But instead, I was just broken.

After everything that had happened between us, all of the push and pull that we’d fought and shoved through until this point, I’d thought we were past this. Yesterday, that work and fight felt justified. She’d given me real emotion and connection, and she hadn’t held back. The metaphorical parking lot had been entered, and the “Don’t Back Up Or Die” spikes were fully engaged.

I’d read the Warning Sign, but I couldn’t stop myself from being pushed back across them without consent.

My emotions were shredded nonetheless.

I understood the things that were at stake and the pressure she felt to live up to each and every one of them.

I got it.

I just wanted and hoped and believed the solution was going to come from a different direction than this.

My heart ached at the lack of a goodbye, but I knew with the way I was feeling, it probably was for the best.

He shoved a nearly identical agreement meant for me in front of the other one, and I was helpless to do anything to stop it.

“I’ll sign,” I barely whispered, the effort to squeeze any words through my throat, let alone those, greater than any physical challenge I’d ever faced.

I grabbed a pen from his desk, took the piece of paper, and did it without looking back as a furious and unrelenting sting attacked my nose. My tongue felt too big for my mouth, and I choked on the thickness of my saliva, but I ignored it.

The longer I lingered the harder it’d be, and if there was one thing I was interested in doing, it was making things easier for Callie.

“Good,” Frank muttered as I finished, grabbing the paper from my hands and putting it behind him on his desk. “Now get the hell out of my gym.”

“Gladly, sir.”

I pictured my dad’s hand on my shoulder, guiding me through one of the toughest moments I’d ever faced as a man.

A moment where I wanted more than anything to let all my anger out through punches and slurs and the behavior of a boy.

A moment where, for Callie, I needed to be a—

Good man.

It took twenty-six years and basically no looking—but I’d found one.

He’d practically fallen straight into my lap, and what a good thing that was since I had absolutely no time or prospects for meeting him or anyone else otherwise.

I was feeling good as I walked into the gym that afternoon, three batches of cookies baked contributing to a healthy amount of raw dough consumed.

It supposedly wasn’t good for you, and my father certainly didn’t approve, but I’d enjoyed every second of it.

Glancing back at Nik’s empty spot in the parking lot, I wondered what was keeping him.

As the glass door swung closed behind me, I hitched my bag higher on my shoulder and headed straight toward the locker room to put my things away.

A few of the homeschooled gymnasts were scattered about the apparatuses, pointing and flexing and running at full speed depending on where they were.

Just when I got to the edge of the half wall that separated the front-of-house from the floor, my dad’s head popped out of his office door.

“Cal?”

His face was an unreadable mask.

“Yeah, Dad?” I asked, wondering how he’d known I was here so quickly.

“Come in here, would you?” he told me while pretending to ask.

Eager to get it over with and knowing Nik wasn’t there, I changed directions and headed directly into his office. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted and the last thing I felt like doing was having a sit down with my dad. My good mood would surely be ruined by all of the things I should be doing.

He shut the door behind me, gestured that I should sit down, and leaned up against the wood edge of his desk.

The fake leather of the chair I sank into was warm to the touch, and the air in the room felt oppressively hot.

My heartbeat sped up to compensate for the extra energy used to cool myself down, and I had to choke my way through several shallow breaths.

His eyes were watchful and assessing, and I got the distinct impression that his mood for this particular talk was anything but warm and fuzzy.

“What’s going on?” I asked when he didn’t say anything.

“Why don’t you tell me, Calia,” he said, using the full version of my name how parents tended to do when you were in trouble.

Searching my mind, I tried to put together some sort of a progress report, but it was hard when I didn’t know what I was looking for. “I don’t—”

“Sleeping with your coach!” he interrupted with a boom.

I shot back in my chair as though I’d been slapped.

While I sat stagnant, tongue-tied with surprise and the absolute worst kind of dread, he was the one to find his voice again first.

“Do you have any idea what kind of scandal this would be?” His voice was quiet in volume but sinister in intensity and meaning.

I tried to form words, to defend myself and Nik, but nothing I had to say happened fast enough.

“You’d be ruined,” he declared in my silent void. “The media would turn it into a fucking circus. You’d be slut-shamed and he’d be labeled an opportunist weasel. You might even be kicked off the Olympic team for misconduct, I don’t know.”

They couldn’t do that. Could they?

I didn’t know the exact rules, but I couldn’t imagine that a consensual relationship between two of-age adults was grounds for legal action. But the truth was, I really didn’t know. I knew what I thought everyone would think all along, that it was inappropriate and a precedent for crossing a very technically tricky line, but I had no clue when it came to the actual ramifications of our relationship from a rulebook standpoint.

My mind reeled and roiled, and my stomach’s behavior wasn’t far behind.

I felt sick, like I could ralph right there, right on the floor at his feet, and when I thought it couldn’t get worse it did.

Fear, foreboding and powerful, washed over me at the realization that Nik’s absence was so out of the ordinary, so unlike him, so something he wouldn’t do.

Not today, not any day, and not unless he hadn’t had some kind of choice.

“What’d you do to make him go?” I whispered, knowing it had to be true.

Knowing he wouldn’t have left unless he’d been forced to. Counting on it and waiting for confirmation because I needed it.

“Nothing.” My dad’s voice was like a whip, meant to lash and sting with every strike. “I explained the options, and he chose to go.”

“No,” I whispered, not believing that everything we’d been through, everything I knew about him, and all the things he’d helped me learn about myself could culminate in something as hypocritical as this.

He would have spoken to me. I knew he would have.

I shook my head, swallowed roughly, and blinked at a rapid pace. “He would have—”

A paper landed in my lap, unwelcome, just as my dad’s words overpowered my own.

“He signed an agreement, Cal. No contact with you whatsoever until the games and any subsequent contracts are through.”

I shook my head as I looked at his name, staring at me mockingly from the bottom.

My dad softened his voice and squatted down in front of me.

“Look at it this way. He obviously cares about your future a little, agreeing to start over so you won’t have to.”

Disbelief and hysteria swirled just under the surface until I couldn’t stand to sit still any longer.

When I jumped up, it forced my dad out of the way, his back hitting the edge of his desk, but that didn’t slow me down as I grabbed for my phone from my bag and pulled it out frantically.

I jogged out of the office without another word, my father calling my name behind me as I went and my hands shaking violently all the way.