Chapter 57

Chapter 57

After the interview, Heath and I had less than two hours before our morning practice session. Not enough time to go back to sleep but, as it turned out, plenty of time to argue.

“Well.” I sat on my bed. The flimsy metal frame screeched in protest. “That was—”

“You don’t want kids?” Heath said.

I laughed. The wrong response, but I couldn’t believe that had been his takeaway from our train wreck of a TV appearance.

“You do want kids?” I asked.

Heath frowned and turned toward the windows. The shades were still pulled down since we’d left so early, but slivers of sunrise wrapped around the edges.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It just seems like something we should have discussed privately before you announced it on live television.”

I hadn’t thought we needed to discuss it. Heath knew me better than anyone, so he should have known there wasn’t a single maternal thing about me.

We had discussed moving back to Illinois; Lee’s death meant the house was wholly mine, and we had the funds to fix it up however we wanted. I’d imagined hanging our gold medals above the parlor fireplace. I’d imagined gutting Lee’s toxic waste dump of a room and turning it into a state-of-the-art home gym. I hadn’t imagined anyone there apart from the two of us—and definitely not a squalling infant.

Heath sunk onto the other bed, head in his hands. “I don’t know if I can do this anymore.”

“It’s just a few more days.”

“A few more days, and then the next competition, and the next and the next. Where does it end, Katarina?”

“If this is about the wedding,” I said, “then—”

“I don’t care about the wedding!” Heath stood up again and started pacing. “We could elope today, for all I care. I just want to know we’re going to be together forever, even after…”

He didn’t finish his sentence, but we both knew where it was headed: after I no longer needed him as a skating partner.

“I love you,” I said. “You know that.”

“You’re so good at pretending now. It’s hard for me to—”

I shot to my feet too. “You think I’m pretending to love you?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Which is it, Heath? I’m too fake, or I’m too honest? Cause I told the truth in that interview, and you didn’t like that either.”

“The problem is that I can’t tell the difference anymore. Can you, Katarina?”

There was a glint of pity in his eyes. I preferred the contempt.

“When Lee died, you didn’t cry,” Heath continued. “You wouldn’t even talk about it.”

“You of all people should understand why I wasn’t especially devastated by his death.”

You’re not my family, Lee. You’re nothing to me. I used to wish you’d died instead of our father, but now I’m glad he’s not alive to see you like this.

Thank God none of the videos from the gala had picked up what I’d said to Lee in our final moments together. Even without that damning evidence, there were plenty of people convinced I was a coldhearted bitch with my poor brother’s blood on my hands.

Heath had been the first to assure me that it wasn’t my fault. So how could I tell him that when I found out about Lee’s untimely demise, my first thought was to wonder where Heath had gone for all those hours after the gala?

When we learned Lee had died of a drug overdose, with no signs of foul play, I was relieved—and sad, and furious with myself for mourning someone who’d given me only misery, and guilt-ridden over my knee-jerk suspicion of the man I loved. My feelings were too unwieldy to contain, too dangerous to express.

So I packed them away and shoved them into a dark corner inside myself, one more thing I could deal with after I became the Olympic champion.

“Let me in, Katarina.” Heath touched my face, tender now. “That’s all I want.”

Let me in? I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream at him. Lee’s death was the least of the things we didn’t talk about. Why should I be the one to open up and make myself vulnerable, when Heath’s past was still a sealed vault?

We were less than seventy-two hours from victory. I couldn’t lose control. I thought back to that night when we were sixteen, when I climbed through his bedroom window.

Convince him. That I could do. The rest we could figure out later.

I kissed him, hard. He kissed me back harder. I pulled his hair, he pulled me down to the floor. Every second of contact felt like a dare, a challenge, a step closer to the edge of oblivion. We were punishing each other, telling ourselves it was passion.

It frightened me, but I was more frightened of what might happen if we tried to have this conversation with words instead of our bodies. We might burn down to ash. We might explode.

By the time it was over, when we lay sweat-soaked and scraped raw in the narrow space between our beds, bright morning sunbeams stabbing through the shades because we’d blown right past the start time of our practice session—I don’t know if I’d convinced Heath of anything.

But somehow I convinced myself that I had won.