3. Melanie
Chapter 3
Melanie
M y inner thighs scream as GT soars over a cross rail. I tighten my core to distract myself from how tired my legs are, but my abs are just as wrecked. It’s a minor miracle GT clears the jump without knocking either rail, because I’m too focused on my own body. We’re a team; I need to think more about connecting with him, and less about how badly I need an ice bath and a deep-tissue massage. And a nice, long cry.
Why did I think I could do this? When I’m not thinking about how much my body hurts, there’s one insistent thought in my head: What are you doing?
Ten seconds with a pretty horse, and I convinced myself this was a good idea. Daydreams about trophies and cheering crowds, proud parents, and—privately, sheepishly—an adoring ex-boyfriend wishing he could have me back blinded me to reality. Now I’m signed up for five competitions I have no business being in. I’m learning the hard way that wanting something doesn’t automatically make you capable of getting it.
“Pick up the pace! You’re going to get a time penalty,” Nick hollers from the edge of the course.
I don’t need to look over to know he’s got his infernal stopwatch in one hand and his evil clipboard in the other. We’ve been training together for a week, and already I want to break the clipboard over my knee and shove the stopwatch into Nick’s loud, unpleasant mouth to stop all the shouting.
There’s one more obstacle on this course, a plank jump Nick constructed out of old fencing materials in the largest corral on his property. It’s not a particularly high jump for GT, but the horse is as tired as I am. This is our fifth run on this course today—in a row. Nick’s focused on our stamina. According to the stats he’s been tracking on his Hadean clipboard, that’s the area where I need the most improvement. According to my internal calculations, the improvement I need is in my coach’s attitude .
I block out Nick and his barked orders, and zero in on the jump. The ground is muddy in front of it, so GT needs to push harder off his back hooves to account for slipping. As soon as I think it, I know I’ve thought it too late. I signal GT for the jump with a shift of my weight and a squeeze of my thighs, six inches closer than I want to be. His back hooves are going to clip the jump, and probably knock the top plank down. Sure enough, I push GT past the finish line to the distinct clatter of the top plank smacking into the other two on its way to the ground.
“You took off late!” Nick hollers at me, as if I didn’t know. “You have to adjust your commands to the environment, or you’re going to keep making simple, easily avoided mistakes. Where is your head today?”
I should dismount so I can storm off the property, but I’m not sure my legs can hold me up at the moment. If I get off this horse and immediately collapse in the mud, I will have no choice but to stay in the mud forever. Becoming a bog body is more appealing than facing yet another Nicholas Korbel lecture about how pathetic and out of shape I am. I choose to stay on the horse and avoid both scenarios.
“That wasn’t a rhetorical question, Miss Manners. When I ask you something, I expect a response,” Nick says, approaching me.
The other advantage of staying on the horse is that he has to crane his neck to look up at me. When we’re both on even ground, he’s at least a head taller than me, so I’m always the one with my head tilted skyward, the obedient student at his feet. From here, I’ve got the upper hand. Barely.
“I know it was late,” I say through gritted teeth.
“That’s not what I asked you. I asked you where your head is. You’re not focused,” he snaps.
“The first run was clean. No mistakes, no time penalty. The problem isn’t my focus, it’s you making us run the course a zillion times in a row for no reason.”
“No reason? Get off the horse,” he challenges.
I adjust my grip on the reins, the leather squeaking against my riding gloves. “No.”
“Get off the horse, Melanie. Prove you don’t need to work on your stamina. Show me you can stand up without your thighs shaking. Look me in the eye and tell me you’re not tired.”
Frustrated tears prick at my eyes but I refuse to let them fall. He’s right, of course. I’m exhausted, and that’s why I’m struggling. Riding for an hour or so for fun a few times a week is nothing compared to the hyper-focused training Nick’s been putting me through. Things that used to happen instantaneously for me are taking too long. Instincts I spent my childhood sharpening and refining are rusty and covered in dust. At fourteen, there wasn’t such a lag between thought and action. I could see an issue on the course and make an adjustment without putting the issue into words. Now, at twenty-eight, it’s like I have to translate everything in my head before my body responds. I’m wasting precious seconds—and I don’t need Nick to point it out.
“I’m obviously tired,” I snap. “We’ve run this course a million times today, not to mention the agility drills, and the workout I did on my own this morning before I got here. What do you expect? I told you I was out of shape. You’re not holding up your end of the deal!”
