Chapter 10
CHAPTER
TEN
Mara had been to Val di Fiemme and the ski center in Tesero a million times, but it felt different with the Olympic glitz and glam all over everything. She wanted to enjoy the Olympics this time around. To really take it in, to live in every moment, but that wasn’t how her brain worked.
Her mind had been running timelines for weeks, and the end dates were fast approaching.
Only two days to train unhindered by competition.
Only three days until the Opening Ceremony.
Only four days to practice perfecting her transition from classic to freestyle for the skiathlon.
Only nine days to the ten-kilometer freestyle race. After that, there were ten days before the fifty-k to rest up, replenish, and get her head on straight.
The schedule had become a mantra she repeated to calm down.
Two days. Three days. Four days…
But new timelines were vying for attention.
Forty-two hours since walking into Kirby’s apartment.
Forty-one since Kirby had said, You can’t be anyone but yourself, in a way that made Mara feel like herself didn’t measure up. They hadn’t spoken since.
Twenty-four hours since Mara watched Kirby’s pre-Olympics press conference. Kirby hadn’t mentioned her once, which bothered Mara even more than when Kirby insulted her.
Two hours since they’d been in the same room during breakfast in the smaller Predazzo Olympic Village, but they might as well have been on different continents.
Their hookup had been nothing but a minor hiccup in the grand scheme of their lives.
It was par for the course for Mara not to talk to Kirby. For them to orbit each other without a word exchanged. They had spent most of their careers in that mode, with small detours when they crashed together in the press.
But that secret hour two days ago had consumed every corner of Mara’s brain that wasn’t already consumed with skiing. And quite a few that should have been consumed with skiing as well.
It wasn’t like her. When she allowed herself to have romantic or sexual exchanges, the mental toll was minimal.
Matters of the heart came in around twentieth on her list of things to worry about.
Below important stuff like nutrition optimization, summer roller skiing, and the HOA bylaws at the Anchorage condo she rarely spent time at.
She’d never let a random hookup affect her skiing.
Mara had caught glimpses of Kirby at training, and of course, she looked better than she had in ages. Precise but loose too. Smooth. Like she’d hit a stride. A sweet spot.
Mara didn’t feel like she was in the sweet spot at all. She felt restless, tight, and out of sorts. She should have been meditating. That was what was on her schedule for that morning. But instead, she was staring up at the ceiling of her double room as her phone buzzed again and again.
Lindsey, her roommate, was watching a show with Apollo on her phone. They were sharing corded earphones, which seemed more intimate than just about anything Mara could imagine. They hadn’t made a peep, but Mara couldn’t quite ignore that they were there.
She glanced at her phone. It was her dad.
Still.
It had been fifteen days since she’d talked to him.
It had been one hour since she’d ignored his first call. Half an hour since she’d ignored his third.
It rang again, so she picked it up. It was better to deal with her father than to turn the experience with Kirby over in her brain for the thousandth time.
“Hi, Dad,” she said after picking up. “What’s up?”
“Oh, she lives,” he said, all sulky and put upon. Raymond May had perfected that tone long ago and used it to great effect.
“Yes.”
“I’m available for the next two hours, so we should get coffee.”
Mara closed her eyes. “You’re already in Italy?”
It wasn’t surprising. Her father had figured out ways to exist in cross-country skiing circles for her whole life, but he was one of those people who didn’t keep a job for very long.
It was never his fault of course. When she’d last seen him, he’d been in the vendor village, consulting for a popular wax brand who had sent him to Goms, Switzerland, for the World Cup events there.
So maybe he’d been hanging out in Europe since, waiting for the Games to start.
But she’d thought both her parents planned to arrive, separately, the day before the Opening Ceremony.
“Yes, I’ve got a new opportunity in the hopper with a junior Nordic team who need—”
“And you want to get coffee?” Mara said, interrupting the long spiel that was coming.
“I only have two hours, so you’d have to cancel whatever Ulf Karlsson has you wasting time on today,” he said. Because of course her Olympic training wasn’t as important as his “new opportunity in the hopper.”
“I’m free until this afternoon anyway, but I’ll have to factor in time to get back through security at the Olympic Village.”
