To be honest, I don’t remember much of the ride home. It was chilly for the middle of summer. My throat and neck were the coldest, because my scarf was still lying beside Dieter’s bed. You know, the bed on which I’d spread myself out like an Easter all-you-can-eat buffet. The bed of the man I was supposed to be “only friends” with, yet had allowed to fuck me into a near orgasmic coma with a dildo and his dick, because obviously just the man’s fat cock wasn’t quite enough fuckery. What the shit was my problem? Why had I given in to lust so easily? That was not the behavior of a friend trying to help another friend.

“You’re a slut, Trent. Oh yes you are. What are you looking at?!” I snapped at a man tossing newspapers out of the back of a red van. He flipped me off, and rightfully so.

My scooter tires grabbed some pavement and actually squealed a bit as I flew through a yellow light. My neck was painfully cold. I wished I had my scarf. Admittedly, it was probably only seventy degrees with a light summer breeze, but when one has a cold and shamed soul, one’s neck gets frosty.

I pulled up to my mother’s house. The front tire bumped the curb, because I was so sick and upset and disgusted with myself that my mind was elsewhere. The scooter tipped and we both fell sideways onto the sidewalk.

With the dawn of another new day tickling the sky with salmon, lilac and cyan, I lay there beside my yellow scooter and stared at the sky, tears leaking from my eyes and streaming into my ears.

What are you doing with your life, Trent? How did the world’s premier men’s figure-skating star end up sprawled on the sidewalk in front of his mother’s house weeping like a kid who’s just skinned his knee?

I sat up, tugged off my safflower helmet, and pushed the tips of my cold fingers into my eyes. I had to get my shit together. I sniffled and coughed, wiped my sleeve under my running nose, and slowly got to my feet. When I turned, helmet in hand, my mother was coming down the short walk, her face set and lined

“How many times do I have to tell you to get rid of that damn scooter?!” Her voice was far louder than it should be at this time of the morning. “Are you okay?”

“Like you really care,” I snarled.

How dare she come out here in her summer robe and get in my face? I stormed around her, intent on taking this indoors so everyone who lived on 16^th Street didn’t hear our discussion. She grabbed my arm as I passed. I flew around to face her. Her brown eyes flared and she took a step in reverse, her hand falling to her side.

“Do not do that!” I yelled, and whipped my helmet into the neighbor’s yard. It landed on their rhododendrons. “Don’t grab me. Not ever! Don’t pretend that you give two shits about me.”

She opened her mouth to reply. I barreled over her, the only sounds on our street the hum of the streetlights, the flitter of a million moths against glass bulbs, and the reverberation of my shouts bouncing off the small, cramped row houses.

“You went to see him. Why? After all he did to us, to me, your only son, you took a day off work to see Clay.”

“Trent…”

“I begged you to come spend a day with me at the rink, to be on this miserable fucking show that I’m doing only because it will keep a roof over your head!” I inhaled deeply and rolled on, not allowing her any chance to reply. She had hurt me. Badly. And I’d hurt Dieter. And Dieter was hurting himself. So much hurting. We were all drowning in hurt.

“Trent, I just— It’s not that I didn’t want to see you on the show.” She pulled the collar of her robe tighter around her throat. Must be her neck was cold with shame too. “I was too embarrassed to be on it. I married Clay. It’s my fault that you’re broke now and whoring yourself out to keep me and your Lola cared for.”

Wonderful. So my mother agreed that I was a slutty whore. This day was just getting better and better, and it wasn’t even six a.m. yet.

“Tell me why, then. Make me understand why you chose him over me.” I waved my hands around in the air. Her eyes darted around trying to follow them. A light came on across the street in Mr. Cho’s bedroom window. “Make me understand why you can’t give your son an hour or two to be on his show but you can drive up to Mercer and saunter into the State Correctional Institute and not be ashamed.” Words were pouring out of me. I felt lightheaded, and wondered if I was taking time to breathe as I berated my mother. “You could go see the man who stole all my money and gambled it away on dogs, but Trent gets nothing! How can you do that? How the fuck can you pick that miserable human being over me?”

“I didn’t! I went to see him because I love him, Trent!” Her shouts bounced off the sides of the low-income homes. A few more lights flickered on inside our neighbor’s houses.

“Love him?” I blinked at her. “How can you love a man who leaves you broken and starving? Who stole all your son’s money and bought booze and other women with it – whatever he didn’t drop on the fucking greyhounds, that is. How can you possibly love someone like Clay?”

“He has addictions, Trent.” Now she sounded weak, teary, just like she always did when confronted with her choice of men. “He asked about you. He wants to see you…to talk.”

“Then why the hell would you be with him?” I refused to comment on the whole Clay wanting to see me comment. Hell would freeze over before that happened.

