“I wanted to get your opinion on something, but while I’m here, can I help?” I ask.
He pauses and looks at the waist-high stack of mats he’s yet to clean. They’re each eight or twelve inches thick, but still—that’s a lot of mats.
“If you really don’t mind, sure, take a mat,” he says. “What’s up?”
I drag the next mat off the stack and pull it parallel to the one he’s cleaning. He hands me the spray bottle and I get to work.
“So, I finally went to yoga this weekend, and it was amazing,” I explain. “Not just the workout part—though that actually wasn’t half-bad—but the mental part of it.”
“Nice.”
“And it made me think that Hallie could actually really benefit from adding yoga to her routine, especially now and during the next few months.”
“Yeah? Why?”
I consider how personal and vulnerable I actually want to get here. I want him to understand how yoga could clear Hallie’s head in a way that gymnastics never could. But I don’t know if I’m ready to share the rest of my thoughts with him. I don’t doubt that Ryan had a hell of a time during his competition days, dieting and pushing through punishing workouts. But I also know that, as tough as it could’ve been for him, it wasn’t the same as what I went through. While puberty signals the end of a girl’s gymnastics career, it’s the real beginning of a man’s: gaining weight and developing muscle only makes him better at the sport.
And Ryan never trained under Dimitri. He probably never worked out on an empty stomach, worrying that his vision would go fuzzy and black around the edges as he sprinted down the vault runway. He probably never tried to convince himself the quaking pain in his stomach was from too many crunches instead of skipping a meal. He wouldn’t understand how restorative it was to be in a place in which you simply had to listen and react to your body’s needs.
Gymnastics has changed lightning-fast, even in the decade since I was Hallie’s age. The top athletes in the sport these days aren’t eighty-five-pound waifs like some of the ones I looked up to as a kid—they have real, solid muscle and power, like Hallie does. She’s smarter than I ever was, and she knows she can’t perform her best if she’s starving. But she faces a new set of pressures I never could have imagined: a more difficult scoring system; watching her competitors’ skills ratchet up every day on Instagram, just like their follower counts do; the disturbing sexual abuse scandal and its coverage on every news channel in America right now.
“I’m just saying, I think she’s going through a tough time right now, and what I loved about the yoga class I went to was the emphasis on self-care,” I say.
I cringe at how hokey that sounds, and I try again.
“I don’t think it’s a bad idea for her to have a place to chill and zone out, where she doesn’t have to worry about being the best, or training for some goal,” I explain. “She can just stretch, listen to my roommate’s cheesy but weirdly effective mantras, and have an hour to herself, away from the news.”
“She does seem pretty stressed,” he admits, ripping off another square of paper towel.
“I think yoga would be a great way for her to relax,” I say.
“Then sure, let’s do it,” he says. “You’re thinking of having your roommate work with her?”
“Sara’s awesome, yeah.”
“Maybe an hour or two a week?”
“I’ll set it up!”
I can’t wait to tell Sara.
“Cool, thanks,” he says. “You’re the best.”
He finishes cleaning one mat, drags it back to its regular spot under the bars, and takes off his sweatshirt before starting on another mat. Underneath, he has on a white tank top that reveals the full scope of the Olympic rings tattooed on his bicep. I’ve seen the bottom edges of it peek out from his T-shirts before, but I’ve never seen the whole thing. It’s not quite as bright as I imagined it would be—instead, the colors are ever so slightly faded, as if it were simply a natural part of his skin.
“What?” he asks, a little self-consciously.
He must have caught me staring.
“Oh, nothing,” I say, embarrassed. “I’ve just never seen your tattoo before, that’s all.”
I scrub furiously at the mat beneath me until my paper towel begins to shred.
“Oh! Here, look.”
Ryan comes over to kneel next to me on the mat. I don’t really like most tattoos—you only get one body, and I doubt most things in life are worth permanently etching into your skin. But this one makes my heart beat faster. I know the Olympic Games have their roots in ancient Greece, when men held footraces and threw javelins in a festival to honor the god Zeus. The athletic challenges were revived in Athens in 1896, when the first modern Olympic Games were held. When you remember the history, it’s hard not to see Olympic athletes like modern-day Greek gods.
“Can I touch it?” I ask timidly.
He laughs. “Sure.”
I run my finger over the outline of the rings. He earned this.
“If you wound up going to the Olympics, would you have gotten one?” he asks.
“Yeah, of course,” I say, nodding. “I mean, I’d want a small one, somewhere easy to hide, but yeah.”
“Why hide it?” he asks. He flexes his bicep, and the rings jump. “It’s an honor to join the club.”
“I don’t know, tattoos aren’t really my thing,” I say.
The expression on his face falters just a fraction of an inch.
“But yours, though… I like yours a lot,” I rush to add. “That’s probably the only one I’d ever consider getting for myself.”
“If you were to get one, where would you put it?” he asks.
“I used to think about this all the time, you know?” I tell him. “I thought maybe my ankle.”
“Huh.” He wipes his finger over the bare skin of my ankle, like he’s imagining ink there.
“Or the other place I was considering was the side of my ribs.”
I brush my fingers along the spot over my tank top. Ryan’s gaze follows my hand. He reaches out to gently slide his thumb over the same stretch of my torso. His knuckles accidentally graze the side of my breast, and I pretend like I don’t notice, like my skin doesn’t buzz with anticipation, like I haven’t already imagined what his touch would feel like there.
But then Ryan leans closer, and his hand is on the nape of my neck, and his mouth is on mine. The kiss is slow and sweet, but that’s all it is: one kiss. I savor the softness of his lips and the nuzzle of his stubble against my cheek for a long, lingering moment, and then he pulls away. As soon as I register the distance between us, a dull pang erupts in my chest.
“Why did you do that?” I ask in a hushed voice, even though I know there’s nobody else around.
“I… I’ve wanted to do that for a long time,” he admits.
“But we said we shouldn’t,” I remind him, hating myself for saying it out loud.
“We said we wouldn’t,” he says. “But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if we’re making a mistake.”