Okay, if he’s in Lenzerheide that weekend, I could move those two intensive blocks. Maybe do extra work the week before, shift the Saturday group online. If he’s in Norway, traveling will be hell, but I could—
My pen freezes mid-arrow.
I know this feeling. The slow, creeping rearrangement. My life bending itself silently around someone else’s dates, someone else’s dreams. It starts with “just this once” and “it’s only for a season,” and one day you wake up and realize every page of your calendar has his name on it, and yours has vanished.
This is exactly how it began with Peter. Little compromises, disguised as practical decisions. And then I was the woman whose every answer began with “I’ll have to see what Peter is doing.”
A chill runs through me that has nothing to do with the air conditioning.
I put the pen down. Flatten my hands on the paper. Breathe.
Fabio is not Peter. He has never asked me to wait, or stand in line, or make myself small. He’s offered to come to Prague, tofind me lanes to train in, to stand at the bottom of the hill and shout my name like it matters.
And I am still, instinctively, doing this. Twisting myself into shapes around a man’s calendar without him even asking.
The problem isn’t him. It’s me.
My chest tightens. I close the planner, hard, and let it sit there like an unanswered question.
If I don’t fix this—this reflex, this fear, this hollow where my own life should feel solid—then it doesn’t matter how decent he is. We’ll end in the same place: me resenting, him confused, both of us wounded by old ghosts.
My phone is on the table, face down. I turn it over. Our chat is still open; his last message is a selfie from the finish area, cheeks red, hair damp, tongue out in mock exhaustion. I trace it with my thumb like an idiot.
I could pretend a little longer. I could ride this high, go to races, keep shoving down the panic every time I book a ticket with his name in mind.
Instead, I open a new message. My fingers hover. They shake.
I type, delete, type again, trying to keep it honest without making it about his failures, because this isn’t about him failing me. It’s about me not being ready, not to fail myself.
In the end, the words are simple:
ZLA: I’m falling for you, and that’s exactly why I need to stop now. I have to learn how not to disappear into someone else’s life before I can be in yours. I need to figure myself out first.
I stare at it until the letters blur. It feels dramatic and not enough and too much, all at once.
Then I hit send.
The message flies off into the little void in the corner. I feel physically ill, like I’ve just stepped off a cliff I wasn’t ready for. My body hums with the urge to snatch it back, to call him, to say I didn’t mean it, that I’m just tired and scared and I’ll be fine.
I don’t. I put the phone face down again and press my forehead to the cool window. Fields smear by in winter colors; station names flicker and vanish. Somewhere out there, he’s reading that text, and I can almost feel the flare of his anger from a distance.
The phone buzzes. Once, then again. I don’t look. Not yet.
An hour out from Prague, I finally flip it over.
His replies are exactly what I expected and somehow worse.
FAB: So that’s it? Over text?
FAB: We said we’d try. You don’t even want to see what “try” looks like?
FAB:What are you so afraid of?
I swallow around the lump in my throat. He sounds annoyed, hurt, and confused. Rejected. Every line is tinged with that sharp, competitive frustration I’ve seen on his face after a bad run—only this time, I’m the missed gate. Text is a terrible medium for this; half his tone I’m filling in between the words.
He doesn’t understand, of course, he doesn’t. How could he?
Before I can decide what to say, the phone buzzes again—this time with a different notification.