He shrugs. “I never said I was going to go easy on you. I said I’d respect you—there’s a difference. Now get off the horse so I can talk to you without craning my neck.”
“Are you going to tell me anything helpful?” I ask petulantly.
Nick sighs and glowers at me. If he weren’t such a sadist, hell-bent on destroying me mentally and physically, I could admit the heat in his glare is more than a little sexy. When he’s not leering at me out of the darkness on abandoned rooftops, the strong angles of his jaw and cheekbones are enticing instead of unsettling. Not that he’s my type—no one has ever been less my type than Nick Korbel.
My type is refined, responsible, and well-mannered. Polite. Kind. Generous—like Paul Walters. Nick is none of those things. He’s brash, loud, uncaring, and insensitive. He’s quicker to criticize than compliment, even when I make improvements. No matter how hard I try, he doesn’t have an ounce of sympathy for my position. I’m crawling my way back from an early, impromptu retirement, yet he’s treating me like a seasoned professional who should be better than this.
“Off the horse, Miss Manners,” he says in a bored tone.
He’s not going to move on until I get down, so I shift my weight to dismount. To add insult to injury, he tucks his clipboard under his arm and puts the stopwatch in his pocket so he can catch my waist and guide me to the ground. No one’s helped me dismount a horse since I was about six years old.
“Hands off,” I say stiffly.
He obliges, so naturally I stumble into GT’s side on quivering thighs, immediately demonstrating how right Nick is about my stamina. I straighten up but the smug look on his face proves he’s not fooled .
“I’m making you run the course over and over because you need to be able to run it perfectly in imperfect conditions,” he says. “You need four top-ten places to get to nationals. We only have five competitions left this season. I don’t know about you, but I don’t love that math.”
“We would have had seven chances if we’d started the process earlier,” I grumble.
“If you’d answered any one of my phone calls in the past six months, we could have started sooner. But you didn’t, so I had to track you down in person. If you’re upset about wasted time, you need to address that shit internally instead of taking it out on me,” he says, still glaring. “We’re going to run the course again, and I don’t want any mistakes. You’re tired? Great. You think you won’t be tired after driving hundreds of miles to get to competitions? The weather is shit? The weather’s always going to be shit. You have blisters? Your muscles are sore? You can bet your ass that’ll be the case on the day of the competition, too. Stop whining, and do what I tell you, when I tell you to do it. Now get back on the horse. Stop thinking so hard and trust GT to respond to you.”
He stalks back over to the fence and scribbles something on his clipboard. It’s probably a note that says, Melanie is hopeless and this is a giant mistake because she’s un-coachable and too old and washed up to be any good . It shouldn’t upset me so much to have him talk to me this way. Every coach I’ve ever had was just as exacting; no one gets into elite sports with the expectation of being coddled. But I’ve gone soft, clearly. Fourteen years is a long time to be gone. The sport’s the same, but I’ve changed more than I thought. Every correction slices through me like a knife.
“I’m waiting. Hurry up,” he shouts.
That’s my final straw. My vision blurs with a fresh wave of tears. No amount of blinking or sniffing will hold them back, and my hands are way too filthy to consider wiping my face with them. I keep myself aimed toward GT while I struggle to get myself under control. The harder I fight the tears, though, the more insistently they stream down my face. I suck in a deep breath through my nose, but my shoulders shake on the exhale anyway.
“Get back on the horse,” Nick barks from the fence. “You’re still wasting time.”
He’s painfully right. All I’ve ever done is waste time. Everything I’ve ever done has amounted to nothing in the end. No amount of effort has ever made a difference to the reality that I’m a born failure. I’m not polished enough, or driven enough, or smart enough. I wasn’t good enough for Paul, I’m still not good enough for my parents, and I’m never going to be good enough to ride GT in any competition at all, let alone the Olympics .
It’s old news, but it’s not private anymore. I’ve registered for the five remaining qualifiers this season, so my name is out there. Everyone knows I’m supposed to compete, so I can either withdraw in humiliation, or fail on the course. Either way, the results will be the same: I’m broadcasting my incompetence nationwide.
“Are you crying?” Nick shouts. “Christ Almighty. I thought I was working with Melanie Archer, not a fuckin’ child. Pull yourself together and get back on the horse. You’re better than this.”
I whip around, too mad to care about how splotchy my face is. He’s leaning on the fence, glowering at me as though my feelings are a massive inconvenience to him. Propelled by fury, I stalk through the dirt toward him.
