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Prologue
Years have passed since the day Scott said “I love you” and Tessa said “I don’t know”.
Of course, it didn’t go exactly like that. For one thing, Scott was pretty drunk when he said it, so it probably came out more like: Iloooveyouuw. Then Tessa’s eyes got really big and she didn’t say anything at all for a long time. Finally, with his I love you still hanging in the air, she quietly excused herself and left him standing alone.
The next day, he apologised and said he didn’t mean any of it. Drunk and stupid. You know how it is. (She didn’t.) He was still talking, moron with a motor-mouth, when she took his hand. She looked at him and all the words died in his throat. He could feel her shaking as she said, “I’m sorry, Scott. I’m sorry, but I just… I don’t know.”
And that was it.
I love you.
I don’t know.
Years have passed and, on the surface, their relationship has stayed exactly the same. She’s his best friend. They’ve spent their lives side by side, hand in hand. She has always been able to read him with a single glance.
Yet it feels like, under the surface, their relationship stuttered on that day – the I love you/I don’t know day – and since then it’s been winding backwards. Regressing.
Now, years later, she can still read him with a single glance. The difference is: he’s not sure he can read her anymore.
When she smiles at him, her body arching beneath him, her skin damp with sweat, he thinks: I have no idea what you’re thinking.
Oh, yeah. That’s the other difference: sex.
Their brand new sex life should be making him happier, but it’s only making him crazier.
*
The first time, he doesn’t even know what’s happening until she kisses him.
She shows up at his apartment at midnight on a weeknight, acting insane. When he asks why she’s there, she just hmms and looks away. She drifts from room to room like a crazy person. She sits down on the couch and then she stands up again. She goes into the kitchen and begins opening and closing cupboards. He follows her like a faithful dog, growing increasingly concerned.
“Tessa… did something happen?” he asks.
“Hmm? … No, nothing,” she replies.
“Tessa… do you feel okay?”
“Hmm? … Oh, sure.”
“Tess, you’re freaking me out!” he says, as she moves back into the living room and he follows.
He sees that she isn’t even listening to him. She just stares past his shoulder, as if watching a movie projected onto the dark glass of his windows.
The words ‘booty call’ literally never enter his mind. He thinks there must have been an accident. He thinks someone must have died. He’s about to ask her, half-serious, if Meryl pulled a gun at the rink and took out half their training mates, when—
She kisses him.
She kisses him hurriedly, yanking him toward her. For his part, it takes his body a whole lot less time to react to the situation than his mind. He is half hard before she even begins to unbutton his pants. They don’t even make it into the bedroom. They half-fall onto the couch and manage to shed only parts of their clothing, leaving sleeves and pant legs clinging to their bodies in their haste.
Scott’s body is delirious, revelling in the sensation – familiar, yet tantalizingly new – of Tessa’s bare skin pressed against his own. Scott’s mind only clicks into place when Tessa pulls a condom from her jeans pocket.
So, he thinks.
So. She planned this. It’s not a giddy seize-the-day moment for her. It was planned.
Scott’s mind only gets the briefest of opportunities to ponder this thought before he feels the cool touch of Tessa’s fingers rolling on the condom. Then all conscious thought stutters out in anticipation of what’s to come.
*
At the time, it seemed sexy and mysterious. Now, it has begun to gnaw at him.
*
“Option one,” Danny says over the phone, “you’re delusional. No way Tessa would give you the time of day. You fucking imagined it, you jerkoff king.”
“I didn’t imagine it,” Scott says moodily.
“Okay. Option two, she’s playing you. Wants to prove she has power over you.”
“How does that one end? Carmen-style?” Scott asks, moodiness turning into gloominess.
“That, or with you leaving a snivelling voicemail on her phone at three a.m. Happened to a buddy of mine. Women don’t like snivelling.”
Scott grits his teeth and asks, “What’s option three?”
“Isn’t one. Trust me, dude.”
*
But they’re not a couple. That much is clear.
One Friday night, after a particularly brutal day of training, they go to the movies. It’s a semi-regular thing. Sometimes a whole group of their friends go; sometimes just Scott and Tessa. That night, it’s just the two of them.
Thirty minutes into the movie, enveloped in the darkness of the movie theatre, he puts his hand on her thigh.
She freezes. He thinks – in one of his top ten dumbest moments ever – that maybe she’s gone rigid with desire. So he leans toward her, dropping his head into the musky-sweet hollow of her neck. He’s just about to kiss the place where her throat curves when—
“Scott,” she says sharply.
