get out of his way until he was ready to ask for support.
She kissed him one last time and drew back. “I could do that all day.”
“Suits me.”
“I’ll wait for you to do what you need to do.”
He didn’t let go for a good five minutes, just held her and looked into her eyes, but when he set her on her feet, he was energized. He went to the office. She heard him at his keyboard and on the phone, talking to Kuch and others. He wandered out to the kitchen with a headset on and she couldn’t help but hear he was talking to his mom, telling her he was fine, in a voice that sounded forced. He hung off the refrigerator door and almost took a slug of juice from the carton, before pouring a glass. Later, when he called, she went to help.
“Would you read something for me?” He caught her hand and drew her onto his lap. “This is not how I wanted our day to play out.” Those words against her ear tickled in places he wasn’t touching that had no business delighting. It wasn’t her ideal day either, but it was the last week of college before a term break so she’d have a little spare time to make it up, and she no longer wanted to box their time into a corner as though it was a problem she was working out.
“What am I reading?” There was a page of type on the screen. He’d been tapping away for a few hours.
“An apology to the company.”