“Are you always this heartless?” I screech. “Tell the black hole in your chest where your humanity should be to leave me alone. Not everything is about you and this horse, you—you jerk!”
He raises an eyebrow. “Don’t hold back, Miss Manners. Let me have it.”
“You’re selfish and unfeeling and I hate you! Why’d you pull me into this, anyway? To humiliate me? To make me suffer? You sadistic little...”
“Go on, finish the sentence. Cuss me out. I dare you,” he says.
I want to—badly. But I don’t want him to win. The moment I curse at him, he’s going to have the upper hand. Again. It’s too much to bear, so I march toward the gate instead. I’m done.
I don’t care that he’s given me the chance to compete again. It’s irrelevant that his mother is the one coach I wanted to work with most, and that this is the closest I’ll ever get to her since she’s retired. None of that matters. Riding in the Olympics was always a pipe dream, and it’s foolish and irresponsible of me to keep trying to achieve it. The disaster at the Junior qualifiers fourteen years ago was a convenient excuse to quit. I was never going to beat Diana, was never going to make it. It’s long past time to pick a new goal to work toward instead of wasting even more of my time on this planet living off my grandparents’ money like some wanna-be socialite and languishing alone in my house.
It’s time to stop treating horses as anything more than an expensive hobby.
“Melanie, stop.”
I ignore Nick. GT belongs to him; he can groom the horse. There’s a pang of regret in my chest at the thought of abandoning the poor animal after putting him through such a tough workout today, but it’s not enough for me to turn back. I shouldn’t have let a perfect horse blind me to the reality of my skills—and Nick’s impossible attitude .
“Melanie, you can’t quit on me,” Nick says, surprisingly gentle.
His voice is way too close—he’s not shouting, but I can hear him perfectly so he must be following me.
“Yes I can,” I say through my tears. “Watch me.”
He catches my wrist and I’m so tired, that’s all it takes to bring me to a halt. One tug is enough to turn me around.
“Don’t quit just because it’s hard,” he says. “If it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing.”
“Easy for you to say, since you’re not the one flying through the air on a nine-hundred-pound animal with unbelievably snappable ankles while an angry giant of a man shouts at you,” I retort.
His face clears, like I’ve just unlocked a puzzle he’s been stuck on for ages.
“So that’s really it—that’s why you’re holding back,” he says. “You’re scared of a fall.”
I yank my wrist out of his grasp. “I’m not going to fall off the horse.”
He shakes his head. “You’re afraid of GT going down and taking you with him. It’s why you tense up before every jump, why you hesitate.”
“I don’t hesitate,” I mutter.
Nick doesn’t bother refuting the obvious lie; it would just waste even more of the time I’m already squandering. Instead, he shoves the clipboard under my face so I can see his notes. He hasn’t covered it in scribbles about how inadequate I am, but what I see is even more unnerving. It’s a print-out of my stats from my last ten competitions. In the margins, he’s written out the stats for all of today’s runs in pencil.
“I know you’re sore and still getting used to training full-time, but you’re not struggling as much as you think,” he says, jamming a finger against the clipboard so hard the clip rattles. “You have more clean runs now than you did at the height of your Junior career. The only major difference is the time penalties.”
“It’s GT. He jumps higher than my horses ever did,” I counter. “That’s why I’m not knocking over as many poles or missing water jumps.”
“Wrong. When you hit poles, it’s because you hesitate,” he says. “You wait a hair too long to jump him, and the arc of his jump is wrong. Those hesitations stack up, and then you’re outside the time limit.”
For the millionth time today, he’s annoyingly right. Three of the top five scores on his clipboard are from today. The fourth is from the last competition I ever completed—the one before Diana’s accident. Thinking of her accident turns my stomach, though .
It was my fault. Our whole childhoods, Diana Walters and I were in constant competition with one another. We were always ranked first and second in the nation for our division, though who was the winner and who was runner-up shifted constantly. My family’s money pales in comparison to hers, but our parents were in the same social circles, which only served to fan the flames of our competitive spirits.
The year we both quit riding was the year Diana stole Lisa Conway out from under me. My parents spent months wooing Lisa, bending over backwards to convince her to drop her other athletes and focus on me exclusively. She was going to push me to the next level and put some distance between Diana and me. I was going to do it all—make it to the Youth Olympics, then compete full-time, and head to as many Olympics as I could. Barring injury or financial catastrophe, I would have been able to ride well into my fifties.
