Quadruple Flip by David Connor

Author:David Connor [Connor, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press

AS SOON as Tom Alan left, someone else checked the spot. Hockey Brute Bill used to worry too, about the same thing, but he’d long since gotten over it.

“Guy put on one hell of a show,” he said to his date.

“I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t watching.”

“No. You were too busy being scared we’d get caught.”

Chapter 20

December 5, 2013

Japan

The ISU Grand Prix of Figure Skating Final

“THEY’RE not ready.” Kyoko-san had said it three times, and she was right. Forget a throw quad, Tom Alan was still so tense about throwing Erika after the accident a month earlier, even their throw triple was more miss than hit. “There hasn’t been enough time,” she had fretted.

“It is not time,” Nobuo Tsukino had countered. “It is goddamned concentration! Tom Alan,” he’d snapped. “Get your mind where it belongs!”

It had been—it was, the whole time. Skating… it was the only thing that had felt right, for days, ever since returning to Japan. And in a moment, they would know, all of them, if he was concentrating enough, if there’d been enough time, if they were in fact ready when they went into the throw triple Lutz in their short, in front of a capacity crowd on “away” ice that was supposed to feel like home.

The duo skated away from each other, and then came back. Erika’s gaze was reassuring. Her hair was pulled tight in a shiny black bun, her porcelain skin painted with a broad brush of color, her brown eyes outlined in dark, meticulous lines that caught Tom Alan’s stare. “You can do this,” it said. He nodded slightly.

His forearm found her waist, in the exact spot where the ties were tightest on the tan corset of her Christine-performing-in-“Don-Juan-Triumphant”-inspired finale costume from Phantom of the Opera. He put his other hand in the small of her back. “Go!” he said, propelling her into the air. The light in the arena caught the shimmer of the coin-like paillettes on the gold satin apron of her burgundy skirt. She crossed her arms across her breasts, over the white gathered top, pulled herself in tight, twirled three times in a blur, and came down on one foot.

“Yes!” Nobuo Tsukino cheered. The audience cried out too.

Tom Alan, dapper in his white tie and tails, flourished like that frigging swan from a different song. He stroked over to her, took her in another hold and bent her into an assisted layback spin. The audience roared—for a freakin’ spin, they roared! As the pair came to a stop for just a moment, stroking to one corner to begin their footwork segment, Tom Alan noticed all the signs, one in particular with a giant red heart with Tom Alan + Erika written in glitter. Sigh! “Do you have any idea how much you mean to the people of Japan?” He had to stop. Papa’s words should not be playing in my mind louder than the music. Not those words, anyway. Concentrate.

Brackets, Choctaws, Mohawks, swizzles, and twizzles, they sped diagonally across

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