THE DAY AFTER THE BUS Incident

Portland, OR

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BY THE TIME THEY ARRIVED in Portland, Brendan was tired, annoyed, and more than a little off-balance. He’d spent the rest of the night bunking with Andrej and his music. Katie, who’d shared a bunk with Natalya, didn’t look any more well rested.

When they traveled for competitions and tours, he and Katie shared a room — or a bunk. Other pairs handled it differently, but for them, being within arm’s reach of each other was a necessary part of their process. In fact, the only time they spent nights apart was when they were home in Denver. Even then Katie often slept on the pull-out couch in his apartment, or he crashed on the leaky air mattress in the living room of the house she shared with a rotating cast of skaters. Was it codependent? Probably. But did it work? Absolutely.

After being at odds with Katie and sharing a bunk with someone else for half the night, Brendan felt out of sorts and lost. He caught up to her as they were all grabbing their bags out of the luggage compartment under the bus before heading into the rink for practice. He tried to ignore the other skaters on the tour watching them curiously.

“Hey. You okay?”

Katie gave him a sidelong look, shook her head, and kept walking. Brendan sighed to himself and followed her into the rink. When something was bothering her, she never could just come out and talk about it; she had to worry it to death first. The cruelly interrupted events of last night were definitely bothering her. Even though she’d started them. Probably especially because she’d started them.

The routine of getting ready for practice helped center him, at least a little. Worry about the ice. Don’t worry about anything else. He changed out of his shorts and hoodie into skate pants and a T-shirt. As he laced up his skates, he let the usual locker room chatter of his tour mates wash over him. Skating would save him. He and Katie could work this out — as they had so many other things — on the ice.

He loved Katie, desperately and completely, and had never been able to understand why she thought it was such bad luck for them to be together outside of skating. Yes, their hookup in Annecy had been followed by an embarrassingly bad free skate and a lot of ugly arguments. But they’d been kids: young, scared, and inexperienced both with relationships and with competition at that level. Given time, surely they’d have worked it out. Given time, he hoped, they could work it out again.

But until they did Brendan respected Katie, her feelings, and whatever fears and desires for space she had. If she didn’t want to talk about what had happened last night — much less try for a repeat — that was fine. If she didn’t want to talk about anything else either, that was also fine, but it was going to pose some difficulties for getting any work done today.

Brendan stretched out the kinks from a sleepless night on the road as he waited for her in the hallway outside the locker rooms. Luckily they didn’t have anything scheduled for this afternoon; he was going to spend every minute he could crashed on a hotel bed in blissful unconsciousness.

Except he and Katie were rooming together, and after last night, she was unlikely to want any kind of excessive proximity to him. Brendan cursed under his breath. They had a tour to get through. He needed to step back, focus on their professional partnership, and tackle the personal problems once they were both on an even keel.

Which meant he’d have to find somebody to switch rooms with. Sleep could happen after that.

With that plan solidifying in his mind, Katie emerged from the women’s locker room. Brendan held out a hand to her. The gesture was one of their little rituals that pre-dated their breakup and reunion; he’d done it when they were kids, too, long before puberty and any of this drama. The way she responded would tell him a lot about how the next few hours were probably going to go.

She gripped his fingers tightly. Too tightly. She was scared. And probably angry. Likely at herself, possibly at him too. Not ideal, but he could work with it.

Brendan squeezed back, gently, trying to be reassuring. You’re fine. We’ll get through this.

Katie shook her head as if she’d sensed the thought he hadn’t voiced aloud. Brendan felt his body tighten in resonance with the tension in hers. If they could put that energy into skating, they’d be brilliant, even if they needed to have a shouting match in the middle of the ice. That was something that could be fuel and, sometimes, fun. But if Katie was too upset, if she pushed too hard because she was being reactive to something ... that tended to have real consequences for her physical and mental health.

Practice that afternoon was mostly focused on polishing some of the group numbers. Only when that was over did he and Katie have some time to work on their own routines. On past tours they’d performed slight variations on whatever programs they’d skated at competitions that year. But while their free skate in Harbin had been their absolute favorite, they hadn’t been able to touch it since the Olympics.

Katie had stress injuries in her knee. They weren’t serious, but that continuing to be the case wasn’t guaranteed. On one hand, needing to take a post-Olympic break to address injuries was about as good as it got for a skater. But on the other, they now had an opportunity to shape their entire post-competitive lives, and Katie, understandably, didn’t want to be sidelined.

