Page 50 of Oh, Flutz!

“Wonderful. As for elements, I hear you are hoping to include very high level ones, yes?”

“Quad toe, quad Salchow, quad twist, and maybe a quad throw.” I tick them off my fingers one by one.

Bryan nearly chokes. “What?”

Lian looks like she’s regretting her life decisions. “Katya…”

“No, wait, quad throw?There’s no way. We can’t do that,” Bryan says, looking to our coach for confirmation. “Right? We don’t have time. What kind of drugs are you on?”

Nothing that would make me senile. “It’s fine. We can handle it,” I tell him matter-of-factly, because it’s true. We have the technical ability. The only problem is Bryan’s head. He proved this morning he can do it all when no one’s looking.

“We can handle—we haven’t even started throws!”

“It’ll be fine,” I say loudly, trying to be reassuring, and Lian throws her hands up in surrender.

“You know what, try whatever you want, but right now we’re trying to put together your programs so you can actually compete before I kill myself. So can we we leave this discussion for later?”

“I’m definitely not dropping this,” Bryan says, jaw tight. And then it finally hits me. How much he underestimates himself.

Anne clears her throat gently. “Is the quadruple ready? Should we put it in?”

“No,” Bryan says abruptly, and I crease my brows.

“Of course it is.”

He looks over at me, and I flush under the sheer force of his glare. “I just mean—you were doing it so well this morning. I saw you. And you pulled off a quad Salchow.” I pause. “You don’t think you can do it?”

“Quad Salchow?” Lian repeats, incredulous. “Bryan?”

He doesn’t answer, just clenches his jaw, and I bite my lip. Maybe I should just shut up. He hates me enough already.

“We can put it in as an option, and if necessary it can revert to a triple,” Anne offers.

I try to meet my partner’s eyes, but he’s staring fixedly at the ice. If this were a few weeks ago, I’d have said he was just contradicting me just to get on my nerves. Now I don’t know. “That’s fine.”

“I still think Swan Lake is a bad idea,” Bryan grumbles. “Watch there be another team doing it. Or two. Orfive.”

Lian raises an eyebrow. “Then we’ll be better than them.” She says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

He looks at her for a second. Then he shrugs. “Okay.”

Chapter Fourteen

BRYAN

MAY

THREE WEEKS LATER

Being ‘better than them’is not as easy as it sounds.

It’s no wonder Lee never hired her friend for my choreo before. That woman’s appearances are extremely deceiving—I’m convinced she’s secretly a sadist, because these are the hardest programs I’ve ever done.

Although Lian, thank god, has forced us to move on from jumps, shifting our focus to twist lifts and throws. “We’re wasting time,” as she declared last week when we laid out our game plan. She’s not wrong. We’re supposed to fly out for our first competition scarily soon, and we’re still not rock-solid on half our required elements.

And that’s not the only thing Lee told us last week. Apparently, her bosses brought in a journalist who wants to do a story on the two of us. So, not only are we practicing elements I hate, but this afternoon, there’s going to be a reporter watching our every move and every word we say to each other.

If you couldn’t tell, I’m jumping up and down with excitement.

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