But then Diana fell. It was her injury, not mine, that ended our careers. When her parents offered Lisa double what mine could, I was stuck without a coach. My parents scrambled to find someone to fill the last-minute gap, and I was trapped with Roger Peart. He was known for his ruthlessness, and I naively thought it would all be reserved for his own athletes.
I wanted to win everything that year—not just to fulfill my own dreams but to punish Diana for stealing Lisa. Roger loved the vindictive streak in me, and I was well on my way to another national championship—until Diana smoked me at a competition in Las Vegas. She did a clean run, no penalties, four seconds under the time limit. I hit a pole on the last jump, and came in three tenths of a second beyond the time limit. She placed first, and I barely salvaged third place. It closed the lead I’d gained earlier in the season, and by the time we reached the last qualifier before nationals, it was down to one final competition to determine who would compete in the Youth Olympics, representing the entire continent of North America, and whose season was done.
Timothy Andrews went to the Youth Olympics, not me or Diana, because Roger snuck into the stable while Diana was walking the course and cut three slits in the leather straps holding her stirrups onto her saddle. Afterward, he told me to stop fretting about how tight the turns on the course were, and how flawlessly I’d need to ride to beat her. He told me he’d taken care of her, then winked. Terrified, I raced to Diana’s horse to see what he’d done. Before I could find anything wrong, Diana discovered me, and accused me of being a “bitter little bitch who has to resort to cheating to win,” so I left in a huff.
Ten minutes later, I watched her stirrup snap as she took off for a jump. I saw her slip sideways in the saddle as they landed, accidentally kicking her horse’s belly in the process. I saw him rear back, startled, and dump her on the ground. Then, worst of all, I saw him slide in the loose sand of the track and fall, right onto Diana’s leg. What I saw isn’t the part that haunts me most, though. It’s what I heard.
I heard bones snap—hers, and the horse’s. I heard her scream in agony, first when her leg broke, then again when she realized her horse wasn’t getting up because he couldn’t—he’d broken an ankle. He was still lying on top of her when she threw her arms around his neck, sobbing hysterically that it wasn’t his fault, that he shouldn’t have to die. With ambulance sirens blaring behind me and a knot in my stomach, I walked to the jury table and told the judges what Roger had said to me, and what I suspected. They told me I didn’t have to withdraw, but how could I stay? How could I ride the course after that, knowing if I’d been mature enough to ignore one meaningless insult, I could have stopped all the carnage?
Diana’s parents sued Roger within an inch of his life. She got a pin put in her leg and went on to found a horse rescue up in the mountains. I never faced a single consequence. No sanctions from the United States Hunter/Jumper Association or the Fédération équestre Internationale. Not even my parents. I had to punish myself, so I quit. It still doesn’t feel like enough.
Of course I’m scared of a fall. I owe a debt, and I haven’t paid it. Who’s to say the universe won’t collect the moment I set foot onto my first competition course?
“Look, Nick, I don’t know what your mom told you about my last competition—”
“I was there,” he interrupts.
“What?” is my eloquent response.
“I was my mom’s apprentice. I helped train Diana that season, so I was there when she fell. I know what happened with your coach. I understand why you’re hesitating.”
My mouth hangs slack. I’m not sure what to say, since I don’t have to justify my fear after all.
“You’re not going to fall, and neither is GT,” he says.
“You don’t know that.”
He crosses his arms over his chest, and the clipboard clacks against his belt-buckle. “When was the last time you fell off a horse?”
I pause to think, because I honestly can’t remember. The pause is all the answer he needs, apparently .
“See? Not likely you’ll fall. And GT won’t fall, because no one is going to fuck with your gear. Security is a lot tighter since Roger Peart’s handiwork. You’ll be fine. You can do this.”
Maybe it’s the confidence in his voice, or maybe I’m delusional. Whatever the reason, I believe him. He certainly believes in me—enough to chase me down when I walked away. That’s more than I can say for most of the people in my life. I take a deep breath and push my fears out with the exhale. Maybe I’m the one who needs an attitude adjustment, not Nick.
“So how do I avoid hesitation then, Coach?” I ask.
“Stop pussyfooting around my corral and ride like you mean it,” he says. “Get back on that horse, Miss Manners. We only have three days until we leave for your first competition. Daylight’s burning.”