Unfortunately, working around Katie’s knee and hoping it didn’t get worse meant that every time they looked at their Harbin free skate the rehearsal turned into a war. Brendan was trying to find ways to modify the program to accommodate both Katie’s body and her ego, but nothing satisfied her. Eventually, Katie would heal or they’d crack the problem together, forcing the program into a new and improved shape, but for now it was not to be.

After a lot of discussion with the tour management and their coach back home, they had shifted to their free skate from their first year back together after Stockholm. Their Harbin program had been huge, bold, daring. Even overconfident. And sexy enough Brendan had been slightly embarrassed to have his grandmother watch videos of them performing it.

But the post-Stockholm program was softer and at least somewhat more conventional in terms of what judges and audiences so often expected. At least for the first two minutes, before they came to the music change and all restraint shattered in desperate pursuit.

The shift took audiences by surprise, and Brendan loved that he could always somehow hear that over the music and his and Katie’s ragged breath. They were four years older and so much closer than when they had first performed it together, which showed in the mood and expression of the performance. What had been genuine tentativeness then, was coy flirtation now.

The program was a massive amount of fun when Katie was with him. And a boring mess when she wasn’t. Today, as Brendan had feared, she was pushing too hard and avoiding his eyes. She was always a fraction of a second ahead of him, and in response Brendan very nearly fell trying to keep up with her. She was just never where he expected her to be.

“All right,” Brendan said as they came out of a spin. He kept a hand around her waist in silent entreaty that she not tear off for water in order to avoid a conversation. “Can we talk about this?”

“There’s nothing to talk about.” Katie tossed her head so that her ponytail swished violently.

“Okay, except, you’re pissed and running away from me on the ice. We almost fell because we’re rushing. I’d prefer to get through this tour without breaking anything.”

“You’re not going to break anything,” Katie said scornfully.

“Your confidence in my ability to keep up is flattering, but I’m not the only one in this pair.”

“My knee is fine, Brendan. Don’t coddle me.”

“I’m not coddling you. And I didn’t mention your knee. I get that you’re upset about last night. For the part I played in that, I am sorry.”

“Yeah, you definitely tried to cool it down,” Katie said.

“You kissed me first.” This was not the argument Brendan wanted to be drawn into, but it was, apparently, the argument available to him.

“I’m aware of that!” Katie snapped.

Not that that’ll stop us from fighting, Brendan thought, although fighting wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Yelling at each other allowed them to let off steam, mainly because it was what they did instead of screwing. Which was possibly a little messed up. But they also strapped knives to their feet and jumped very high for a living, so messed up was relative.

“I’m just saying, whatever you’re angry about, please, can we deal with it before we fall all over ourselves out here?” he said.

Katie glared at him. “If you could keep up, we wouldn’t be in any danger of falling.”

Exasperated, Brendan let go of her waist and dug his hands through his hair. “Okay, that is really not fair. Or accurate. And the music can’t keep up with you either. So cut it out. Either talk to me about what’s wrong, or chill out and stop being so pissed off about everything!”

Brendan knew it was the wrong thing to say before the words left his mouth, but he couldn’t stop himself. Katie threw out her hands and glided smoothly backward away from him.

“I don’t know what I’m angry about, Brendan. I just know nothing is right and everything is changing. I am terrified, and you want me to shrug and get on board with how much you don’t care.” She turned sharply away from him. “And, by the way, asking me to be less angry is making me WAY GODDAMN ANGRIER.”

***

IN THE DRESSING ROOM Brendan leaned his head against his locker. Then he picked it up and thunked it back against the metal. Repeatedly.

Shane patted Brendan on the shoulder as he walked past. “Hey man. How’s it going?”

“Situation absolutely normal.” Brendan looked sideways at Shane, not bothering to hide how tired and annoyed he was. “Thanks for asking.” Complaining out loud made everything feel marginally less shitty, though.

Shane shrugged. “Don’t worry. She’ll come around.”

“Keep dreaming,” Tyler, Brendan’s least favorite person on the tour, said. Brendan decided to ignore him.

“Well, she hasn’t yet,” he said to Shane. “And she’s had twenty years. Or four years. Or ten hours. Depending how we’re counting.” His relationship with Katie was so long and so complex, sometimes it exhausted even him.

“You need to be clear about what you want,” Shane said unhelpfully, pulling open his bag and rifling through it. A few feet away Justin, two-time men’s world champion, was putting the finishing touches on his hair. They’d gotten off the ice less than ten minutes ago, and already he was showered, dressed, and perfectly styled. Brendan didn’t know how he did it.