“Because I love him!”

“Only idiots love people with addictions!” I roared. My words echoed back at me, resonating off the front of Mr. Cho’s battered brick row house. I slapped my hands over my mouth. What had I just said? What had I just said?

“Trent, you don’t mean that. You loved Jonah so much…”

She took a step toward me. I stumbled in reverse, shaking my head violently. “He never loved me,” I coughed into my palms. “He couldn’t, because he loved the dope more. Same as Dieter.” I dropped into a crouch, resting my back against the cheap fencing that ran around the postage-stamp-sized yard.

“Dieter? Who’s Dieter?” Mom asked.

I ignored her and just cried. For so long that 16^th Street was waking up in earnest before I got myself together enough to go to the rink, my mother begging and pleading with me to come inside and talk more. There were no more words or emotions in me, so I righted my scooter and took off, leaving my helmet on Mrs. Patel’s pink rhododendrons. Who cared if I T-boned a car without my skid lid? Not Jonah. Not my mother. Not Clay. Not my father, who got himself killed before I could even talk. And certainly not Dieter.

Rainbow Skate appeared mysteriously in front of me. Had I crossed the city already? Huh. I’d wept and scooted all the way there without kissing a phone pole or the back of a Subaru, so yay me. First stop once inside the empty rink was a bathroom. I looked at myself and wanted to weep again. My hair was a windblown, sexed-up mess. My eyes were puffy and red, my cheeks splotchy, and my neck bore a brilliant purple hickey the size of my thumb.

“This right here is a complete mess,” I muttered.

I turned on the cold water and patted down my cheeks and hair, to no avail. Knowing it was beyond a sink bath, I went to the showers and stood under the hot water, lost as a man could be, soaping my ass and wincing at the reminder of being loved by a hockey player on the edge. I had to put on my dirty clothes. I skipped the day-old briefs and threw them in the trash. Then I went to the manager’s office, sat behind Dan’s desk, and pretended to work. Work consisted of staring at Dieter on a continual loop of video.

What was I doing allowing myself to fall into this kind of relationship again? I turned off the tapes of Dieter Lehmann and let my eyes drift shut. I had a couple of hours before the Railers and the fucking cameras would show up. I’d push through the training today, make my calls to the charity event I’d missed in order to tumble into Dieter’s bed, then go home to my place and sew. Or eat tubs of frozen whipped topping while watching Steel Magnolias and wallowing in self-pity and disgrace. Or I could get drunk. Either would work.

I’d been asleep for only a short while when a thunderous rap on the open door jarred me awake. Heart in throat, I found Stan filling the doorway of Dan’s small office.

“We work me good.” He folded his arms over his massive chest after ducking to enter the

room. I scrubbed at my face with my hands. He smelled of coffee and doughnuts. My stomach rumbled but there was no way I was feeding it.

“You hungry. Should eat.”

“I’m not eating today. I’ve stuffed enough food into me the past couple of weeks to sink a tubby old ship.”

His gray eyes narrowed a bit, not so much in anger but in concern.

“I need to abstain a bit. Maybe just do a liquid diet. I’ll be fine.” I found my Superstar Trent smile and glued it into place.

“You eat. Not eating is bad.”

“Not when you’re a fatty potato like I am.” I patted my flat stomach, then slowly pushed out of the creaky chair. Or were those sounds coming from my stiff back? “Let me get some coffee and we’ll—”

“No. We eat now. Skate needs food. Mm-Mm good.”

“Soup? We’re having soup for breakfast?”

He nodded, then took me by the wrist and led me to the row of vending machines. I peeked up at the huge man. Stan smiled down, then waved a hand the size of a hubcap at the machines.

“Eat Mm-Mm soup. Drink milk. Make energy for skating. I wait.”

“Fine.” I sighed and fed some money into the damn machines.

When I had soup and a container of two percent milk, my diet guru and I went back to Dan’s office. I ate. Stan sat across from me, all eighteen feet of him folded into a puny chair, talking away as I sipped on my chicken rice. It tasted rather good.

“I keep eye on food for you like Layton.”

“Okay.” I spooned in some rice and broth. It slid down my tender throat. Crying for hours on end is tough on a soul. “Do you think I’m being a twat?”

“What is twat?” He tried to sit back and get comfortable, but his frame was just too long and gangly for comfort in that chair.

“Oh, uh, it’s a word for a lady’s feminine region.”

“Ah, yes. Feminine freshness.”

I coughed on my sip of soup. “If you insist. I’ve never been close enough to a feminine region to say if they’re fresh or not. I like the boys far too much.”

Stan smiled. It was a kind smile that crinkled the skin around his pretty eyes and changed him from Mr. Intimidating to Mr. Cutie-Pie.

“You love Dieter like Tennant loves Jared. I see you and him making google eyes. Is good.”

