Chapter 8
Leesa
I still wasn’t sure how he’d made me agree to be friends.
When I woke up from my still very jetlagged sleep, I wasn’t even sure what I’d agreed to.
Maybe I’d given him the green light to prank me, which was a scary prospect.
I certainly remembered he wanted me to prank him back, which would take some thought.
I’d managed some extra internet searches last night and discovered his middle name was Valerio, from the Latin, meaning ‘strong’ or ‘healthy’.
I tried not to admit it suited him, or that there was an affinity between us, our families and names that spanned cultures.
He’d put that idea in my head, along with his insistence that we were friends.
He’d probably meant a friend with benefits.
I could still remember him as a pimply 19-year-old graduating to the senior team for the first time.
Now I had to record every aspect of his existence for a job, while ignoring the little details that were not part of it, like the way his hair caught the evening light and glowed reddish.
It had a wave in it and needed cutting. He had a surgery scar on his right forearm and I guessed he bit his nails.
And I was the only idiot interested in that.
I had two weeks of training camp to amass as much content as I could to drip-feed during the Tour, when I wouldn’t have as much access to him.
Luckily, the man was disgustingly photogenic, even with a dirtbag moustache.
My first few days passed in a blur of hotel breakfasts, training rides and an ice bath under the mountain sun, where Colin and his teammate Jarin Nelson had traded barbed banter about shrivelling private parts that made me want to apologise to my hard drive.
At least it helped temper the inappropriate interest I’d suddenly developed. I was relieved I’d never noticed before. I couldn’t imagine how mortifying it would have been to moon over him in the breakfast room in front of my teammates.
Doortje would be clutching her stomach with laughter if she could see me now, spending my time watching him through my phone screen, watching him in real life and then going back to my room to watch him on my laptop as I processed and uploaded the content.
On the third day of my assignment, he was spending hours hooked up to various machines, half-naked, to measure his performance on a stationary bike.
Lucky for the sponsor, their name was stamped right above his butt and was impossible to miss even when the only things he had on were skintight shorts and a heartrate monitor strapped around his chest.
The testing brought back visceral memories.
I’d been pricked and prodded and pushed to my limits too, but not with the intensity that the entire team hovered around Colin.
He was a test subject, a science experiment, where the results would ultimately show themselves at the end of the gruelling Tour de France.
Except there were too many variables for the team to hope to control – not least their test subject himself, who was still decorated with patches of angry road rash and red scabs, to add to the criss-crossing puckered scars on his knees.
Annoying how scars on a man were intriguing, but mine were something to hide with pantyhose. I hated pantyhose.
‘What’s the hardest thing about cycling?’
I had been admiring his tight obliques, decorated with the dark compass tattoo and glistening with sweat, and had to rip my gaze from his torso when he asked me the sudden question.
‘What?’
His lips twitched in a smile. ‘The road!’ he ground out, chuckling when I finally realised he was making a joke. ‘When are you hitting the road with me, Kubicka?’ he asked, his voice gravelly with effort.
‘Hopefully never,’ I mumbled, keeping my eyes pointedly on my phone.
‘You scared?’
Terrified, for a host of reasons, none of which I was going to discuss with him, so I rolled my eyes instead.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll be gentle with you.’
I considered telling him off for flirting with me on camera, but I seemed to have swallowed my tongue.
One of the soigneurs, the vital support staff who looked after us, interrupted anyway to take a sample for lactate testing, pricking his ear.
Colin didn’t even flinch as he kept up a recovery pace on the bike, didn’t react to the drop of blood landing on his shoulder, before the soigneur wiped it away.
Lactate testing was pretty gross all round.
It measured the point at which overuse of muscles started to turn the blood acidic, making fatigue inevitable – and it felt like hitting a brick wall.
I had enough memories of that feeling to last a lifetime and the stakes were so much higher for Colin.
If he blew up, so did the chances for the whole team.
I tried not to look at his results, terrified I’d accidentally blurt them out to no one in particular, after I’d signed the NDA, but what glimpses I caught were some incredible numbers.
In my head, he was the team clown, often the second-choice lead rider, with some famous blow-ups as well as wins, but it seemed he’d earned the support of the team with hard work as well as raw talent.
Perhaps it was fair enough if he let off steam in his free time, given everything he put into the session.
By the end, he had sweat pouring off him, his hair dark and curling.
Finally, on the warm-down, he let go of the handlebars and sat up, accepting a water bottle from a soigneur.
After taking a long drink, where suddenly my world seemed to shrink to the image of his square jaw and the bob of his Adam’s apple, he lifted the bottle and squeezed water onto himself, spraying his face and then his chest, and shaking off like a dog.
Watching him glow, all slippery muscle and stamina, fired up all of my senses. My brain, which usually never shut up, was happily occupied cataloguing every detail of him as I hid behind my work phone, taking footage.
He shot me a sidelong glance. ‘Did you get all that?’
