This is the longest piece I have ever completed. This has been with me for three weeks and it's become my baby- affectionately referred to as ANGSTBUCKET for reasons which (I hope) will become evident in future chapters. In the meantime I'd like to say right here, right now: thank you to my husband for understanding when i started yelling at fictional characters, to sarah for being the best friend a girl could ask for and to kayla for pretty much everything else. I own none of this.
This is what I imagine a mother feels like when her baby goes off to school for the first time.
i. something told me to run
there were sounds in my head—
little voices whispering that
I should go & this should end,
oh and I found myself listening
-where I stood; missy higgins
He felt a familiar stirring in his lower abdomen as she pirouetted across the beam. He swallowed hard. This is ridiculous. He glanced at the clock – already 9AM. He turned back to see her dismount perfectly, landing ramrod straight with her arms in the air. She grinned at him, a wide-eyed, full-faced grin he knew she couldn't control even if she tried.
"Excellent, Payson," he called. "Five more and take ten minutes." He took the steps up to his glass-walled office two at a time, thankful it was empty. He scoffed as he poured himself a cup of coffee from the steaming jug in the corner, the barest hint of bitterness and disbelief in his expression. He knew she wouldn't take a break. If it were eleven years ago and he was still competing, he would have, quite arrogantly, called her the female version of himself and invited her—not so subtly- back to his hotel room at any and every event or competition they happened to attend together.
He was proven right as he watched the action in the gym from his elevated office; Payson completed her routine six more times, stopped just long enough for a cup of water and then moved over to work on her floor routine. Sasha shook his head with a rueful smile and took a sip of hot coffee. Convincing Payson Keeler to take a break was impossible.
He moved to his desk and reclined in his chair. For the first time in months, he allowed his mind to drift over the last eighteen months, his time in Colorado and his relationship with his Rock girls. He knew there was something special about those girls before he arrived in Boulder. He wouldn't have left Cambria for just any team – this team was special. This was a team he truly believed in—a once-in-a-lifetime kind of team for any coach—and one team member in particular believed in him. He wasn't surprised that Payson was the one to lead the other athletes outside to convince him to stay. Even before meeting her, Payson's drive to succeed and ability to lead her team to victory after victory was something he admired and he recognised it in her the way he had felt it himself as a young, competitive gymnast.
What surprised him was the ease of their relationship. In all his years in the sport, the only time he had ever experienced such a strong, effortless rapport was in his relationship with his own coach, Nikolai—although even that paled in comparison to the bond he had come to share with Payson. Payson had drive and determination by the bucket-load and she challenged him in ways no other gymnast dared. Her quest for perfection rivalled his and her work ethic stunned him into silence every day when she arrived at the gym, bright-eyed and ready to work at half past five in the morning, a full hour and a half before the rest of her team. He appreciated how elusive satisfaction was for her; even when he was pleased with her routines, she would always find something she felt she could improve and she wouldn't stop until she had.
He treated her as an equal and worked with her as a partner; over the year and a half they had trained together, he had come to consider her a friend. Watching her get hurt broke him more than he cared to admit. There was guilt – lots of guilt – and anger on her behalf at the cruel and premature death of her dreams, but the most overriding feeling of all was fear. With Payson's gymnastics career over and her flat out refusal to even consider assisting him as a coach, she had no reason to be at The Rock anymore. More than anything he had ever felt, Sasha was terrified of losing her from his life – he never imagined she could slip away just as easily as she captured him in the first place.
The night of her vault—her first foray into gymnastics following the ground-breaking operation to repair her fractured spine—Sasha prayed for the first time. When she kissed him—high on exhilaration from a newly-complete routine—it took all of his strength, physical and mental, to push her away. When she performed a flawless floor routine at Worlds Trials and was voted onto the team without even having qualified (and then told him she wanted a do-over because she wasn't happy with her extensions), Sasha felt on top of the world. Not even coaching three elite gymnasts onto the National team could hold a candle to his pride in Payson, his impossible, incorrigible, unstoppable girl.
"Is everything okay, Sasha?" Kim Keeler's voice broke him free from his thoughts. She dumped her purse on the desk opposite his and started to flip through the piles of papers that had begun to build in the in-tray. Sasha swallowed hard, trying to rid himself of the dryness in his mouth. He couldn't look Kim in the eye. How could he tell his office manager he had spent the morning torturing himself over his relationship with her teenage daughter?
This had long surpassed ridiculous. It was now well and truly into the realms of inappropriate. Sasha Belov was a man obsessed and he knew it had to end. He smiled tightly and nodded at Kim before stepping out onto the stairs and sliding the glass door shut behind him.
"This ends," he murmured to himself. "This ends tonight."
to be continued.