“Why are you staying in the Olympic Village? You could have acquired nicer accommodation without the—”
“I’ll send you an address to a nearby café and see you soon,” she said and hung up.
Mara sent him the address for a café some of the athletes had walked to yesterday, and whizzed by Lindsey and Apollo, who didn’t even acknowledge her presence.
Her dad was waiting for her at a table right by the front window. Raymond May was tall, fit, and intense. He had a way of staring right through a person. For most of Mara’s life, his voice had been the main one in her head, telling her what to do, how to train, what was important, what wasn’t.
It was a hard thing to change, but after the Olympics four years ago, with the help of therapy, she’d started retraining herself.
She’d had to pick herself up and put herself back together after the embarrassing defeat in the thirty kilometer and poor showings in the other Olympic events.
What she’d needed from her dad was for him to be a dad, not a coach or consultant or ski support.
She’d brought Coach Karlsson on board as her main coach, working with him through phone calls and texts when they weren’t in the same place.
His voice was the one she wanted to hear when it came to skiing. Coach Karlsson’s voice and her own.
Her dad hadn’t forgiven her for it. He didn’t seem to know how to be a dad without also having a say in her skiing.
“Have you spoken to your agent this week?” he said before he’d tasted his coffee. He was wearing a Team USA–branded beanie. “Now that you insist on paying that fancy agency, they should have you booked and busy. I heard Kirby Bonham filmed two commercials last week.”
Mara forced floaty blankness to take over her brain. It was the only way she managed speak to her father these days.
He was a bulldozer. He had always been her biggest supporter and her most aggressive critic.
She loved him. It was complicated.
She passed him a packet of sugar to pour into his coffee.
She took a sip of her smoothie. The coffee shop they’d met at was busy.
She’d already had to sign several autographs, which only happened to her in big European cross-country skiing hubs or at the Olympics.
She occasionally got recognized in Anchorage, but Alaskans typically gave her space.
Liking their space was baked into most Alaskans’ DNA.
“We filmed all my sponsorship stuff weeks ago. I wanted to take these past few weeks to focus on training, not commercials.”
How he knew about Kirby’s filming schedule was anyone’s guess. He probably followed her Instagram account. Hell, he probably had Google alerts set up for Kirby’s name.
Mara had deleted social media apps off her phone after the first impulse to look at Kirby’s TikTok after their hookup.
Kirby posted every day. Sometimes multiple times a day. Mara had wanted to see if Kirby had seemed happy in the posts following the sunglasses incident. Had she seemed as dazed and anxious as Mara felt?
But she didn’t have the time or the mental energy to obsess over it. So she’d removed any and all online temptation.
Instead, she just looked and looked and looked at Kirby every time they were in the same space. For two days. No words exchanged. No recognition.
Which was good. That was for the best.
“What interviews did KB get booked for?” her dad asked, snapping her out of a spiral.
“How would I know that?”
“Well, don’t you talk?”
Mara tried to keep her face from changing but failed.
“What, Mara?” her dad asked loudly. “Have something to say?”
“Dad.”
“Yes?”
“Of course I don’t know Kirby Bonham’s interview schedule.
I’m assuming she got a lot of the same calls I did.
The pre-Olympics press day was yesterday.
I took questions on my own.” She was sure it had been the most boring press conference ever, and she’d actually missed being there with the full team.
“We filmed an interview with Janette Collins together.”
It was better to give him a heads-up to hopefully decrease the eventual reaction. Because that interview had not been boring.
“Why would you do that?” he asked, his voice incredulous. Honestly, that was a fair question.
“I wanted to.”
It was more complicated than that. She’d been asked to, and it had felt wrong to say no. It was hard to turn down a primetime interview with a premiere Olympics correspondent.
But also, she’d wanted to take advantage of the legacy-building opportunity, the chance to be the princess of cross-country skiing. It had been a tactical error.
“How was the interview?”
“Interesting.”
“Hmm. Okay.” He gave her that judgmental once-over she was so used to. “Have you seen this?” He held up his phone. A Facebook reel started playing with no sound.
It appeared to be a podcast interview between a man and Kirby, their screens split. Kirby was in her room in Oberhof. They were both smiling and laughing a lot.
“It’s muted,” she said as mildly as she could, even as dread trembled through her.