“It’s nice to see you, too,” he replied sarcastically. He carefully placed his own bags in the back seat of his car and let his hand rest on the top of the open door. “Have you told Brandon about our music yet?”
I groaned. No, I had not. I had been doing my best to keep the two parts of my life separate. Work and my relationship didn’t mix well. “No, I haven’t.” The judgement in Dom’s eyes left a knot in my stomach. “Have you told Emma?” I asked defensively.
Dom closed his door harder than necessary. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one this was a touchy subject for. “I told her on Friday night. I thought you said you were going to tell him.”
My initial reaction was to call him out on waiting until he was going away for the weekend before telling his girlfriend, but I held back. “I am going to tell him. I just didn’t want to deal with it over the weekend.”
“Well, if you tell him now, you’ll have plenty of time for him to cool down before next weekend,” Dom replied. He was leaning against his car, sunlight illuminating his white t-shirt. The sleeves pulled taut against his biceps. “And how mad can he be, really?”
It was an interesting question. It had taken up way too much space in my brain ever since we sat down with Mark and Olga the previous week to finalize our song choices. I’d hoped that I'd have a flash of inspiration if I mulled it over. I don't know why I bothered. It wasn't as though the wording would make Brandon accept it. Unfortunately, the more I thought about it, the less hope I had that it would go well.
I must have taken too long to answer because Dom said, “You just have to explain to him that it was a business decision made among four people.” A beat later he added, “Right?”
With the sun beating against me, I felt a bead of sweat trickle down my back. At least, I hoped it was because of the sun. It may have been the nerves. I swallowed hard. “Right. I’ll tell him tonight.”
Dom pulled at the handle to his driver’s side door and said, “I’m going to hold you to that. See you in the morning!”
I dragged my feet as I went around my car, like the prospect of the conversation I was going to have to have tonight was physically weighing me down. With a sigh, I began the drive home. I really needed to come up with a good way to phrase what I had to tell Brandon. It felt impossible.
Mark had been the one who'd had the idea of changing up the music choice for one of our programs in the upcoming year. Dom, Olga, he, and I had been crowded around a small table at the rink. Mark had a pad of paper and a pen on the table in front of him to write the ideas we brainstormed. “I think we need to do something that will help you two stand out in the minds of the judges and fans next season. Something that will help keep your program on people’s minds, even when you aren’t the ones skating.”
I could see the merit in that. I thought our past programs – most of them, anyway – were memorable. Judging from the look on Dom’s face, he’d thought the same. “What sort of thing did you think could push us over the edge?”
“We need to really lean into the fact that you two have such great chemistry.” The firmness in Mark’s voice surprised me. He always had ideas of how to make things better and what would work, but he rarely came in with his mind sold on what was best. “We need to go with something sultry.”
I swallowed hard. When my eyes met Dom’s, I wondered if he could see the panic building inside of me. He had been my first partner and I was his, so we had learned everything there was to know about pair skating together. We had never had to learn lifts with anybody else. We had never had to read anybody else’s expressions on the ice. It hadn’t taken us time to switch from somebody else’s timing to each other’s. From the conversations I’d had with other skaters who’d had multiple partners over the years, that could pose a problem at the start of a newpartnership. I'd always told myself that was why we had such great chemistry. And lately, it was what I had been repeating to Brandon.
Dom had sat perfectly still after Mark spoke. He was near expressionless. He had been dating Emma for a couple of months. I didn’t know if they’d even been exclusive for that long. She hadn’t been around for our last season and, if his past track record with women was anything to go by, she might not be around by the time the next season started. He sounded skeptical when he said, “You want us to lean into the gossip about us?”
“Exactly,” Mark said, pointing his ballpoint pen at Dom as he spoke. “I don’t need to tell you that people have speculated that you and Hazel were a couple for years. If we can keep that speculation going, it will keep people talking about you. We need to think about what your routine can provide that others can’t. It could give you a leg up against your competitors.”