Thank the gods my little Styrofoam cup of soup was empty. It slid from my fingers and landed on my lap. I stared openly at the goalie.

“No, no, no,” I said while fishing the cup from between my legs. “Love has not been mentioned. Not once. It was merely sex. Great sex, yes, but just sex. I can’t love a man like him. Never again. It hurts too much. Better to walk away now before we both end up being more crushed.”

Where the shit had my spoon gone?

“Never walk away from man you love.”

My eyes lifted from my soup search to find his. Lovely, they were – big and gray with dark lashes and topped with incredibly expressive brows. And sad. So incredibly sad.

“Sometimes walking away is for the best.”

He shook his head. “Is never best. Come.” He shoved to his feet. “Let us work on speed.”

I sat there with my cup sans spoon and watched him leave, his broad shoulders sliding through the door on an angle.

Stan and I got an hour alone on the ice. He was coming along nicely. He’d never have the speed that the smaller players had, but he was quicker on his skates now. His height was considered an advantage, or so I’d been told, in that he filled up more of the net, making it harder for the other team to score. He was pleasant to work with. The big man smiled most of the time, tried to tell jokes but always fouled up the punchline, and worked like a dog to implement all that I was trying to pass along.

Then the cameras arrived. And the makeup people, and the producer, and the sound men. Stan nodded and chatted. I sulked and bitched. So much, in fact, that my agent was called out by the show producer, a short round man named Kurt who was very nice, I was sure, when he wasn’t being a feminine region that starts with C.

Gayle found me sitting in the top row of red seats, my hands under my armpits and my skates resting on the back of the seat in front of me. She climbed up the twenty rows and flopped down beside me, her gloved hands holding two large cups of hot drink.

“Hot chocolate,” she said, then pushed the extra-large cup of calories at me.

I waved it away with my elbow and a sour look. “I’m fasting for the rest of the day.”

“Ah, well this isn’t food – it’s drink.”

She lifted the edge of the cup and blew a steamy cloud of cocoa goodness into my face.

“Cow-bag,” I huffed, then took the drink from her.

She smiled, and we sat side by side sipping for a few moments. The Railers and the production crew were milling around on the ice. I took note of the fact that Dieter was not among the men in dusky blue jerseys, and my heart grew more dejected.

“Would you like to tell me why you’re refusing to go on camera today?”

“I’m having personal issues,” I mumbled into my cup.

“What kind of personal issues?”

“Personal ones.”

“That’s not helpful, Trent,” she said with a touch of schoolmarm in her voice.

I cocked an eyebrow and took a drink. It was sinfully sweet.

“You know you signed a contract to deliver so many hours of film. If you start pulling back, they’re going to start getting crabby. Honey, you can’t afford a lawsuit for breach of contract.”

“Let them sue me. I’m a vile person who says vile things about people who are struggling.”

“Trent, you’re not a vile person.” She sounded tired.

Well, such was the life of anyone who got near me. I tired people out. Just ask my choreographer. She would attest to how tiresome Trent Hanson was. She was probably dancing in the streets knowing she wouldn’t have to put up with me anymore.

“You’re a wonderful person,” Gayle said.

“Pfft. You should have heard me around five this morning. You’d change your mind about my wonderful status.”

I lifted my right hand from my cup to rest it on my throat. It was still cold.

“Trent, you have to perform today for those cameras. I’m not sure what happened off-ice, but you know better than anyone that athletes can’t let what happens in their personal lives affect them on the field…or ice, as the case may be.”

“I’m not a skater anymore…”

“Tell that to the kids who idolize you,” she said softly. A tiny marshmallow stuck in my throat.

“You’re a terribly shitty woman to say that to me,” I snapped.

Gayle patted my thigh, then got to her feet.

“I just want…”

“What do you want?”

I searched among the hockey players, and when my eyes couldn’t find him, I knew what I wanted. I just wasn’t sure I had the guts to be with him.

“I want courage.”

“I’ve never seen a man with more bravery than you have.” She smiled at me, then went back to the ice. Her hand-knitted hat was atrocious, but in a way that made it cute. Not fashionable, no – far from it – but cute. Like a soccer mom kind of cute.

I sat there and drank my hot chocolate. All the while I thought of Jonah and Dieter, of my mother and Clay, of my grandmother, of this rink and those cameras and the men on the ice and the kids in school. My kids. They needed me to do this. My mother and Lola needed me to do this. Dieter needed me to do this. I needed me to do this.

“Okay, the chocolate has made me feel all better! Let’s make some reality TV!” I shouted from the rafters, my smile firmly in place. I hoped the makeup man had good foundation. My face and neck were a wreck, as was my life. But at least I wasn’t walking away from this or from Dieter. Stan would be thrilled.