Page 55 of Sexting the Coach
“The hell are you talking about?”
Elsie laughs, performing a little twirl that sends her braids flying, and my mouth practically dropping open. When she’s done, she turns, skates backward, and lifts a leg into the air while saying, “I could have competed in the Olympics. You really thought, growing up in my family, that I didn’t spend a childhood on the ice?”
Like always, the moment she mentions her family, or her past, something shutters on her face, and it’s like I can see her recognizing her mistake. I’m not going to let her back away from it this time.
“You’re right,” I say, holding her gaze. “I definitely should be Googling people more.”
She turns and starts to skate away, but she forgets that I grew up on the ice, too, and I’m in front of her in a second.
“What was that, Elsie?”
“Nothing,” she says, letting out a quick breath, then turning it into a quick laugh. “Nothing—let’s just think of something more interesting to talk about.”
“I can’t think of anything more interesting than the stuff you’ve been hiding.”
“I’m not hiding anything, Weston.”
Her voice is tight. Something tells me I should let up, but I can’t. It’s never been in my nature to back away from something like this.
“Elsie.” I skate in front of her, stopping her in her tracks. My hip twinges and I ignore it. Her gaze drops to the precise area ofthe pain, but I don’t let her change the subject. “Tell me about your brother.”
I fully expect her to use her skating abilities to dodge me, pirouette—or whatever—away, but she just sighs and drops her eyes to her skates. The droop of her shoulders when she begins to speak is like a weight has been lifted from them.
“We were teenagers,” she says, her voice soft, and together, wordlessly, we start skating slow and easy, moving around the rink. “We used to go on the ice together all the time. Drew had a D-1 scholarship lined up, and he was only a junior in high school. We had a rink in the backyard—obviously, my dad made sure of it—and we’d go out there together, sometimes to practice, sometimes just to goof off. I wasbeggingDrew to help me with some of my lifts, even though figure skating wasn’t his sport.”
She hasn’t even gotten to the end of the story, and I can already see where it’s headed. The brother whose occupation she’s not quite sure about. Them not speaking. The weird tension between her and her dad at the charity gala.
“I was trying to do a basic lift,” she says, her voice growing quiet, slightly choked. “We miscommunicated. My skate…I hit his leg. There was blood everywhere, and we fell to the ice. At first, I thought that I’d cut him, and that was what caused the most damage. But the cut was minor. It was my weight on him when we fell. That’s what tore his ACL.”
I don’t mean to, but I suck in a breath through my teeth. Torn ACL is the death blow no athlete wants to hear. As much as you train and heal and work, you never really come back from something like that.
Luckily, Elsie just nods, not taking my reaction too hard. “Yeah,” she says, breathing out. “It was…not fun. And it was my fault. That’s why—I mean, I know it’s stupid, but I just have this feeling that if I can help one guy avoid injury, or get better, that it will make up for it.”
“Stop.”
I pivot and turn, stopping at the entrance to the rink, facing her. There’s a single tear running down her cheek, and she hastily wipes it away. My mind flashes back to the flag football game. I remember the look on her face when we went down, the panic in her voice, and suddenly it all clicks into place.
“First,” I say, moving closer to her, cupping her cheek in my hand. “It’s not stupid. The way you feel is never stupid. And second, if anyone is holding anaccidentagainst you, that’s on them. Something like that shouldn’t dictate the rest of your life, Elsie.”
Not unkindly, she lifts her chin to me, “Oh, like a hip injury?”
I bite my tongue. “That’s not the same thing.”
“Youspend so much of your time hiding it. Pretending like it’s not real. That’s the same thing I’m doing with my brother, but at least I’m willing to admit that I’m avoiding it.”
“If I’d been honest about my injury,” I say, through gritted teeth, “I would have been pulled from the ice. They might not have picked me for the coaching spot.”
“How could you know that?”
“I didn’t,” I admit, steeling myself, “but even though you grew up around the NHL, you have no idea what it’s like. To rely on your body for performance, for pay, for your entire career, only to have it fail spectacularly. For other people to comment on it and analyze it. Pick it apart and list all the ways you should have been different. This league isallabout strength. And the moment you reveal your weakness is the moment you’re on the way out.”
“But having an injuryisn’ta weakness,” Elsie protests, moving even closer to me, and although we’re standing on the ice and I should be cold, my entire body fills with heat at her proximity. “If anything, it shows how much stronger you are.To fight through that pain and still show up everyday, just like everyone else.”
“Yeah, well,” I finally tear my gaze from hers, swallowing, not sure what to do with the information that she thinks of me as beingstronger. It’s probably not true—probably just something she tells all her PT patients to up morale. “The rest of the league doesn’t see it that way.”
The rest of the league doesn’t see it that way, and that’s something I’ve known from the first time a recruiter came to one of my high school games. In fact, it’s something I knew from the first time I laced up a pair of skates.
Weakness isn’t tolerated in hockey.
