Chapter 2 #2
It had taken us some time to get used to skating so close to somebody else, but soon enough we were holding hands and practicing basic pair moves.
It was all new to me, and not just the skating.
Holding hands with a boy and spending so much time with a high school boy always kept my middle school friends interested.
I tried to play it cool, but I found the entire thing thrilling.
I found Dom hard to read back then, since he tried to keep his expression neutral and look cool all the time.
In hindsight, he must have enjoyed himself too.
Even if he may have found me babyish at the beginning.
I did my best to mask my awkwardness while he did his best to hide his excitement.
When we received our first instructions for a lift, it was very basic.
He would place his hands on my hips and lift me a couple of feet off the ice while spinning in a circle.
It would take a while before we got to the point where he would be raising me above his head.
We hadn’t had quite the height difference then and he wasn’t nearly as muscular, but he managed just fine.
As soon as my skates were firmly planted back on the ice after a single rotation around his body, I was hooked.
Before then, my favourite part of skating had been jumping.
The feeling of flying was unlike anything else and I had loved it for as long as I could remember.
I was pretty good, working my way through all my doubles with ease and dipping my toes into the world of triples.
The possibility of spending more time in the air with the help of a partner firmly cemented in my mind that I should do pairs.
I don’t know if my parents really knew what they were getting into when they agreed to let me partner with Dom.
By the time they realized I was going to be flung through the air, it was already too late to back out.
We were both much stronger as partners than we had been as individuals.
We had progressed at rapid speed through increasingly complicated moves that were new to both of us.
Warming up took longer than most people would realize, but it was important that we were both limber before we really started for the day. There was too much potential for injury otherwise.
I was getting impatient to get started when I finally heard the metallic clank that came whenever the door opened.
I stopped mid-stretch to watch as our choreographer and coach stepped into the room one after another.
Mark Abbott, our coach, had been a pairs skater in his own right back in the early eighties.
He had helped progress the sport, even though he had to wear ridiculous, badly dated costumes when he did so.
He had done well, but he had never been able to topple the legends that the Soviet skating machine turned out regularly.
When Ekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov came onto the scene as he exited, he had turned to coaching.
Since then, he had focused his efforts on helping others achieve the glory he couldn’t.
Our choreographer, Olga Malinova, had once worked exclusively with Russian skaters.
We were lucky to have her, although she split her time between us, a Russian pair, and an extremely young Russian prodigy.
Not that Mark was exclusively our coach either.
That would be unreasonable. Even with their split focus, they were vital to our success.
They had made the move from junior competitions to the senior level with us and had proven to be invaluable with their knowledge.
“Dom, Hazel,” Mark said, nodding at each of us in turn. His close-cropped salt and pepper hair was leaning more towards salt than pepper recently, but the cut hadn’t changed in all the years I’d known him. “Are you two ready to get started?”
I nodded. After a weekend away, I was itching to get back to work. I wouldn’t feel comfortable until I knew we were ready for competition.
“We always are,” Dom quipped.
“Don’t let us get in the way of your stretching,” Mark said, gesturing for us to continue.
“We were just about done,” I said. Olga pursed her lips together, so I pulled a leg over my head with ease to show that I was limber.
“You do not want to hurt yourself with impatience,” Olga said. Her voice was still heavily accented after all these years of living away from her homeland.
I could practically hear Dom fighting back the urge to roll his eyes, but I followed his lead and stayed silent for a few more minutes of stretching.
Olga was incredibly dedicated and her incredible track record spoke for itself.
That didn’t mean we didn’t talk about how unyielding she could be when we were well out of earshot of everybody else, though.
Thankfully, it didn’t take long before Mark seemed satisfied. With a clap of his hands, he said, “Let’s see how those lifts are coming along before we get you on the ice.”
I grinned at Dom as we moved towards the centre of the room.
We stood facing each other, a couple of feet apart but still close enough to reach out and grab each other as needed.
I had to crane my neck to look up at him, but it wasn’t uncomfortable.
After so many years of partnership, I had grown used to it.
I had spent more time looking up at him than at any other guy, including all of my past boyfriends combined.
I let the familiar sense of eagerness and comfort wash over me while I waited.
My friends were always skeptical when I said I was comfortable in a time like this, moments away from trying a lift, but it was true.
Dom was as steady as a rock and as comforting as coming home at the end of a long day.
“In order?” Dom asked, looking over my shoulder.
“In order,” Mark confirmed. “Now get ready while I count you in.”
Dom and I moved in sync at his go, going through the motions at the start of our new long program that would set us up for our first lift.
Some of them were more difficult without the speed we had on the ice and they were absolutely less graceful, but we made it work.
With my back towards Dom’s chest, I touched my hands to his wrists as his hands firmly gripped my hips.
A jump and I was up in the air with his help, flinging myself around in a double twist. I kept my arms up as he placed me down gently on one foot, being careful not to collapse into him.
We had mastered the double twist years ago, but it was definitely easier with the momentum of the ice.
Some people didn’t like it because of its difficulty, but I loved it.
Dom always teased me that there was nothing quite like my expression when I’d come down from what I’d long ago dubbed flying.
Our only question about the twist now was whether we could push ourselves farther.
The triple twist was standard in competition and ours was clean, always getting a good grade of execution.
The next step up was much harder and rarely performed.
“I still want to push towards the quad,” I said as soon as I was down, even as Dom started with the next steps of the routine.
