“Great. Now if we can only get the brooming right.”
“Your thing,” Michael said, ignoring my snide comment, “it comes and goes, so I’d like to understand it better, and how your mood affects it. If we know that, we can figure out how to make it more predictable and steady.”
I could only nod. He was right. It had never mattered before if it came and went. It was annoying if I got stressed in the middle of a game and lost it, but losing a house league game was a different thing than losing a tournament that may or may not affect our qualifying for the Olympic Trials.
The guys on the team we had joined had been dreaming their Olympic dreams a lot longer than Evan, Robbie, and I had. It would suck if I was the reason they didn’t come true this year.
“I don’t know how to stop the stress from affecting it,” I admitted. I didn’t want to confess I had become so used to Evan calming me down that I’d forgotten how to do it for myself. If I’d ever known. Life before Evan was a hazy mess of disjointed un-fun times in my memory.
“Then maybe the trick is to stop the stress, period. If you’re not stressed, it can’t break your concentration.”
Again, he wasn’t wrong.
“Want to talk about what’s stressing you?”
Before I could answer, we heard a burst of laughter from the sheets. There was no mistaking Evan’s clear, boisterous happiness. I looked over to see Alan grinning at him, dimples fully out, attention on my boyfriend intense and singular.
“Ah,” Michael said.
“Ah?” I spun back to him. “Ah, what?”
“Your face.” He wiggled his fingers at me. “All thunder right now.”
I clenched my jaw.
“So here’s a thing. When we first asked you guys if you wanted to do this, there was talk about a more personal connection between the three of you. Is that off the table?”
“We haven’t talked about it.”
“So you don’t know?”
“Are you relationship counselling right now?”
“If it will get a better curling game out of you, yes.”
“Don’t you need a degree for that or something?” Could I sound more sullen?
“As it happens, I have one. I’m a licenced therapist in my other life.”
“Oh.”
He chuckled. “Oh. Yes. So. I know you’re not all sleeping together, because we all live in the same house. But I can also see that at least some of you want to.”
“How much do you want to know about your Skip’s love and sex life?”
“Not as much as I’m probably going to have to know. But how’s this… I think you should go back out there and act like you want him, or put that behind you and get on with curling.”
“Evan wants him,” I mused, watching them.
“Go, then, and sort that out, because that’s where we have to start, yeah?”
“You make a habit of being right all the time?” I asked as I slid out of the booth.
“It makes me an excellent coach. Now go flirt or something. Let’s get on with this.”
He made it sound like it should be easy. And as I walked back out to the practice, I watched Evan make it look easy, a hand on Alan’s arm here, a wink there, an ease to the set of his shoulders he didn’t have around me these days.
I stopped in my tracks, watching them. Alan was a touchy type, always with a hand on someone’s shoulder or high-fiving people. He touched everyone, but his hands on Evan lingered longer, fingers stroking the small of his back or tucking under his collar when they stopped to discuss a shot.
