Page 93 of Racing Hearts

“What does that mean?”

“You and Adrian,” she says. “You’re finally with someone. Falling in love. Experiencing the highs and lows that come from real, genuine affection and not that box-checking nonsense you did with the last guy. I was hoping that falling in love with Adrian would have changed your perspective a bit.”

My next breath stalls. “What? That’s not what’s happening.”

“No?”

“No. Nobody is ‘falling in love.’ We have an expiration date. Like you said, I’m being present.”

She blinks at me like there’s something caught in her mascara. “Being present doesn’t mean that you don’t have feelings for him.”

“Right, sure, but it does mean that I won’t end up heartbroken. I won’t be hurting while I’m racing at Pan Ams because I knew from the beginning that it would end. I’ve protected myself.”

Mom looks back at me with an expression that can only be described as pity. “You are such an intelligent person, Kath, but the world—life—they are not black and white. Not everything fits in a box with a neat label. It’s messy. It’s grayscale. It’s emotion. That’s true whether you want to see it or not.”

In the last few months I’ve gotten pretty good at understanding Adrian when he talks to me in cryptic code, but apparently these translation skills don’t extend to my mom. “Sorry, what?”

“It doesn’t matter what label you put on it or what you decided in advance,” she says quietly. “It will still hurt when it ends.”

A thick feeling rises up my throat. The world suddenly seems like it’s moving too fast, and Pan Ams is streaming toward me like a launch with a broken motor. I swallow again, trying to push that feeling back down. We’ve gotten derailed here. This conversation wasn’t supposed to be about me and it certainly wasn’t supposed to be about Adrian.

I cross my arms, square my shoulders, quell the tremble in my fingers.

“Does this mean you’re going to keep seeing Rob?” I ask.

She watches me for a long moment, lips pressed into a thin line. “Yes, I’m going to keep seeing Rob.”

“Fine,” I say, scooping up my bag. “But I don’t want to pick up the pieces when it all falls apart.”

Before she can respond, I fly upstairs to my room.

. . .

Mom’s words are still haunting me the next time I see Adrian.

The truth is I did think that the expiration date would make leaving him easier. As much as I hate it, I realize now that leaving Adrian is going to hurt. I’m going to miss the way he smiles encouragingly when I’m afraid to try something new, and the tingle of his high fives after I do it anyway. I’m going to miss the way he touches me, like he’s full of reverence, and the way my chin fits into the divot in his sternum. I’m going to miss the way he tastes like citrus and how he always presses a kiss to my forehead when he thinks I’m already asleep.

“You okay, Parker?” Adrian asks.

I blink up at him from the squat rack. Apparently, I’ve spent the last two minutes of rest staring at the middle distance between the barbell and the rubber flooring.

I swallow, but it’s like I’m trying to push down a mouthful of agave syrup.

“Uh, yeah,” I say, ducking under the bar and letting the cool metal settle across my shoulders. Thankfully we’re alone in here—the kids aren’t strength training today because they leave for Youth Nationals a few days after I land in Toronto. Rohan absolutely would have caught that awkward moment on camera. “I’m fine.”

He snorts. “Extremely convincing.”

“Just worrying about Pan Ams,” I say as I rise onto my tiptoes to lift the bar off the rack. It’s not that I don’t want to tell him how I’m feeling. But talking this through with him would be confusing and possibly hurtful. It also might give him the wrong idea and I don’t want to mislead him.

I drop into my first squat, trying to focus on my sets. The weight room has always been my sanctuary—a silent corner where the world makes sense. A place where every day, every moment, is organized methodically. Reps organized in sets. Sets organized in circuits. Predictable. Orderly.

Under Adrian’s careful watch, this weight room now smells of Lysol and rubber instead of sweat and rust. Rather than towers of mismatched bar plates shoved into corners, dumbbells and plates are organized by size in neat rows. I still love this place. But the best part of being here is Adrian, his presence, his enthusiastic confidence when I’m repping pull-ups, the way he yells in triumph when I let the barbell crash to the floor after a clean-jerk, the fire in his eyes when he urges me to finish just one more rep on the bench row and how my chest immediately clenches in response.

The weight room back in the training center is objectively better—cleaner, higher tech, more orderly. I need that place. I love that place. But it won’t have him.

My glutes burn lightly as I finish the set. I rack the weight, trying to avoid Adrian’s eye contact in the mirrors.

He slides to a seat on the bench across from me. “You want to talk about it?”