“Oh, I’ve been clear.” Brendan straightened up and reached for his towel, scrubbing it through the sweaty mess of his own hair. He never tried to hide the torch he carried for Katie. Skaters were the most gossipy people in the world, and Brendan had no poker face, so why waste the energy?

David gave Brendan a sympathetic look from where he was sitting on a bench unlacing his skates. He and his wife Lena were a Canadian ice dancing pair from Vancouver and had taken silver in Harbin. They’d been skating together almost as long as Katie and Brendan, but their off-ice relationship was much more functional: They’d gotten married four years ago, the summer after Stockholm. Brendan and Katie had gone to their wedding. Not as dates. Technically.

“Have you talked to her?” David asked quietly.

More than I talk to any of you. That was half the problem wasn’t it? The only person Brendan wanted to go to for advice about Katie was Katie, which was easier said than done.

“Sure. We talk all the time.” And that was the other half of the problem. They didn’t need to communicate more, they needed to communicate more relevantly.

“Actually talked. About your deal.”

“We haven’t had time since Harbin. Last night was the closest we’ve gotten, but we made out instead and now everything’s a mess. And when I tried to talk about that, it turned into an argument.”

“It turns into an argument every time you two talk about anything,” Justin muttered.

“That’s because they’re not fucking,” Shane pointed out helpfully.

“Thanks, both of you, so much.” Brendan turned back to David and lowered his voice, not that that would stop anyone from eavesdropping. “We were fine as long as we channeled whatever feelings we had for each other into skating and ignored them everywhere else. At least, that’s Katie’s theory, so when we went and made out last night everything got broken, and here we are. Oops.”

David’s eyes widened. “Wait. Was that seriously the first time you two have been macking on each other?”

“In like eight years, yeah.”

“Jesus.” David blew out a breath.

“Tell me about it.”

***

BRENDAN LOOKED FOR Katie when he was finished getting dressed but couldn’t find her anywhere. Maybe she’d gone out for a run to work off some of her nervous energy. Which was fine, but Brendan would have preferred to discuss the need for a room switch before he went and did anything about it. But that apparently was not to be, and he needed to catch people before they got too settled.

Justin and Natalya were willing to help him out, and once that was settled, Brendan helped Natalya move her luggage to the room that was now Katie’s and dragged his own to the one he was sharing with Justin. Logistics finally resolved, he face-planted on his bed and slept for two hours without moving. When his alarm woke him so that he could eat dinner and get to the rink in time for that evening’s performance, he rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling, letting the disorientation of travel wash over him.

Forgetting where he was, was par for the course in a life that involved so much travel. But this kind of disorientation came from the fact that the bags on the other side of the room weren’t Katie’s and that, tonight after the performance, they wouldn’t be coming back to the same place. The decision to switch rooms was the right one, Brendan was sure, but it sucked all the same.

Despite everything, getting back to the rink for that night’s performance felt like a weight lifting off his shoulders. He liked skating; he loved skating with Katie. While he missed the adrenaline rush of competing a bit, he did not at all miss the sickening, stomach-dropping nerves of stepping onto the ice and hearing their names announced. No matter how long he’d had to get used to it, that had never really gone away. But on a night like tonight, all he had to do was relax and enjoy himself. He was determined to do that regardless of whatever was happening between him and Katie.

Once he got himself changed into his costume for the first number, Brendan knocked on the door to the girl’s dressing room. “It’s me, can I come in?”

He was greeted, as usual, by a chorus of assent, so he pushed the door open.

Katie, seated at a makeup table along the far side of the wall, looked over her shoulder at him. Her pale, elegant arms were raised above her head, her fingers attempting to twist her hair into place. “Oh good. I was going to text you.”

“Do you need a hand?” Usually the other women ignored his presence in their dressing room, but tonight, presumably thanks to the bus make-out, several pairs of eyes followed him as he went to Katie.

“God, please, I can’t get it to stay.”

“All right, here.” Brendan put his hands over Katie’s in her hair, carefully taking the braids between his own fingers.

“Do you have them?” she asked, as if he couldn’t redo her braids if they came loose.

Brendan nodded. “Yeah, you can let go.”

Katie slid her hands slowly out from beneath Brendan’s, the gesture almost a caress. He grabbed a handful of bobby pins off her table and stuck them in his mouth before he could do something like catch her hands again and kiss the backs of them in front of everyone.

“I hate this costume,” Katie grumbled once Brendan had taken over. She plucked at the short, fluttery sleeves of her dress.

