Page 2 of My Best Bet

Feeling too ashamed to look Dmitry in the face, my eyes snapped to the ice before I nodded and quickly skated off.

He probably wouldn’t be my new partner for long.

Guys were hard to come by in this sport, girls were not, which was why most guys shopped around for the best deal. They wanted a partner who could win and also pay for everything. Dmitry wouldn't want to be saddled with a liability. He was after a medal.

But it wasn’t exactly my fault that I was being hesitant with these throw jumps. They weren’t giving me any time or patience to get it right.

My last partner, Alexander, was fifteen– the same age as me– and he wasn’t very strong, so he couldn’t throw me all that much higher than I could jump on my own. And that was a problem. I tried like hell to lose weight, but according to Iryna, it just wasn’t happening. I failed us.

After our last competition cycle, Iryna had us split up.

Alexander was now tearing it up with a smaller 12-year-old, while Dmitry and I stumbled and stutter-stepped all over the ice.

It wasn’t Dmitry’s fault. He was a great skater. It’s just… he was 19, and he worked out, and you could tell. He launched me so high that it felt like my knee was going to explode each time I landed. I wasn’t used to the force– so I kept subconsciously two-footing. Because I was scared. So, sue me.

No. No one would sue me. He’d just leave me if I didn’t get my shit together.

Fuck.Now my eyes were burning again. I squeezed them shut, willing myself not to cry as I continued pacing the hallway.

Annndnow my neck was itching again.

Ever since the lead up to Nationals last year, I started getting itchy hives on my neck every time I got stressed. I zipped my jacket higher to hide the evidence of my stress– Iryna would just call me a “basket case” if she saw– and continued pacing.

Right then, a couple hockey players darted from one locker room to the other, making me jump and hold my chest.

Great.Those hives were really itching now.

The hockey players were cackling and yelling at each other, completely oblivious to anyone else in the rink.

Unlike us figure skaters, the hockey players never seemed stressed out. I was jealous of that. They were always messing around with each other, especially in the summer when they were just doing clinics and weren’t in their regular season yet. I could hear them yelling their games throughout the rink and the workout room upstairs:Bet you five bucks I lift more than you today.Bet you can’t get this water bottle stuck up in the rafters.Ten bucks says I can eat this whole pizza.Twenty dollars says you can’t steal the toilet paper from all the locker room bathrooms before Hans gets you.

They were involved in an unspoken war with Hans, the rink manager. He’d always be apprehending one of them, catching them by the back of their shirt and making them clean up whatever mess they made.

They lived in their own little world here.

I guess us figure skaters did, too.

We lived parallel lives. Worked side by side at the rink, but never actually crossed the invisible line and talked to each other– well, at leastInever talked to any of the hockey boys.Piper did one time. She yelled at them when they hit her in the head with a soccer ball in the lobby. Piper claimed they did it on purpose. The way they laughed and didn’t apologize made me think she was right…

Honestly, I didn’t want to get laughed at, so I just kept my distance from them.

And I tried hard to tune them out as I paced the hallway.

That is… until one of them stopped about ten feet in front of me.

From the way he wore his dark hair in a mullet and the way he was grinning at me mischievously, I could tell he was trouble.Majortrouble. His eyes flashed, telling me I just fell into a trap of his.

He pointed at me and yelled, “Five bucks if you can get her to kiss ya!”

My body jolted with shock.

What the…

Me?

Was he talking about kissingme?

I looked around in the hallway. No one else was around.

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