“Yeah, well, I don’t know how else to get it off my mind. Believe me, I’ve been trying not to think about it, but it is getting harder and harder to avoid.”
It felt like everything was barrelling towards us at breakneck speed. Next week, we would head to Montréal for Nationals.Thankfully, we would be in the same time zone, so we wouldn’t have to adjust to that. It meant that we could stay here at home for much longer than usual. Considering how anxious I was already, I was willing to bet that I would benefit from sleeping in my own bed as long as I could. After Nationals, we would only have a month before the Winter Games. And considering we were going to be partway around the world for those, we would leave for them long before our events.
“Thank God you’re finally ready to talk about this,” Dom said. His relief was palpable. “It’s been all I can think about lately. I really think we have a shot. I mean, we’ve been doing so well this year. We are so, so close to having the quad consistently. If we can get that, then I think it should be enough to push us past Evgenia and Pavel.”
“I think we might have to try it, even if we are still only getting it eighty percent of the time. We need the extra points. It’s a big risk, but I think it is our best bet.” I picked at a hangnail on my left ring finger anxiously.
That was always the hard type of call we had to make. Was it better to do an element that we could do extremely well but was worth fewer points? Or did we think we were more likely to get more with something we were more inconsistent with? It was something we would have to decide closer to the competition. Our usual execution of the twist consistently got us great GOE scores in the past. It would be dangerous to risk one of our stronger elements.
“We have time,” Dom said. “We are so fucking close. They will have to agree with us that it will be worth it.” He didn’t sound as confident with the last part, but even if Mark or Olga didn’t think that it was of great idea, we could still insist that we would give it our all.
Just then, Olga’s skater flung herself up into a quadruple toe loop. She was so young that she still had the skinny body ofsomeone who was not done growing, with tiny legs and arms. She had her arms up over her head, adding to the difficulty of an already difficult jump. So few women could do quadruple jumps at all, never mind by adding difficulty. Yet here was this 16-year-old, doing it like it was nothing. She was pushing the limits of her discipline. Watching her do it made it hard not to want to do the same thing.
I turned and scanned Dom’s face. His lips were parted ever so slightly and his hands were resting on the ledge below the glass in concentration. I had a sense that he was thinking something similar. The triple twist had been standard for so long in pairs skating, but so few people had pushed it either. We would be in a very select group if we pulled it off. I would be lying if I said that wasn’t another thing that was making want to do it.
“I’m glad we won’t be competing against her,” Dom said, shaking his head slowly.
“With some luck, we will be in the team event against her,” I said.
“Not directly,” Dom said. The number of points each country got would be determined by the scores in each discipline, then totalled together. “I have to imagine that we would be up against Evgenia and Pavel or Daria and Feodor. Maybe both.”
For the team event, each country could select one person or pair who had qualified to compete for the team for each event. It could be the same or different choices for each program. We suspected that the Russians would have each of their pairs do one event. That would ensure all four of the skaters could get medals when the team inevitably ended up on the podium. It seemed inevitable that Olga’s skater would earn more points for her team than whichever woman we had, but at least we wouldn't be compared to her directly.
“Assuming that we do make it to the Winter Games, do you think Olga will be cheering for us, even in the team event?” I asked.
Dom gave me a weird look. “You really are getting fixated, huh?” He quickly added, “I’m not complaining, mind you. I much prefer this to you acting like I was going to screw us over by assuming that we would do well enough to make it. Anyway, I guess she probably would be. It’s not like she wants us to do badly or anything. She probably would even want us to win the pairs portion of the event. But if she had to pick, I’m sure she'd want the Russians to take gold as a team. And then she would want to watch us kick their asses a few days later and beat them individually.”
"I guess that’s fair. At least we know Mark will be cheering for us the whole time."
“He better,” Dom said with a grin. He took a couple of steps back from the glass. “Come on, we don’t have much time.”
That was an understatement. Not only did we not have much time that afternoon to practice, we were almost out of time before we had to compete in a do or die skate. I turned to follow Dom and saw that he was waiting for me. I hurried to catch up with him, so we could walk side-by-side to the ice.
We took every minute we had to practice the twist, over and over again. They got harder as time went on and we got more tired. Getting the momentum and the strength to fly up in the air and twist so many times is hard at the best of times. When you are exhausted, it is nearly impossible. I didn’t want to be the one who tapped out first, though. If Dom could carry me and throw me so many times without complaint, I wouldn't admit to being exhausted.
After I had landed my fifth twist in a row cleanly, I felt a bead of sweat trickling down my back. I was trying to keep my breathing steady, but it was growing increasingly difficult.Dom’s face was bright red with exertion, and his chest was heaving. Neither of us wanted to be the first one to say that we should settle for what we had so far. “That one was really good,” I said, panting between words.
Dom nodded and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “I know how you feel about jinxing something, even though you claim you aren’t superstitious, but we have only messed up once all afternoon.Once.” He stressed the final word.
“I know,” I said. A smile crept onto my face, even though I was trying to be serious. “I don’t know about you, but I think I’m comfortable with the rate we're getting. I mean, think about how often we still had issues with the triple twist when we made it a standard part of our performances.”
“It’s like you can read my mind,” Dom said with a grin. “I guess that means we just have to tell Mark and Olga that we are going to do it.”
I was already warm, but that made me feel even more flushed. How had I never noticed how many innocent remarks could sound dirty in the past? Trying to be professional and stick to the agreement that we had made, I resisted the urge to point out a double entendre. “First thing tomorrow?” I asked.
“Definitely,” Dom said. “And thank God, because I don’t know how many more times I could do this today. My arms are killing me.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Why are you apologizing? I want to keep going as much is you.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe because you have had to throw me so many times in a row, and I know how exhausting it is.”
“For both of us." He slid his feet back and forth while standing in the same spot. "Now let's leave before you change your mind and tell me you want to practice more.”
I laughed. “As much as I love spending time with you and I love skating, I am definitely ready to go. I want to go home and sit on the couch and not move for, like, six hours.”
We were going to have to repeat it all over again tomorrow. A lazy evening would keep my body from completely turning against me. Even sitting on the couch, I was going to be stiff. At this point in the season, there was no time to rest. We just had to walk the line between practicing enough and not overdoing it.