“Stop moving your head,” Brendan said through his mouthful of bobby pins. Katie could have figured out her own hair or gotten one of the other girls to do it, but he’d learned to help her when they were kids and her mom or her uncles couldn’t come to competitions. It had become another ritual for them.

He worked in silence for a few more minutes. Katie picked up the hairbrush sitting on the counter and started turning it over in her hands. “You could have warned me about Natalya,” she said, not looking at him in the mirror.

Brendan took in a breath to steady himself and made his voice calm. Casual. Neither accusatory, nor defensive. If Katie wanted to be upset about his unilateral decision to change rooms, that was more than fair, but he didn’t want to have that fight minutes before they went on. “Sorry. It felt like the right thing to do. I needed a nap and I had no idea where you were.”

“Stretching.”

“How’s your leg?” Brendan leapt at the chance to change the subject.

“Attached to my body,” Katie said flatly.

No further discussion of that topic today, okay. “Excellent, now will you please stop fidgeting?”

Katie finally stilled herself. “Neon pink is not my color.”

“Consider yourself lucky. Someone thought orange suits me. I look like a sunflower.”

“That’s ’cause you’re so cheery all the time.” Katie finally looked up and made a face at him in the mirror. Then she passed him the hair spray.

Brendan’s heart leapt. Routine had always been their friend. It helped with the nerves that came with the sport and the anxiety that Katie battled regardless of it. If she was complaining about the admittedly hideous costumes they had to wear for the group numbers and feeling up to teasing him, things were returning to something like normal.

That hopeful feeling lasted all the way through the opening number, the girls’ number, the guys’ number, and a particularly fierce backstage game of Sorry! while other solo routines went on. But when it was time for their own program, he could feel Katie draw away from him again.

He watched her face in the dim light of the tunnel as Justin finished his routine. She’d changed out of the hated neon into the dress that their own beloved seamstress had made for her. She looked stunning in it, her dark hair and pale skin beautifully offset by the emerald green velour. But she also looked remote and untouchable, and Brendan groaned inwardly.

There was no time to talk her out of whatever nerves and insecurity the events of the last day had planted in her brain. The applause for Justin was dying down, and soon Justin himself was there, stepping off the ice as Katie and Brendan’s names were announced. Brendan high-fived him reflexively and took Katie’s hand. He hoped this wasn’t about to be a disaster.

He knew they were doomed when their first side-by-side jumps weren’t synchronized. The crowd applauded, but that almost didn’t matter when he could feel how off they were. Katie was too rigid on the first lift, and Brendan was helpless to do anything for her.

He commanded himself not to hold his breath for the throw jump; it was instinct to do so, but that would screw everything up. Throws were a moment when every part of his body needed to work perfectly so that Katie wouldn’t get hurt.

Katie spun through the air as he released her. When she hit the ice, her leg wobbled. It happened quickly, but Brendan felt like he was seeing it in slow motion. She tried to save her balance but couldn’t. She went down on both knees, her hands trailing through the bits of ice shaved off by their and others skaters’ blades before she regained her feet.

Only a few seconds passed before they fully caught up to the music again. Katie’s hand was cold when he held it tightly for the death spiral. She was smiling, but her smile was brittle, pasted on for the sake of the crowds and the judges that were probably still there in her head.

As soon as they were back in the tunnel, Brendan pulled her into a hug. That’s what they did when something went wrong on the ice. Still together. Still okay. Still one.

Katie’s back rose and fell under his arms as she caught her breath. He wondered how long it would take her to remember that, after the events of the last twenty-four hours, she probably didn’t want his comfort.

“Shit. Shit shit shit,” she hissed even as she leaned into him.

“Hey.” He brushed the loose part of her hair back, untangling a strand from one of her earrings. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

Katie didn’t reply, but when she pressed her face into his shoulder he could practically feel her frown. Angry with herself, not him. Brendan ached for her. Things happened on the ice. There was no reason for her to feel more pain about it than necessary.

He touched her cheek, the soft skin by her ear. “Come on, look at me.”

She raised her head. As he looked down into her eyes, all Brendan wanted to do was kiss her. If it hadn’t been for recent events he would have, on her forehead, like the good friend and perfectly platonic partner he was supposed to be. But given the circumstances, he had no idea what to do.

Something in his eyes must have shifted, because she straightened up, cold and remote and made of steel. Before Brendan could say anything, Katie nodded as if deciding something in her own head.

“Extra practice tomorrow,” she said. And then she was gone.