Olga’s mouth was set in a firm line and Mark didn’t look much happier. “If you can land it consistently and cleanly, it could put you ahead. If not, you are tossing out one of your strongest elements.”
We had already debated the risks and rewards of putting a quad twist into at least one of our skates many times.
It was a familiar discussion from the earliest stages of our skating relationship.
Whenever we learned something new, the question remained if we could do it well consistently.
If we couldn’t, we could hurt our score by replacing a simpler move with the new one.
“Not now,” Dom muttered out of the corner of his mouth, reaching a hand out so we could continue. “Let’s get through this first.”
I gave him a brief glare before gripping his hand and moving on. We did our best to go through everything else in turn. We were in the middle of a lift, with Dom’s right hand supporting me from my hip while my legs were in a full split, when Mark asked us to pause for a minute.
On command, I froze. Legs splayed open, I tried to keep my core solid so I wouldn’t move.
I could feel Dom’s hand move ever so slightly, his fingers tightening.
Most people wouldn’t even notice the change in pressure, but I could.
We had done this so many times that I could practically tell what he was thinking from just the way his hand moved against my body.
Now, with the tiniest difference in his grip, he was doing his best to keep his arm straight above his head without wavering.
Mark moved around us. He was in and out of my vision, looking us up and down like he was about to haggle over the price of something at a market.
He and Olga started talking rapidly, debating the flow and artistry of the lift we were frozen in against a slightly different one.
They were talking to each other, as though we weren’t there, frozen like a pair of oddly positioned statues, so I didn’t pay attention to the words.
Anything they discussed would be relayed to us directly after.
I had done this so many times that I didn’t even need to put that much thought into keeping my position.
Whoever said that muscle memory was a powerful thing wasn’t lying.
“Dominic, you can put her down for a second,” Olga said. Mark hardly spared a glance over his shoulder as he nodded absentmindedly. This wasn’t the first time he got so wrapped up in a conversation that Olga would direct us to stop what we were doing and save our energy.
I dismounted, body turning and legs swinging through the air as I did.
Even though I’d been more than six feet in the air, I landed gently.
For all his faults, I had complete confidence that Dom would take care of me on the ice.
I had to. When we were spinning with our blades next to each other’s heads or when he was throwing me around, we had to rely on each other.
More specifically, I had to rely on him to keep me safe.
Our first coach had drilled that into Dom’s head from the first days of practice together: he was responsible for my safety. In that, he’d never let me down.
As they continued their discussion in hushed voices, Dom exaggerated shaking out his arm and his shoulder. With a grin, he said, “Want to change spots next time? It could be fun to make you do the heavy lifting for once.”
“As long as I get to wear pants and you have to wear a dress.”
Dom looked like he was going to retort when Olga, in her heavily accented English, said, “Resume and hold.”
A moment later I was up in the air again, Dom standing beneath me, steady as ever. “Hazel, arms,” Mark said.
I straightened my arms out more, ensuring my hands were properly positioned. My hands were extensions of my arms, I told myself. They couldn’t be flopping around, even in practice.
“How are you doing, Dominic?” Mark asked.
I couldn’t see his face from the position I was in, but I could imagine a look of intense concentration on it.
That or a grimace. The difference between the two was incredibly subtle, but I could always tell.
A lot of times, it veered closer to a grimace when we hadn’t been able to practice as much.
Or, to be honest, when I’d put on a few pounds.
“I’m fine,” Dom said. In sharp contrast to his words, his fingers moved along my hip again. It wasn’t a tightening, but more like he was trying to get comfortable. It couldn’t be very comfortable to have the weight of my entire body supported on one of his arms, but he didn’t complain.
A single nod from Mark. “Okay, continue with the rest.”
A second later I was down again, and we were off.
We talked through the spot that would contain side-by-side jumps on the ice and spins.
Mark and Olga had a lot more to say about our step sequence.
We didn’t have room to do straight across like we would on the ice, so we had to make the best with the room that we had.
Olga made us repeat it three times, pointing out areas of weakness each time and making a minor change the second time, before she let us continue.
We were breathing hard as we went into our last move, a lift where my legs would swing through the air before getting settled in position above Dom’s head.
“I want this to become one-handed,” Olga said, “if they prove they can execute it flawlessly.” Even though she was standing somewhere behind me, I could picture her face: lips pursed in judgement, eyes showing doubt that we would ever be able to meet her definition of flawless.
Even if the judges at a competition gave you amazing marks for execution, she would never say that it was the best you could do.
In her mind, there was always something to improve on and that was the part you should focus on before the next competition.
It wasn’t a bad thing, even though it had taken some getting used to when you were used to being the star of your local competitions.
Dom and I had never discussed it in so many words, but I knew the desire to have her deem something you had done as perfect was one of the things that pushed us to improve.
Dom was breathing heavily as he set me down. He wiped his forehead with the back of his arm, brushing stray strands of sweaty hair out of his face. “You want us to focus on that instead of the quad twist?”
“Ideally, you would master both,” Olga said. “What you do best will decide what we should put into your skate.”
I turned to Dom, my shoulder brushing against his chest. “It sounds like we have a lot to work on.”
“I don’t know why you would ever expect anything less,” he said.
He had a point, I thought as I walked over to the spot near the door my water bottle was. I drank quickly before retying my hair on top of my head in a messy bun. I didn’t need any distractions, not even my own sweaty hair sticking to the back of my neck.