“Such a baby! I should've worn my sunnies, would have solved that.” She rubs her eye gingerly.
“Let’s head back before you lose your eye.”
I watch her flutter around the kitchen, reaching up to take bowls from the top shelf, straining high on her toes. “Need a hand there?”
“I can reach,” she quips, pushing her hips against the counter, jutting her ass to reach. Her stubbornness is endearing, and I am enjoying watching her exercising her independence.
“Should we move the bowls down so you can reach, shorty?”
“Fuck off,” she throws back, but I can see the smile curl up one side of her lip.
To be fair, the shelves in this hotel room are unreasonably high. Even I need to over-extend to reach that shelf, and she is only slightly shorter than I am. But, man, I enjoy needling her for a reaction.
“AH HA!” Bursts from her mouth. A bowl in each hand, she spins around to face me, arms still over her head. Triumphant. “Suck it.”
Placing the bowls down, she starts divvying up the fruit she’s prepared.
Teasingly, I say, “Such a sour disposition. No boyfriend, I gather?”
She rolls her eyes.
“No…girlfriend?”
“No girlfriend or boyfriend,” she confirms, handing me my fruit bowl.
“Neither for me, either,” I answer her unasked question.
She looks around at the hotel room we've been sharing for the last few weeks, mockingly adding, “Hmmm, I could have guessed that.”
I feign shock, hand covering my mouth, but a smile creeps through. “You guessed right. Not many opportunities to meet up with people when we're on tracks, or on the move so much in the year.”
“And off-season?”
“Catching up with family, off-season training—not a great deal of time.”
“That’s fair.”
“How about you? You said you were going home on the off-weekends while you were doing rally? No beaus waiting for your return home?”
“Absolutely not. I was heading back home to spend it with my parents.” She paused for a few beats before continuing. “I had a few boyfriends across high school and uni. Not a great deal. But my parents would tear them down. To their faces. Despite me asking them to cool it, they were relentless. And so boyfriends started becoming less and less. I thought it unfair to put another person through that. I have to deal with them because they're my parents. But bringing someone else into that is shit.”
“You don’t have to deal with anything. Respect goes both ways.”
“Yeah, I agree. The biggest reason I changed jobs was because it was traveling for the majority of the year. I couldn’t pass it up. Give me that scapegoat to be away from them.”
“Mabel, I see you be a PR boss bitch within the track walls. You take no shit. How are you needing a scapegoat to escape your parents?”
“Their negativity, the constant berating and badgering becomes too much. It feels like I can’t escape it. I am transported to being nine-years-old again.”
I nod, because I don’t know how to respond to that. I can’t understand the logic of parents being so cruel to their children. “This year will be a good year. I’m already so relaxed away from them. And they never want to be the ones to initiate contact, soit’ll all be in my court to hear from them.” She smiles. As I open my mouth, my tablet starts ringing, loud bells interrupting us. Stretching over to reach for it sitting on the kitchen bench, I answer it to my parents’ faces filling the screen.
“Hey, Mum. Hey, Dad.”
“Hi, Riley,” they answer in unison. “We aren’t disturbing you?”
“No, no. Just came back from training. Settling down for a snack Mabel fixed us.” I raised my bowl, as if to prove they weren’t interrupting anything more than that.
“How’s Mabel going? Settling in?”
