“I am a two-time national champion. I think I know how to spin without cutting your precious face,” I retorted.
“It is precious, isn’t it?” Dom put his hand up against his cheek and did his best to look innocent. “But I trusted twelve-year-old Hazel to do side-by-side spins, too. You definitely weren’t any sort of champion back then.”
“Hey!” I exclaimed, letting go of my leg. “That’s rude.”
He gave me his best shit-eating grin. “It’s true.”
I tried to look grumpier than I felt. “Still rude,” I retorted, switching the leg I was stretching. “Especially since the reason you started pairs is that they didn’t think you were strong enough to continue as a singles skater. You only really started going places after that dumb twelve-year-old showed you a thing or two.”
“I prefer to think that they knew I was one of the only people who would be able to handle you,” Dom said.
Truthfully, both things would have contributed to the decision that had brought us together as partners. My coach at the time had been a woman in her late twenties. To me at twelve, she had seemed so much older and more mature than she probably was. She had been the one to broach the subject of letting me try pairs skating.
I had been a tiny little thing back then, not even five feet tall and as thin as a rail. I had dreamed about developing curves to fit in with the other girls at school. My frame must have contributed to the idea that even a teenage boy could lift a pipsqueak like me. I had been so excited that my mother had agreed to talk to my father about letting me try it. Despite her fears about having a boy not much older than me trying to carry me around the ice while balancing on a pair of tiny blades, my parents discussed it. Dad had agreed and, not long after, I was told that I could meet a potential partner.
It was a cold winter day and already dark outside, even though my mother and I had left for the arena just after I got off the bus from school. It was then that I was introduced to a gangly fourteen-year-old boy with thick eyebrows above brown eyes and shaggy, dark hair that desperately needed a haircut. I eyed him shyly, intimidated in the presence of a cute high school boy, when my coach introduced us.
“Dominic Hughes, this is Hazel Pierce. Hazel, Dom. We thought we would try you two together, since you’re both new.”
He intimidated me, but I didn’t hesitate before reaching out to shake his outstretched hand.
It had taken us some time to get used to skating so close to somebody else, but soon enough we were holding hands and practicing basic pair moves. It was all new to me, and not just the skating. Holding hands with a boy and spending so much time with a high school boy always kept my middle school friends interested. I tried to play it cool, but I found the entire thing thrilling. I found Dom hard to read back then, since he tried to keep his expression neutral and look cool all the time. In hindsight, he must have enjoyed himself too. Even if he may have found me babyish at the beginning.
I did my best to mask my awkwardness while he did his best to hide his excitement. When we received our first instructions for a lift, it was very basic. He would place his hands on my hips and lift me a couple of feet off the ice while spinning in a circle. It would take a while before we got to the point where he would be raising me above his head. We hadn’t had quite the height difference then and he wasn’t nearly as muscular, but he managed just fine. As soon as my skates were firmly planted back on the ice after a single rotation around his body, I was hooked. Before then, my favourite part of skating had been jumping. The feeling of flying was unlike anything else and I had loved it for as long as I could remember. I was pretty good,working my way through all my doubles with ease and dipping my toes into the world of triples. The possibility of spending more time in the air with the help of a partner firmly cemented in my mind that I should do pairs.
I don’t know if my parents really knew what they were getting into when they agreed to let me partner with Dom. By the time they realized I was going to be flung through the air, it was already too late to back out. We were both much stronger as partners than we had been as individuals. We had progressed at rapid speed through increasingly complicated moves that were new to both of us.
Warming up took longer than most people would realize, but it was important that we were both limber before we really started for the day. There was too much potential for injury otherwise.
I was getting impatient to get started when I finally heard the metallic clank that came whenever the door opened. I stopped mid-stretch to watch as our choreographer and coach stepped into the room one after another. Mark Abbott, our coach, had been a pairs skater in his own right back in the early eighties. He had helped progress the sport, even though he had to wear ridiculous, badly dated costumes when he did so. He had done well, but he had never been able to topple the legends that the Soviet skating machine turned out regularly. When Ekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov came onto the scene as he exited, he had turned to coaching. Since then, he had focused his efforts on helping others achieve the glory he couldn’t.
Our choreographer, Olga Malinova, had once worked exclusively with Russian skaters. We were lucky to have her, although she split her time between us, a Russian pair, and an extremely young Russian prodigy. Not that Mark was exclusively our coach either. That would be unreasonable. Even with their split focus, they were vital to our success. They had made themove from junior competitions to the senior level with us and had proven to be invaluable with their knowledge.
“Dom, Hazel,” Mark said, nodding at each of us in turn. His close-cropped salt and pepper hair was leaning more towards salt than pepper recently, but the cut hadn’t changed in all the years I’d known him. “Are you two ready to get started?”
I nodded. After a weekend away, I was itching to get back to work. I wouldn’t feel comfortable until I knew we were ready for competition.
“We always are,” Dom quipped.
“Don’t let us get in the way of your stretching,” Mark said, gesturing for us to continue.
“We were just about done,” I said. Olga pursed her lips together, so I pulled a leg over my head with ease to show that I was limber.
“You do not want to hurt yourself with impatience,” Olga said. Her voice was still heavily accented after all these years of living away from her homeland.
I could practically hear Dom fighting back the urge to roll his eyes, but I followed his lead and stayed silent for a few more minutes of stretching. Olga was incredibly dedicated and her incredible track record spoke for itself. That didn’t mean we didn’t talk about how unyielding she could be when we were well out of earshot of everybody else, though.
Thankfully, it didn’t take long before Mark seemed satisfied. With a clap of his hands, he said, “Let’s see how those lifts are coming along before we get you on the ice.”
I grinned at Dom as we moved towards the centre of the room. We stood facing each other, a couple of feet apart but still close enough to reach out and grab each other as needed. I had to crane my neck to look up at him, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. After so many years of partnership, I had grown used to it. I had spent more time looking up at him than at any other guy,including all of my past boyfriends combined. I let the familiar sense of eagerness and comfort wash over me while I waited. My friends were always skeptical when I said I was comfortable in a time like this, moments away from trying a lift, but it was true. Dom was as steady as a rock and as comforting as coming home at the end of a long day.
“In order?” Dom asked, looking over my shoulder.
“In order,” Mark confirmed. “Now get ready while I count you in.”
Dom and I moved in sync at his go, going through the motions at the start of our new long program that would set us up for our first lift. Some of them were more difficult without the speed we had on the ice and they were absolutely less graceful, but we made it work. With my back towards Dom’s chest, I touched my hands to his wrists as his hands firmly gripped my hips. A jump and I was up in the air with his help, flinging myself around in a double twist. I kept my arms up as he placed me down gently on one foot, being careful not to collapse into him.
We had mastered the double twist years ago, but it was definitely easier with the momentum of the ice. Some people didn’t like it because of its difficulty, but I loved it. Dom always teased me that there was nothing quite like my expression when I’d come down from what I’d long ago dubbed flying. Our only question about the twist now was whether we could push ourselves farther. The triple twist was standard in competition and ours was clean, always getting a good grade of execution. The next step up was much harder and rarely performed. “I still want to push towards the quad,” I said as soon as I was down, even as Dom started with the next steps of the routine.
