Ink and Ice, Erin McRae [primary phonics .txt] 📗

least for now. He’s staying on to do some work of his own. Or something. I’m not positive he’s sure what.”

Charlotte’s mouth opened in dismay. “In Marie’s basement?”

Aaron dropped down beside her on the couch. “It’s a good basement!”

“The basement is not the point!”

“Okay, what is the point?” he asked, squinting at her. Zack’s presence at TCI had never thrilled Charlotte, but she’d never been this abrasive about him before. “What’s wrong?”

"Has Marie googled him? Have you googled him?" she demanded.

"I read one of the war book reviews, but you know, I’m a little busy here." He squinted at her. “Why?”

"You have questionable taste in men, even more questionable judgment, and no research skills. All the good google stuff is always two or three pages down."

"What did you find?" Aaron asked, curious. "His high school Myspace page or something?"

"No. Not that. Here." Charlotte shoved her laptop at him.

Aaron didn’t have that much time before he needed to get back out the door and to the rink, but he took it with trepidation. What was he about to find? Was Zack not really divorced?

“See?” she said.

Aaron didn’t at first. He squinted, trying to make out the subject of a series of black-and-white photos on the screen. The reflection from the window behind them made it hard, and he reached behind himself with one hand to tug the shade closed.

Ah. Discussing erotica photography with Charlotte wasn’t how he expected his afternoon was going to go.

“That is a very attractive mostly naked man, but—”

Charlotte huffed and yanked the computer back into her lap, gesturing at the screen. “Do ropes count as clothes? I think he’s just naked.”

Aaron didn’t feel prepared to get into that particular philosophical conversation at this particular moment as his brain tried to catch up to why they were having this conversation at all. “But that’s not Zack. What do these have to do with anything?”

He realized the likely answer only as the words flew out of his mouth. Zack had a very nice camera, a photography hobby he was super vague about, and he’d hooked Aaron’s arm over the bedpost and put him on display within moments of their agreeing to have sex. Oh.

Somehow over the screeching of metaphorical brakes in his own head, he heard Charlotte make a noise of disgust that sounded like all the consonants in the English alphabet exhaled in one single breath of supreme annoyance.

“He’s the photographer, Aaron.”

“Of course he is,” he said softly.

Aaron yanked the laptop back from her and did some more squinting at the sun-obscured screen. He was still fascinated, but not just because of how hot the pictures were. Who was the guy in them? A random model? Zack’s ex? They’d had sex last night—and again this morning less than two hours ago. These photos were as intimate as those moments, no matter how artful. He felt adrift again.

Zack’s past didn’t matter, and neither, really did the photos. Certainly, Aaron had no moral objection to them. But he was a public person who hated that reality of the sport. Zack had helped him feel okay and contained in his own skin again, but Zack could, just as easily, ask to expose him like this. Aaron didn’t know how to reconcile that.

“Oh,” he said again because he didn’t know what else to say. “You should have told me what I was looking for, otherwise I’m gonna look at—”

“I know!” Charlotte gave him a glare illustrative of her done-ness with the entire masculine portion of the species.

Aaron angled the laptop to get a better look. Patterns of ropes and knots danced over skin as surely as shadow and light. They were, truly, beautiful photographs, even if they were also complicating his life immeasurably. The ropes were something he wanted, but now Zack’s camera, idle on a table, felt wildly dangerous.

“He’s good,” he said, because it was true and simpler than the rest of it.

Charlotte’s murder eyes could have rivalled Katie’s at their best. “That’s your reaction!”

“What else am I supposed to say?” Other than Zack is very good at getting people to do what he wants.

Aside from the somersaults his brain was doing—talk about information overload—he couldn’t track Charlotte’s dismay. She was never bothered by displays of the sensual or explicit and was often very vocal about her impatience with puritanical American prudishness.

“You want to make Team USA, and yet you’re sleeping with a journalist who also ties people up and takes pictures of them and puts those pictures on the internet! I don’t know, Aaron, that seems like a bad plan!”

“They’re not pictures of me,” he protested. Though now that Charlotte put it that way, his own concerns had coalesced to a bright, vivid point.

“Are you being dense on purpose?”

“No! I get what you’re saying. I just don’t get why it matters.” That was true. He didn’t want this to be an issue, and he was angry that it already felt like one.

“In an Olympic year, everything matters.”

Charlotte wasn’t wrong. But life at Twin Cities Ice was never as regimented as it was at some of the other training centers. Yes, food and sleep and training regimens were tracked rigorously in ways that were intrusive, exhausting, and not always fun. Unlike a lot of athletes elsewhere, Aaron got to eat dessert once a week, but that was seen as a wild, unorthodox risk. Olympic years were hard. Brutal, even. But Brendan and Katie were constantly telling him that he couldn’t only be a skater, he had to be a person too. Otherwise no one would care about what he did on the ice, not even himself.

But what if everything includes my body feeling something other than constant pain and my heart feeling something other than desperate fear that I won’t pull this off?

If Zack untethered Aaron, he also anchored him again and made him feel like a person in his own skin. Now that he’d had a taste of that, Aaron didn’t want to give it up.

THE PROBLEM WITH