Page 67 of Racing Hearts

46 Days Until Pan Ams

When I wake, predawn light filters through Adrian’s shutters, casting the room in an indigo sheen. It’s the same cool light that has illuminated breakfasts spent standing in the kitchen, smoothies drunk on the way to the boathouse, an expanse of unbroken water, misty in the warming air. It’s the light of discipline and hard work. The light of my real life.

Carefully, I extricate myself from the sheets and hunt down my clothes. My sports bra lays discarded by the bedside. My yoga pants and tank top are still in a crumpled heap below the granite countertops. When I return to the bedroom fully dressed, Adrian’s chest rises and falls with the soft ease of sleep, his hair whispering against the pillowcase. I won’t see him at practice this morning—he’s going to a recruiting event in San Francisco today—so if I leave before he wakes, I’ll have a few hours to think about “next time” before we talk again.

I hunt through the living room until I find a pad of paper and a pen in the drawer under the coffee table. I scratch out a quick note, trying to keep my scrawl as legible as possible:

Thanks for an amazing day. Needed to change for practice. See you soon.

Kath

It’s true, but also purposefully neutral. Hopefully, it’ll also keep Adrian from worrying before I have a chance to sort through my feelings.

When I get to the boathouse an hour later, I expect to be the only one there. With Adrian away, the performance team has the morning off. Yet when I drop off the last creaky stair beside the bays, I find Peter running through a set of warm-up lunges underneath my beech-tree. He’s facing the pale expanse of water, watching the mist rise from it with intense concentration etched between his eyebrows. I observe him for a moment, thinking about a young teen girl who used to stretch in that same spot, feeling like she’d finally found a place where she could be herself.

“What are you doing here?” I ask, stopping next to his shoulder.

Peter startles and his glasses slip down the bridge of his nose. He shoves them back up and tugs his earbuds out.

“Sorry to sneak up on you,” I say. “You didn’t want to take the morning off?”

“The other guys are but…” He chews at his bottom lip, gaze sailing toward the long expanse of water before pinging back to me. “We only have a month until Nationals.”

I nod, because that’s explanation enough. Youth Nationals are the weekend after Pan Ams, so I have a rough idea of how much urgency Peter feels right now. I shrug my bag higher and motion toward the bays. “Right. Good. Well, I’ll just…”

“Hey, do you—” Peter starts, then ducks his head. He rubs at the back of his neck, looking somewhere over my shoulder. “Do you want to, maybe, paddle together? Today? I’ll do whatever workout you want and I know I won’t be able to quite keep up, but…If you’re up for it.”

I smile. “Yeah, okay, then.”

“Yeah? You’re not just humoring me or something?”

“Nah, it’ll be good to have someone to pace me. I’ll give you a head start on the intervals so we can end at the same time.”

Peter’s lips crack into the widest smile I’ve seen on him yet.

Twenty minutes later, we cruise out from the docks and, from the moment I dip my oars into the water, I feel good. Strong. My muscles respond to my intentions with an unexpected energy. My lungs feel clear and weightless, and my shell slices toward our line of buoys as effortlessly as a butcher’s knife running through paper.

Peter starts our first interval fifteen seconds before me and I push hard to catch him, each stroke prying through the water in rhythmic progression until I overtake his bow just at the end of our row of buoys.

“Next one,” I tell him as I let my blades skim across the surface in a bumpy swish.

Peter pushes up his glasses with a shoulder and grins back. “Give me twelve seconds next time.”

“I gave you fifteen on this one.”

He pulls on one oar to start turning his bow back around. “Sometimes I do my best work when things feel impossible.”

I nod my approval. “Twelve it is.”

My watch screams twelve seconds after Peter starts his interval. I hit my first stroke hard and fast. Although Peter will have a good view of me as I race toward him, I decide to avoid looking for his stern when I check my line. Still, I hear the splash and groan of his strokes as I gain on him. An image of my bow ball coursing up the side of his hull flits through my mind and I drive my legs harder, pushing past the initial flood of acid that already has my blood feeling like it’s on fire. My shoulders burn. Peter’s stroke rate picks up as we near the finish. With a few meters to go, I pour on the gas, pumping my legs and core as hard as they’ll take me.

We hit the end buoys. I glance to my side. My oarlocks are nearly even with his, but not quite. Peter won that one.

“Very nice,” I say.

He can barely contain his smile through heaving breaths. “Again?”

The sun is high in the sky by the time we coast back toward the docks. The inlet radiates harsh light, and a mix of sweat and briny water has darkened my shirt. It’s rarely warmer than temperate in Berkeley, even in the summertime, but today is unusually hot.