He recoils back into his own seat and spends the next hour concentrating very, very hard on the movie. Afterward, neither of them mention it. Tessa seems unfazed. Only the slightest sign of strain shows in her smile. But she has made herself clear.
They’re not a couple.
On paper, he supposes they’re fuck buddies. Except, he’s had fuck buddies before and it never felt like this. Those girls, he bade goodnight with an easy smile. When he watches Tessa leave, it hurts him. The loss of skin-on-skin contact causes him actual pain.
He’s started craving her touch. Of course, he’s always enjoyed the closeness of their skating – the warmth, the reassurance that, no matter what else changes in their lives, he can hold out his hand and find hers right there. Now, he doesn’t just enjoy that closeness. He needs it. When they skate, he savours the heat of her skin against his hands, the weight of her body in his arms.
The grand, ridiculous irony is that they skate better right after they’ve had sex. It goes against every superstition he’s ever held. It contradicts every scare story about so-and-so who made it with a hot blonde the night before his competition and then placed 12th.
In Ontario for Skate Canada, she arrives at his hotel room door on the morning of their Free Dance, greeting him with coffee and a kiss. He’s barely awake, but she is fired up. He feels the jangling excitement of her pre-competition nerves, like an electric current beneath her skin. Usually, he only catches a brief spark of it as he grasps her hand and they skate out to centre ice. Now, it makes the hotel room hum, as she climbs on top of him and her body rocks against his. Afterward, she just barely manages to scurry back to her own room before Marina arrives to rouse them for an early practice session.
He has spent half his life pretending to love her in four-minute bursts on the ice, but those feelings were never so close to the surface before Carmen. That passion pours out of him the second the music starts. Beside him, he feels Tessa’s sparks and he knows in his bones that they’d win the day. When the program ends and he pulls her toward him, savouring the last bit of body contact, he thinks, with sudden certainty—
It’s not just me.
I’m not just imagining this. It’s not just a game. This is real.
*
When it’s his shot, Scott is so distracted that he ends up hacking at the golf ball. He tries to make it into a joke and swings his club a few more times for comic effect, sending the turf flying.
He needn’t have bothered, because Tessa’s not even watching him. She’s staring off in the opposite direction, chin buried in her scarf, expression remote. Finally, he stoops down, picks up the ball and throws it in the direction of the second hole. Tessa’s attention is roused by the sound of the ball hitting the ground, but if she witnessed his cheating, she doesn’t call him on it.
“Ready?” he asks.
“Sure,” she says and automatically moves to slip her arm through his.
They walk to the golf cart, arm-in-arm, like a pair of married-for-fifty-years retirees. It’s early and the golf course is quiet. But, as Tessa revs the golf cart into life, they pass an elderly couple, dressed in vivid shades of orange and green. The couple wave at them and call out “good morning!”
Tessa waves back and nudges Scott to do the same. He tries not to react to the everyday intimacy of her touch, but he’s pretty keyed-up. In fact, he feels like a junkie who’s gone cold turkey.
He’s so sick of the pretence of their relationship that he took a stand last night.
(“You took a stand?” his brother asked, over the phone, this morning. “You turned down sex as a stand?”
“Yeah,” Scott said defensively.
When there was a familiar knock on his door the night before, Scott gritted his teeth and ignored it. When the knocking continued, Scott crept to the door to look through the peephole. He just wanted to check that he was ignoring Tessa and not some pizza guy calling at the wrong apartment. Through the peephole, he drank in the tiny, distorted view of Tessa.
And then he waited for her to leave.
“Moron, that is the dumbest thing I ever heard,” came Danny’s reply on the phone.)
The short drive to the second hole feels lengthy. Tessa says little – just as she said little when he picked her up for their usual Sunday morning golf round; just as she said little when they checked out their golf cart; just as she said little when she played her own (perfect) first shot.
Scott is desperate for the silence to end. Scott is desperate to say all the lovelorn, moronic, messed-up things that he’s feeling.
Instead, he says, “I think I want to start a company that makes rocket boots.”
Tessa looks at him for a long moment and then bursts out laughing.
“I’m serious,” he says, because he is. That only makes Tessa laugh harder.
“It’s almost 2013,” he continues. “How are rocket boots not a thing yet? I think there’s a gap in the market. Maybe when the Olympics are done, I’ll spend the rest of my life as the CEO of Rockin’ Rockets: The Experts in Rocket Boots.”
Tessa’s still smiling, but she’s not laughing anymore. He knows why: talking (even joking) about life after the Olympics is verboten. It assumes they’ll make it to the Olympics (superstition, superstition). It assumes they’ll win Gold again (superstition! superstition!). It’s better just to live as if only the next 12 months exist.
