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

understand. He’d never won nationals—in the U.S. or Estonia—had almost no international competition experience, and had certainly never been to an Olympics. At thirty-two that wasn’t going to change. And yet he kept showing up. Aaron didn’t know how he had it in him. Surely it was a sign he was a better person than all of them. Because Rasmus just loved to skate, results more or less be damned.

He twisted his hands together in his lap as Rasmus asked him how his family was doing. He replied on autopilot, probably inanely, and was grateful again when Rasmus didn’t take offense at his distraction.

This was the U.S. National Figure Skating Championships. How he placed here would determine whether he secured a spot on the Olympic team. Jack and Cayden were here and their careers were on the line too. This was it. If he didn’t perform at his absolute peak, if he didn’t make the cut, in seventy-two hours the season and Aaron’s Olympic dreams would be over.

An official stepped out, holding the bag of numbers for the draw. Aaron took an involuntary breath.

Rasmus reached over and patted his knee. “You’ll be all right.”

Aaron wasn’t so sure he would.

DESPITE THE FACT THAT he’d invited Zack to Nationals, they didn’t see much of each other. Separate hotel rooms and no plans for socializing until after the competition were essential; he needed to keep his head in the game. So while Zack occupied himself, Aaron went to his practice sessions and kept his focus where it needed to be: skating.

By the morning of the men’s short program, Aaron could feel the uncertainty trying to push its way through the well-managed nerves he’d been able to keep in check for the rest of the season. Competitions were always nerve wracking, but this was different. There was so much on the line, and in a season filled with surprising success, there were now expectations on him. Aaron was unfamiliar with the sensation, which was the emotional equivalent of not being able to settle over his blade on the ice. He wanted to find somewhere safe and dark and hide.

I’ve trained for this, he reminded himself as he laced up his skates for the warmup. I trust my training. I trust my coaches. I trust myself.

Aaron hated skating early in the draw. The crowd was never filled in yet, there wasn’t much energy in the arena, and judges, he believed, needed to warm up as well. Not to mention, with so many people coming after him it was easy to get forgotten in the commentary of the day.

But no matter when he skated, he still had to turn in the performance of his career.

At the end of his short program, he wasn’t sure he had. He’d skated cleanly, that was for sure, but there had been no magic, no energy, pulling the crowd along with him.

Still. Clean was nothing to be ashamed of. The judges agreed—it was still too early in the day for it to really mean anything, but when his scores were announced, he was in first.

Which should have been a relief, but as Aaron left the kiss and cry with Katie’s arm around his shoulders all he could think was that there were three more groups of skaters to go and every chance his name would fall too far down in the standings. And with his own skating done for now, there was nothing to do but watch everyone else skate.

Katie and Brendan always did their best to keep their people from calculating their own ranking or keeping track of other people’s scores, but Aaron was the restaurant’s bookkeeper. He was good at mental math and had an excellent working memory. It was far easier for him to do the math than it was to stop himself from doing the math.

Finally, in one of the rooms backstage, with the final group about to go on, Katie looked up from where she was sitting cross-legged on the floor with her laptop.

“Aaron,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Stop pacing,” she ordered. “Go get a snack. Watch cat videos on your phone. Something. You can’t change anything now.”

“I know, but—” Aaron protested

“Go,” she said. There was understanding in her face. “Twenty minutes. You can do it.”

Aaron reluctantly nodded. He reached into his bag for his phone. Zack was watching from the stands, maybe they could meet up somewhere afterward.

Once outside the room he took a moment to first swipe away various congratulatory texts from family friends. He could deal with those later, when he actually knew how he felt about his scores.

But as he did, he realized that it wasn’t just texts he was dealing with. There were notifications

from every social media platform he used—and from some he had signed up for only at Brendan’s insistence.

Odd.

They all seemed to include links or talk about an article...Aaron clicked one of the links at random. It led him to Athletics Monthly, and the article Zack had written.

This was obviously not the time to look at that, but here it was. His own name leapt up at him from the page, and he settled himself down on a bench in the hallway to read.

Curiosity turned to dismay, and then to horror as he got further into the piece. The writing was incredible, no doubt about that—but it was about him. Aaron. And only Aaron. No mention of Cayden or even of Jack, other than that they existed and were also vying for a U.S. Olympic spot. Aaron knew Cayden was being difficult, but he hadn’t realized that this would be the result. Especially after he’d put himself out on a limb way back at camp to try to help Zack.

And then, towards the end, was a paragraph, not about skating at all. But about the island. The most private part of his life, that he had trusted Zack enough to see. There was even a picture—Aaron recognized it. Zack had taken it their first day there, when they’d taken a