Maybe I hadn’t been hiding as well as I’d thought. ‘Yes,’ I squeaked.
‘Are you sure? The phone seems to be pointed at the floor.’
I hastily raised it again, giving myself a shake, although that didn’t help my temperature, because he looked just as tasty on screen as he did in real life. I had to change the subject before I went up in flames and the soigneur had to sweep my ashes into the trash.
‘Want to tell me about your tattoos?’ As subject changes went, it was out of the frying pan and into the fire, but I’d said it now and had to keep a straight face as he lifted a brow at me.
The strength coach made a few final adjustments to the computer running the stationary bike and excused himself, gesturing for the soigneur to follow, and suddenly I was a little too alone with Colin, who was a little too unclothed.
‘Or… don’t tell me. It’s up to you.’
‘No worries,’ he said with half a smile.
His bright eyes were locked on me. Keeping up the pedalling through the warm-down programme, he twisted on the bike to stretch his left arm out for the camera.
‘This one needs no explanation. The five stars of the Southern Cross for Australia. I got it done when I won the National Under-23 title the first time and added the rings when I got selected for the Olympics.’
No one could accuse him of flirting right now, but it seemed he could say anything and I’d feel it under my skin.
‘I didn’t manage the win at Nationals this year, but my sister did. She’s been through hell recently, so she deserves a bit of glory.’
I wanted to ask about his relationship with Lori, but I was scared of going soft on him and he kept speaking anyway, before I had a chance to press.
Straightening, he gestured to the compass, just below where the heartrate monitor was strapped around his chest. ‘The compass pointing northwest for Europe. I mean, from Australia, Europe is northwest on the usual world map projection. This is where my parents come from and where I’ve spent most of my career.
’ He looked up suddenly. ‘You’ve been very restrained. ’
I had. My feet hadn’t moved even an inch in his direction, even while my eyes had slid over his skin. But he couldn’t have meant that.
Stopping the video, I said, ‘Hmm?’ rather stupidly.
‘You haven’t mentioned my middle name.’
Only about a hundred times in my head. ‘I haven’t looked it up.’
When he grinned at me, it was all cheek. ‘Liar.’
It was completely irrational how that word, spoken in his deep, soft voice, could seep so far into my skin, especially when it was an accusation. When he said it, it felt like praise.
‘It’s not relevant,’ I insisted, hoping he wouldn’t read anything into my breathy voice. Lifting my phone, I started recording again, clearing my throat before asking, ‘What about the dragon tattoo?’
‘You’d better go around the back to get a shot of that artwork,’ he said.
I made my way to the other side of the room, where I could record the rear view for my avid audience. ‘Are you sure you mean the tattoo?’
It just slipped out before I could judge the wisdom of teasing him. He spluttered a laugh and peered over his shoulder at me, making those butterflies in my stomach flock wildly.
‘You can be damn certain this arse is a work of art, d—’ He cut himself off. ‘Probably shouldn’t call you darlin’, right? At least not while you’re recording.’
‘You probably shouldn’t say “ass” either.’
‘You said it last.’
Lowering my phone with a sigh, I marvelled at how quickly this conversation had spiralled out of control when we’d been left alone together. Maybe there had been a potion in that slagroomtaart back in September, because I’d never been this much of a wreck around him before.
‘You still recording, Kubicka?’
‘Yes,’ I said in such a rush that it emerged an octave too high.
Staring into my phone screen, the first thing I saw was that dragon tattoo, writhing between his shoulder blades, its wings open and bowed as though in pain.
Next to it was a tiny drop of blood, spilled when the soigneur had pricked his ear.
My throat thickened, pondering the image, wondering if there was an allegory hidden there. How did he feel about the upcoming trial by endurance? It was three weeks and over 2,000 miles of hurting, endless opportunities to screw up and only a fleeting few for glory.
My heartbeat echoed in my ears as my thoughts raced ahead to July, when he would carry the future of the team up and down mountains and through every battle on the road.
Damn it, I cared. This choking anxiety was one of the reasons I’d decided to retire and I feared it could be even worse, given I couldn’t do anything but watch and feel frustrated.
‘Lees? You all right?’
Shit, there was going to be a lot of footage to delete. I released a long breath and met his gaze. ‘Yeah. You?’
‘O’ course. We all done, or do you wanna know about the dragon? He’s called Valerio, by the way.’
‘Ha! You named him after yourself?’
He sucked on his bottom lip and I saw sparks behind my eyes. ‘I told you, you’re a liar, Kubicka.’
There was that praise again.
‘I didn’t laugh,’ I insisted.
‘I don’t know whether to believe you.’
I held up my phone – a cowardly excuse to cut short the flirting. ‘Tell me about the dragon, Colin.’
He considered his words for a moment and I held my breath, hoping for a hint of insight, an indication that my sympathy wasn’t irrational.
‘I was at the tattoo place,’ he eventually said with a shrug and a wry smile. ‘I didn’t know what to get. My mate said girls love dragons and… you can see the result.’