The trouble is: Scott has been thinking about life after the Olympics a lot recently.
It’s all tied up with his feelings for Tessa, of course. What will life be like when he doesn’t see her every day? Who else but Tessa will laugh at his jokes? Who else will be able take one look at him and speak his thoughts aloud like a mind-reader?
Does he even know who he is without Tessa at his side?
They arrive at the second hole and climb out of the golf cart. Scott watches as Tessa busies herself selecting a club and then walks to where her golf ball lies. She is pensive again, threatening to sink back into her earlier demeanour of silences and sighs. Scott has no choice but to say something. Something that’s not about rocket boots.
“Tessa… can we talk about last night?” he asks and, to his own ears, his voice sounds strangled.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Tessa says calmly.
Her face appears untroubled. Her posture is relaxed. But when Scott looks down at her hands resting on her golf club, he notices that her fingers are trembling.
“I guess you were on a date,” she says brightly. “I’m glad you met someone. That’s great.”
“I wasn’t on a date,” he says. “I was home. I heard you knocking.”
“But you were busy. That’s fine.”
“I wasn’t busy.”
“That’s fine, too,” she says. “It’s really best if we just draw a line under it.”
Her voice is still calm. Breezy and bright. It’s her press conference voice. Only someone who spent every day with her would be able to hear the underlying unease.
“Tess… I don’t wanna draw a line under it.”
Tessa acts as if he hasn’t spoken. All of her attention is focused on her next shot. She lines up carefully. The distance to the second hole is a manageable one. But Scott sees the tension in the line of her shoulders, and when she draws back her club and swings, the ball lurches to the left and lands in a bunker. “Shit!” she exclaims loudly.
Scott has heard Tessa swear maybe three times in his whole life. It’s a lot more shocking than it should be.
They play the rest of the hole in silence. It takes Tessa several attempts to get her ball out of the bunker, which means that Scott is suddenly winning by a spectacular margin. This would normally be cause for gloating, but Scott has other things on his mind.
As they head back to the golf cart, Tessa slips her arm through his.
“Scott,” she says softly, remorsefully, “I’m sorry I made this complicated. But let’s just make it simple again.” She finds his hand with hers and squeezes it. “You, me, friends. Simple.”
She smiles at him – a perfectly polished smile – and he can’t help but smile back.
He’s a sucker for an easy way out.
He took the easy way out when he was 17 and he had to get smashed before he could admit to her that he loved her. He took the easy way out when he accepted “I don’t know” as her answer.
He takes the easy way out every single damn day at the rink when he doesn’t say “I love you” to her over and over again.
That’s what the two of them do, he realizes suddenly. She smiles her press-conference smile and he takes the easy way out. Every time.
Well, fuck that, he thinks.
“Well, fuck that,” he says.
“Scott…” she begins, and he can already hear another platitude forming.
“I told you I loved you when I was seventeen,” he says loudly. He feels like a golf ball careening off course, heading for a sand trap. But he’s started this, so he needs to finish. “Do you remember?”
“Do I remember? Of course I remember—”
“And you said… you said I don’t know. That’s what you said.”
“I remember, Scott.”
She’s still holding his hand, but she’s squeezing too tight now. Her nails are digging into the palm of his hand.
“What did I don’t know mean, Tess? It’s been eight years and I still don’t know what I don’t know meant!”
“It meant… Jesus, Scott. It meant that I was fifteen! And you were… you! New girlfriend every month. Bragging about your weekends. Hanging around the rink, acting like the big man. You were… exhausting! And you didn’t want me. You just wanted me to want you.”
When Tessa finishes speaking, she lets out a big breath of air. Her hand releases its vise-like grip and she slips out of his grasp, turning away.
Scott feels the grain of truth in what she’s saying. The way he remembers it, it was a lot more black and white. He told her how he felt and she rejected him. Black and white. Right?
“That’s not how it was,” he says, haltingly. “I wasn’t that bad.”
Tessa shoots him a sidelong look. Her smile is fond, a little bit crooked.
“No, you weren’t that bad,” she says softly. “But there was a lot going on. It wasn’t just you and me in a bubble. I mean... god. How did you imagine it would be? No arguments. No problems. It would never disrupt our skating. You’d never get bored of me. No one would ever talk behind our backs. We’d be together and everything would be perfect...?”
“Yeah!” Scott says, puffed up with indignation. “I mean. It could have been like that.”
Tessa lets out a sighing laugh. “It’s funny,” she says. “Everyone thinks you’re the realist and I’m the hopeless romantic.”
