“Well, that’s on you. But in all seriousness, I think this is going to be the year we land the quad twist. We were so close in November. Now that things are back on track, I think we will have it.” He paused. "Just in time for—"
“I told you not to talk like that,” I said, glaring at him. I knew it was ridiculous to have superstitions, but that didn't make mine go away. The prospect of him tempting fate made my stomach twist more than his throws. “It’s one thing to say that we should be able to nail it. The whole ‘just in time’ thing I could do without.”
“Fine, I’ll just think it. And you can keep your negativity to yourself.”
I leaned down, stretching to grab the toes of my shoes. “Good,” I said, even though I was speaking into my legs. “Now let me stretch so I don’t hurt myself.”
“Are you saying you can’t talk and stretch at the same time?” Dom teased.
I stretched my legs out more, but shot him a glare as best I could from that position. “I didn’t miss you constantly insulting me,” I said, even though that was a lie. He obviously wasn't being serious, and I had missed his teasing. He had gone too far in trying to be professional and it had taken a lot of the fun out of the more boring parts of our day. “I doubt you spent much time keeping yourself in peak physical condition over the break.”
He nodded his head, conceding the point. “Why do you think I got in even earlier than usual today? My joints were creaking like an old man's this morning.”
“Just what you want to hear from somebody who is going to be carrying you over his head for a couple of hours,” I said, pullingdown the light grey sleeves of my shirt. “I did not sign up to be partnered with an old man.”
“Now who is the mean one?” Dom asked with a smirk.
I smirked back. “Still you.”
It seemed like no time at all had passed when the distinctive metal clang of the door latch rang out. I turned from my spot on the floor, my ponytail whipping against my cheek. Olga was standing near the door, wearing her favourite cream coloured sweater and jeans. Her blonde was hair pulled back from her face in her signature French braid. As always, her expression was hard to read.
“Good morning,” I said, pushing myself up.
“Did you have a good holiday? I mean, did you do anything fun during the break?” Dom asked, correcting himself. He did this every year. I don’t know why he had such a hard time remembering that the Russian Orthodox Christmas was after ours.
Olga nodded. “Yes, I had a quiet time with some friends. We will have a bigger gathering next weekend.” She looked between us. “Are you both well? Ready to work?”
“Absolutely,” I said, retying my hair in a ponytail. “We want to get back to work on the twist.”
Her lips pressed together in a thin line. “It may be best to improve from last month first. You need to be more in unison.”
I caught Dom’s eye from his spot to her left. “Oh, I think we’ve moved past that problem,” Dom said. He was only semi-successful in trying to sound casual.
“You have skated together since then?” she asked. When we shook our heads, she said, “If you have not been on the ice, we cannot know that. I will see if you are correct.”
Thankfully, even Olga had to admit that we had vastly improved from the Grand Prix Finals when we got on the ice. We zipped through the brackets and edge changes that led toour throw triple Flip, getting the feel of being next to each other for the first time in a couple of weeks. When I landed, I felt a wave of relief. Dom had thrown me higher than usual, giving me plenty of time to complete my rotations and get into the correct position for landing. The landing was just as smooth as the takeoff had been. Our timing was vital for a throw to go well, so it had been yet another thing we’d had to work much harder at than usual the previous month.
When I reached Dom again, we skated to where Mark was standing. His eyebrows were raised in surprise. “Where was that last month?” he asked. “You were struggling for weeks. Frankly, I thought we would have to spend today working on that. It seems your time apart was good for you. Like a reset button, allowing you to go back to your usual state.”
“We are going to try the quad twist again,” Dom said. It was a statement, not a question. His tone made it clear that he and I had decided that we were going to work on this, regardless of anyone else’s opinion on the matter. “We were so close. I really think we could get it before Nationals.”
Mark ran a hand over his closely cropped hair. Much like Olga, it never seemed to change. If it weren’t for the extra greys around his temples, it would’ve looked exactly the same as when we met him all those years ago. “There isn’t a lot of time for that, but if you can give Hazel that height every time, I wouldn’t put it past you.” He glanced at his watch. “Do you want to take a few more minutes to practice other things and ease your way in? Or do you want to go straight to it?”
“Straight to it,” Dom and I said in unison.
“Well, it’s good to see that you’re on the same page again,” Mark said. He pointed to a spot on the ice and pushed off. “In that case, let’s get started.”
For the rest of the week, Dom and I put in extra hours. We never discussed that we should do it or said why it was necessary, but we both knew. Thanks to our indiscretion, we had essentially lost three weeks that we could have used to push ourselves forward. We had a very limited amount of time to make up for all those lost days. Since we couldn’t push the dates of our competitions back, we had to settle for squeezing as much practice time out of the shrinking number of days we had left.
Dom and I stood together by the glass, watching Olga with one of her other skaters. As the skater went from an Ina Bauer into one of her jump combinations, I turned to Dom and said, “Do you think we will be able to win?”
He screwed the cap onto his bottle of orange Powerade. “You mean at Nationals?” he asked, sounding confused. “Even if we did as badly as we did in the Grand Prix finals, our score was still better than Emma and Philippe’s season best. Why do you ask?”
Emma Kelly and Philippe Michaud would likely be our two teammates when we went to the Winter Games. They trained at another facility several hours away, so we only saw them at the occasional competition. We spent so much time at international events with them I would consider them closer than acquaintances, but not quite friends.
“I'm not asking about beating them,” I said, looking over the ice. “After Nationals.”
Dom let out a slow, deep breath. He clearly had not been expecting me to ask that. When he finally spoke, his words were measured. “I thought you didn’t want to jinx us by talking about it.”
