Page 9 of Run for the Money

I adjust my grip on the reins, the leather squeaking against my riding gloves. “No.”

“Get off the horse, Melanie. Prove you don’t need to work on your stamina. Show me you can stand up without your thighs shaking. Look me in the eye and tell me you’re not tired.”

Frustrated tears prick at my eyes but I refuse to let them fall. He’s right, of course. I’m exhausted, and that’s why I’m struggling. Riding for an hour or so for fun a few times a week is nothing compared to the hyper-focused training Nick’s been putting me through.Things that used to happen instantaneously for me are taking too long. Instincts I spent my childhood sharpening and refining are rusty and covered in dust. At fourteen, there wasn’t such a lag between thought and action. I could see an issue on the course and make an adjustment without putting the issue into words. Now, at twenty-eight, it’s like I have to translate everything in my head before my body responds. I’m wasting precious seconds—and I don’t need Nick to point it out.

“I’m obviously tired,” I snap. “We’ve run this course a million times today, not to mention the agility drills, and the workout I did on my own this morning before I got here. What do you expect? I told you I was out of shape. You’re not holding up your end of the deal!”

He shrugs. “I never said I was going to go easy on you. I said I’d respect you—there’s a difference. Now get off the horse so I can talk to you without craning my neck.”

“Are you going to tell me anything helpful?” I ask petulantly.

Nick sighs and glowers at me. If he weren’t such a sadist, hell-bent on destroying me mentally and physically, I could admit the heat in his glare is more than a little sexy. When he’s not leering at me out of the darkness on abandoned rooftops, the strong angles of his jaw and cheekbones are enticing instead of unsettling. Not that he’s my type—no one has ever been less my type than Nick Korbel.

My type is refined, responsible, and well-mannered. Polite. Kind. Generous—like Paul Walters. Nick is none of those things. He’s brash, loud, uncaring, and insensitive. He’s quicker to criticize than compliment, even when I make improvements. No matter how hard I try, he doesn’t have an ounce of sympathy for my position. I’m crawling my way back from an early, impromptu retirement, yet he’s treating me like a seasoned professional who should be better than this.

“Off the horse, Miss Manners,” he says in a bored tone.

He’s not going to move on until I get down, so I shift my weight to dismount. To add insult to injury, he tucks his clipboard under his arm and puts the stopwatch in his pocket so he can catch my waist and guide me to the ground. No one’s helped me dismount a horse since I was about six years old.

“Hands off,” I say stiffly.

He obliges, so naturally I stumble into GT’s side on quivering thighs, immediately demonstrating how right Nick is about my stamina. I straighten up but the smug look on his face proves he’s not fooled.

“I’m making you run the course over and over because you need to be able to run it perfectly in imperfect conditions,” he says. “You need four top-ten places to get to nationals. We only have five competitions left this season. I don’t know about you, but I don’t love that math.”

“We would have had seven chances if we’d started the process earlier,” I grumble.

“If you’d answered any one of my phone calls in the past six months, we could have started sooner. But you didn’t, so I had to track you down in person. If you’re upset about wasted time, you need to address that shit internally instead of taking it out on me,” he says, still glaring. “We’re going to run the course again, and I don’t want any mistakes. You’re tired? Great. You think you won’t be tired after driving hundreds of miles to get to competitions? The weather is shit? The weather’s always going to be shit. You have blisters? Your muscles are sore? You can bet your ass that’ll be the case on the day of the competition, too. Stop whining, and do what I tell you, when I tell you to do it. Now get back on the horse. Stop thinking so hard and trust GT to respond to you.”

He stalks back over to the fence and scribbles something on his clipboard. It’s probably a note that says,Melanie is hopeless and this is a giant mistake because she’s un-coachable and too old and washed up to be any good. It shouldn’t upset me so much to have him talk to me this way. Every coach I’ve ever had was just as exacting; no one gets into elite sports with the expectation of being coddled. But I’ve gone soft, clearly. Fourteen years is a long time to be gone. The sport’s the same, but I’ve changed more than I thought. Every correction slices through me like a knife.

“I’m waiting. Hurry up,” he shouts.

That’s my final straw. My vision blurs with a fresh wave of tears. No amount of blinking or sniffing will hold them back, and my hands are way too filthy to consider wiping my face with them. I keep myself aimed toward GT while I struggle to get myself under control. The harder I fight the tears, though, the more insistently they stream down my face. I suck in a deep breath through my nose, but my shoulders shake on the exhale anyway.

“Get back on the horse,” Nick barks from the fence. “You’re still wasting time.”

He’s painfully right. All I’ve ever done is waste time. Everything I’ve ever done has amounted to nothing in the end. No amount of effort has ever made a difference to the reality that I’m a born failure. I’m not polished enough, or driven enough, or smart enough. I wasn’t good enough for Paul, I’m still not good enough for my parents, and I’m never going to be good enough to ride GT in any competition at all, let alone the Olympics.

It’s old news, but it’s not private anymore. I’ve registered for the five remaining qualifiers this season, so my name is out there. Everyone knows I’m supposed to compete, so I can either withdraw in humiliation, or fail on the course. Either way, the results will be the same: I’m broadcasting my incompetence nationwide.

“Are you crying?” Nick shouts. “Christ Almighty. I thought I was working with Melanie Archer, not a fuckin’ child. Pull yourself together and get back on the horse. You’re better than this.”

I whip around, too mad to care about how splotchy my face is. He’s leaning on the fence, glowering at me as though my feelings are a massive inconvenience to him. Propelled by fury, I stalk through the dirt toward him.

“Are you always this heartless?” I screech. “Tell the black hole in your chest where your humanity should be to leave me alone. Not everything is about you and this horse, you—you jerk!”

He raises an eyebrow. “Don’t hold back, Miss Manners. Let me have it.”

“You’re selfish and unfeeling and I hate you! Why’d you pull me into this, anyway? To humiliate me? To make me suffer? You sadistic little...”

“Go on, finish the sentence. Cuss me out. I dare you,” he says.

I want to—badly. But I don’t want him to win. The moment I curse at him, he’s going to have the upper hand. Again. It’s too much to bear, so I march toward the gate instead. I’m done.

I don’t care that he’s given me the chance to compete again. It’s irrelevant that his mother is the one coach I wanted to work with most, and that this is the closest I’ll ever get to her since she’s retired. None of that matters. Riding in the Olympics was always a pipe dream, and it’s foolish and irresponsible of me to keep trying to achieve it. The disaster at the Junior qualifiers fourteen years ago was a convenient excuse to quit. I was never going to beat Diana, was never going to make it. It’s long past time to pick a new goal to work toward instead of wasting even more of my time on this planet living off my grandparents’ money like some wanna-be socialite and languishing alone in my house.

It’s time to stop treating horses as anything more than an expensive hobby.

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