Scott feels himself deflate. Tessa is right, of course. He was a tool at 17. He would have found some way to fuck things up. After that, things would have been excruciating at the rink. Goodbye, Olympics. Goodbye, gold medal.
Maybe he’s still a tool some of the time. And maybe he’ll still find some way to fuck things up. She’s wrong about one thing, though.
“Tessa,” he says, “it’s been fourteen years. I’m not bored of you. I could never get bored of you.”
Tessa takes a breath like she’s about to respond, but then she stops. It’s as if she can’t shape her thoughts into words. Instead, she just looks at him. No smile. No everything’s fine pretence. And Scott realizes that she looks... lost. Scared. Not so different to the way she looked when she was 15 and he laid the gauntlet of “I love you” at her feet.
“Scott,” she says hoarsely, her voice barely more than a whisper. “It’s such a big deal... It could change so much about us.”
Scott shakes his head and reaches for her. Wordlessly, she takes the two steps to close the distance between them. They embrace smoothly. Their bodies know exactly how to fit together. Years of practice. Years of muscle memory. When he’s eighty, his body will still remember the shape of hers.
He kisses her gently. It is the lightest of kisses.
Then he lets her go.
“You’re still you, Tessa,” he says. “And I’m still me. Maybe it’ll change us. But I gotta hope it’ll only make us better.”
For a long moment, they just smile at each other.
Then she folds herself back into his arms and kisses him. Not lightly this time. Not gently.
These are starving-junkie kisses. Hot, passionate kisses. Kisses of the kind that this placid golf course has probably never seen before. They kiss without coming up for air. They kiss for five minutes or two hours or the length of time it takes Jupiter to orbit the sun. Scott’s honestly not sure how long they kiss for. He just knows that he wants to keep kissing Tessa.
Finally, Tessa says breathlessly, “Scott… we have to go!”
“Yesss,” he murmurs, “my place or yours?”
“No, we have to finish our round,” she says.
Scott stares at Tessa, torn between horror and amusement.
“People are waiting on us!” she adds.
Indeed, the older couple have arrived at their hole. Nearby, they begin selecting clubs. Their matching orange-and-green outfits are even more garish up close. Scott looks at them and then he looks back at Tessa.
“No, Tess,” he says, “we don’t have to. This isn’t golf time.” He drops his voice. “This is find-a-darkened-room-and-get-naked time.”
“We should finish the round,” she says, pecking him on the cheek. “It’s about decorum.”
She turns and walks toward their golf cart. Decorum? Yep. Despite her worries, she’s still the same Tessa.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Tessa calls to the elderly couple.
“Don’t apologize, dear,” the woman calls back. “It’s nice to see young love. How long have you two been a couple?”
Scott checks his watch. “About seven minutes,” he says.
The couple exchange confused looks. Scott slides his gaze over to Tessa.
“Seven minutes or fourteen years,” he says. “Somewhere in between.”
*
A mercifully short time later, Scott and Tessa rendezvous at Scott’s apartment, which has more of a clothes-optional policy than the golf course. Exhausted and happy, they lie in bed, tangled up in the sheets.
Daytime is dimming into evening when Tessa breaks the comfortable silence by saying—
“You never asked me why.”
“Huh?”
Tessa sits up in bed and says, “That first time. When I came to your door at midnight like a sex-starved maniac! You never asked me why.”
“You told me not to!” Scott says. “Those were your exact words. Don’t ask me why.”
“Oh, yeah… I was a little embarrassed,” Tessa says, laughing.
“So tell me…”
“It was Carmen,” says Tessa. “Carmen and that stupid acting coach who told me I wasn’t digging deep enough. Then when I did manage to dig deep—”
“You were horny!” Scott says triumphantly. “I knew it was my animal magnetism you couldn’t resist.”
“It was Don José I couldn’t resist,” she says, shooting him a sly look. Then she relents, dropping a kiss onto his shoulder. “And a little bit of you.”
The conversation unravels as one kiss turns into more.
Then Tessa murmurs, “Scott… I love you.”
Scott pulls away, just to make sure he understood her correctly.
“Scott,” she says, “did you hear me?”
Scott bites his lip. He takes a deep breath, frowning at her.
“Scott.” Tessa’s beginning to look concerned now. “What’s wrong?”
“I know you love me,” he says slowly. “But. See, the thing is. I’m sorry, but… I don’t know.”
Scott manages to hold his straight face for all of ten seconds before he collapses into uproarious laughter. Tessa swats at him, visibly torn between annoyance and amusement. He fends off her attack with a loud, smacking kiss.
“Just in case I haven’t made it clear,” he says, “I love you, Tessa. I’m pretty fucking sure of it.”