“You were incredible,” I admitted immediately, painting her face with surprise and bewilderment. “If you were like that on everything, I wouldn’t need to be here.”

She rolled her eyes, their warmth cooling a little with resentment. “You just had to bring it back to the negative side, huh?”

Uncrossing my arms from my chest and reaching out, I grabbed her shoulder gently and shook amiably back and forth. “No. That was absolutely not meant to be a dig. You’re incredible to watch on beam. Comfortable and sure and completely settled inside of your skin.”

Just her eyes smiled as I rounded the conversational corner to my point.

“You don’t look that way anywhere else,” I stated matter-of-factly. “And watching it just now…I couldn’t take my eyes off of you.”

She shrugged sheepishly at the compliment, unsure how to handle it. A flush stole across her features and her hands fidgeted in front of her.

“It’s always been that way. I’m just comfortable here.” One corner of her dusty pink lips tipped up in thought. “Happy, I guess.”

My eyes narrowed, and my curiosity piqued.

“And you’re not happy on Bars, Vault, and Floor?”

Her spine straightened as her admission cleared the fog, and her face slammed closed once more.

“That’s not what I said.”

I wanted to delve into the reasoning behind everything she’d said and the sensitive way with which she reacted.

But raucous sounds from behind me interrupted and curtailed my thoughts.

“1, 2, 3, GO GYMSTARS!” we heard screamed from the floor. The group made a clean break but dispersed unevenly from there, some heading for the locker room and others the front or the bathroom up front.

For me, it was a cue of opportunity. What opportunity, I wasn’t sure. I kept telling myself I just wanted to get to know her better so I could be a better coach, but each statement held less and less professional conviction and, instead, built an abundance of uninvited personal investment.

Knowing didn’t seem to stop me though.

“You want to hang out tonight while I tumble?”

Her head whipped back to me, the long glossy tail of her hair cutting through the air like an expertly wielded sword.

“What?”

“I just asked if you want to—”

She shook her head rapidly. “I know what, I guess. I meant why. Why are you asking me to stay?”

I didn’t have a good answer. I knew I shouldn’t and at the same time I couldn’t stop myself. Instead, I shrugged. “Because I can’t think of a good enough reason not to.”

The line was getting slicker by the minute, the feel of it slipping out from underneath my dangerously treading feet oddly enjoyable. As a guy who lived most of his life on the opposite side of that line, I couldn’t even begin to understand what was happening.

All I knew was that I liked it.

She searched the gym with her eyes and landed on the locker room. Back they came to me once more, and then back to the locker room.

This time their movement was slower, but it was infinitely more confident.

An unhurried smile crept onto her normally taut lips as she teased, “Are you any good?”

I couldn’t stop my cheeks from lifting as I replied, weaving my head back and forth between my shoulders as I did. “A couple people are better.”

“Just a couple?” she pushed as if she knew.

I narrowed my eyes, trying to see the proof that she’d looked into me written somewhere legible and obvious, but settled for a brisk nod when the search came up predictably empty.

Straight white teeth cut a soft line into the line of her bottom lip. They weren’t plump or overfilled. They were just normal. And plenty damn pretty.

“Then I guess I’ll stay.”

“Yeah?”

“Yep. I’m gonna need you to prove your skill to me.”

White hot lust shot down my spine and into my balls at the double entendre in her words. I knew she hadn’t meant it. She didn’t even realize the blunder herself.

But my dick had been noticing lots. The innuendo and her body and the way a touch to her shoulder fired my nerves better than the well-placed touch of an experienced woman.

“I…Ah…Um…Yes…Okay,” I stuttered. In actuality, I was impressed. As much as I’d struggled, my brain had done the talking despite the death grip my dick had on my voice box.

Shaking my head and my thoughts, I tried to talk myself off the ledge of self-sabotage and back to the land of reality.

This woman was a gymnast I coached. I was her coach, for fuck’s sake. It would be totally douchey of me to exert my power and influence as a figure of trust in her life in order to get in her pants.

Leotard.

Fuck. No.

I wasn’t getting inside of anything.

“Nik?” she called, focusing my attention on something other than the brain versus biology war being fought in my head. My brain used logic and strategy and well-placed task forces to talk me around to the right side of battle, but strategy didn’t mean much when biology bombed the living hell out of my synapses.

“Sorry. What’d you say?”

“Ummmm,” she said, sounding perplexed. “Nothing. Just your name.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“For the last minute and a half.”

Well that’s embarrassing.

“Sorry, I was…thinking.”

Explicit thinking was still thinking.

“Alright, well, everyone else is packing up and getting ready to leave, so I’m gonna go change.”

“You’re not going to tumble with me?”

“What? No! I’m not even in the same league as you.” Covering, she added, “I wouldn’t imagine I am anyway. I’ll just watch.”

“Come on, tumble with me.”

“No—”

“Callie.”

“Nik.”

“Callie.”

“Nik.”

“Callie,” I said once more, knowing that if you held out long enough, people normally became annoyed enough to give in.

“Okay! Fine! I won’t change!”

The last stragglers of the night looked on with avid interest as they crossed the floor to the exit.

“Yelling is kind of becoming our thing, you know?” I offered, ignoring their nameless faces and smiling at hers.

“Shut up,” she snipped playfully.

“No, really. I don’t even think they’ll call us by name soon. We’ll just be ‘those people who yell’.”

She tilted her head forward and raised a brow in disgust.

A warning.

I kept talking anyway, standing proudly with my hands on my hips. “The Yellertons.”

I stumbled and tripped, the result of her shove catching me off guard.

“What?” she asked when I looked at her with surprised hostility. “Now they can call us ‘the people who shove each other’.”

“Cute,” I laughed, adjusting my hair by pushing it out of my face.

“One of us has to be,” she poked in jest, shoving a finger in my direction as if plotting a poke in my chest.

“Whatever,” I mocked, hands to my forehead in the shape of a ‘w’.

“Go change!” she demanded, throwing her hands forward in the direction of the bathroom. “Unless you’ve changed your mind and don’t intend to tumble?”

I threw up both hands in useless defense and backed slowly toward the exit. “Alright, alright. Relax. I have to go get my bag.”

An unexpected chill hit me as I shoved through the door into the warm, muggy air of a Southern Georgia summer night. I could hear the echoes of my flirtation following me the entire walk to my motorcycle, and my euphoria skirted the edge of dismay and back again.

It felt good to want something.

But why did I have to want something I shouldn’t?

Frustrated and flustered, I snapped open the saddlebag in a rush, grabbed my bag, and nearly slammed it shut.

My feet itched to jog on the way back, but I forced them to walk, the anticipation roiling rigorously between sour and sweet in my gut with each step.

The door felt lighter on the swing to enter, but I didn’t seek out the cause. Instead I headed straight for the bathroom and changed quickly, doing all of the necessary taping and preparation that I always did.