Olga had been fixated on me. The intensity of her gaze made me fidget. She must have thought I was worried about the judgement that would come with something too sexual, because she said, “We will stay on the right side. Sultry, not over-the-top.”
I wondered how she would describe a couple of moves that had gotten tongues wagging in years past. The first one that came to mind involved the female partner with legs draped over her male parter's shoulders, with her crotch directly in front of his face. That one had gotten a rather sexual nickname. The thought of having to explain that one to Brandon would be horrifying. Neither of us needed the image of Dom's head between my legs in mind. The thought was enough to make me blush at the table. “We’ve come out and said that we aren’t a couple repeatedly and recently. Plus, I have a boyfriend.” The last part sounded dumb,but I felt like it had to be said. Then, when Brandon inevitably asked if I'd pointed it out, I could honestly say that I had.
“I didn’t say you two need to act like a couple off the ice,” Mark said, exasperated. “But when you are on the ice, I absolutely want to make the most of the chemistry you have. Your strengths complement each other. You two are a much more believable couple than some of your rivals.”
One pair we were up against the season before was a brother and sister duo, so that wasn’t saying much. But even among the other pairs, there was not nearly as much talk about romantic chemistry. I had been fending off questions about whether Dom and I were hooking up for years. In the earliest days of our partnership, my giggly teenage friends had wanted to know if we’d made out yet. In recent years, it had expanded to gossip sites and comments on our routines from fans online.
“Did you have a song choice in mind?” I asked. There was a big difference between something like a tango and a dirty pop song with lyrics that were thinly veiled references to sex.
Unfortunately, Mark and Olga were leaning more toward the latter. Mark was willing to take or leave the lyrics, but he was adamant that we needed something more modern. He was unwavering in his desire for a good beat that would go well with more modern dance moves. If it could get the audience moving along with us, he would consider it all the better. “We want people to be looking forward to your routine as something different.”
“The routine should make the audience happy,” Olga interjected. “We will try to make you the gold medal favourites going into the big competitions at the end of the season.”
Convincing people they should be cheering for you rather than the pair from their home country was always a tough sell. I could only imagine that it would be exponentially harder than usual at the Winter Games. Mixed with the fact that judges werenot supposed to have favourites to begin with, there were some problems with this plan. Yet, Mark and Olga had both worked with gold medalists and half a dozen world champions before. We paid them good money because we were supposed to trust their judgement, even when it wasn’t something we wanted to hear.
There was a fine line to walk with voicing my problems without making it seem like I was too worried about what other people would think. “I do like the idea of a song with a good beat.” There were a few scores that were favourites, but a fast-paced modern song would be different than a lot of the other routines we would be up against. I had to give him that.
Dom leaned back in his chair and stared off into space. It took him a full minute before he let the front legs of the chair fall back to the floor with a thud. “People are going to talk no matter what music we choose. Remember two years ago?”
I could probably still do all of our old programs from memory, but that wasn’t what he was asking. We had done a slower free skate that season. The comments that followed were ingrained in my mind. Apparently, the song choice then had been an obvious nod to the fact that we were falling in love, and that was why we spent a lot of time looking into each other’s eyes. The recurring argument was that there was no way we could have such good chemistry without actually being a couple. The concept that it was our job to act like we were in love while skating that program was not as obvious as I’d thought it must be. “Yes?”
“If they’re going to talk about it either way, we might as well lean into it. If they’re going to gossip, it might as well be about something that is going to actually help us out.”
By the end of the week, we committed to a skate that would certainly get people talking. On Thursday, Dom and I had promised each other that we would tell Brandon andEmma about the song choices. Neither of us was thrilled at the possibility of sharing, but we knew we had to. Dom had repeatedly stressed that we should emphasize that we were going to be doing everything we could to get a gold medal and that it was strictly professional. “It’s not like they can be mad if we tell them the truth. If they really have issues, we could always tell them to talk to Mark.”
I knew he was joking about the last part, but it was a tempting thought. I would have preferred to tell Brandon to call Mark and to talk to me again when he had accepted everything he had been told.
