Winter Circuit (The Show Circuit -- Book 2) (2 page)

“I’m not sure that’s true.”

“Okay, maybe they do, if one transfers to the other’s school.”

“Maybe the problem here is not Chris and you being together, but who you are apart from Chris?”

I looked out the one tiny window at the gray snow and sky outside. Who was I away from Chris anymore? Was I that girl before Vermont again? No, I couldn’t ever go back to being her. That was impossible. So then who was I?

Chapter 2

Immediately, instead of feeling happy, I felt intensely worried. He’d said he had a busy day. Why was he calling? Was something wrong with Logan? Or worse, was he calling to break up with me? I shouldn’t have been considering this as an option. I had no reason to believe he was breaking up with me, but lately I often found myself imagining scenarios where he would tell me he couldn’t do the long distance thing, or he’d slept with someone else. More often than not, in my imagination, that someone else was Mary Beth. It was kind of like imagining your own funeral. Imagining things going wrong with Chris must have served some emotional purpose that I didn’t know about. As I answered the phone, I tried to make a mental note to ask Dr. S about it next time we met.

“Hey,” I said, making my voice upbeat. I never let Chris know how down I was. Whenever I talked to him I raised my voice those all-important few octaves. I filled my texts with happy-face emoticons. I forced myself to smile when we FaceTimed. He didn’t ask all that much about college life—maybe because he didn’t know what to ask since he’d never gone to college himself, choosing the horse-life out of high school instead. I might casually mention a paper due or a fake party attended just to keep up the front.

“I thought you were super busy today,” I said. “I didn’t expect to hear from you.”

“I know. I’ve only got a few seconds, but I had to call you because I have great news.”

“Yeah?”

I hoped his great news—about a new horse, a great jump session with Logan or Arkos, a new client, maybe even a new sponsor—would fill me up enough to get me through the day.

“I’m coming to visit you!” Chris said.

“Seriously? Why? When?”

“I hadn’t wanted to tell you and get your hopes up but I’d put out a few feelers back in October about maybe doing a clinic. I just heard from one of the barns—Maple Valley? It’s in Littleton. They want me to do a clinic the second weekend of December. They’re paying my gas and it’s not bad money. They were going to put me up at a hotel near the barn but I said I’d take care of it. I made us a reservation at a place in Cambridge—The Charles Hotel? Have you heard of it? I think it looks nice.”

I had vaguely heard of it and it didn’t matter what kind of hotel it was. I would stay anywhere with Chris. I guess a tiny part of me wished he’d at least mentioned the possibility of staying in my dorm room. Even if it was half-hearted like, “I know I could stay with you but I think this will be much better… We’ll get to be alone together. No roommate.”

But I got over his not mentioning it pretty quickly. Because he was coming to Boston. In two weeks. In two weeks we’d be together again. We’d look into each other’s eyes. We’d have dinner together. We’d talk in person. We’d have sex.

“Isn’t that great?” Chris said.

“Oh my God, so great. I barely have words it’s so great. I can’t wait.”

“Me neither,” Chris said.

I heard someone calling him in the background. It sounded like Dale, his barn manager. I wondered how Dale felt about Chris arranging this clinic and visit to me. It wasn’t like Chris would be missing anything during the second weekend of December. December was the one down-month before everyone headed South. Sure, if you really wanted you could find grand prix classes to compete in. There was a pre-circuit in Wellington and classes in other parts of the South. The European indoor shows were still in full gear with Olympia in London and Mechelen in Belgium. If Chris still had the top horses he’d had at the beginning of summer, he might have been competing abroad. But his number one horse, Nova, had gotten hurt at Devon, and then both Nova and his other top horse, Titan, had been pulled out from him by his sponsor, millionaire tycoon Harris Delaney.

I was definitely a contributing factor in Harris pulling his horses, since my former best friend Zoe had posted a fake online journal, supposedly written by me, that detailed my sex life with Chris. I’d learned that top grand prix riders had to have impeccable reputations—or at least that some owners tolerated debauchery more than others did. Because, of course, where there were top classes, big prize money, cocky men, and pretty girls there was debauchery aplenty. Harris might have also pulled his horses because his second wife told him to, after Chris declined her advances. But either way, by the end of the summer, Chris was down to two horses—one of which was my Logan, a recently reformed children’s jumper with possible potential.

“Sounds like you have to go,” I told Chris. I didn’t want to have him tell me he had to go and the longer I stayed on the phone with him, the more likely it was that I wouldn’t be able to hide my true state of emotions.

Two weeks. I had to hold it together for two weeks and then I’d see Chris.

Chapter 3

From looking at her timeline you wouldn’t necessarily know that she and Chris had been a couple. And not just any couple but the circuit’s young royal couple—show jumping’s Will and Kate pre-marriage and babies. It would have been a lot worse if Mary Beth were a regular twenty-something woman. Then there would be the obligatory photos of her and Chris, lips plastered together, or totally drunk. There would have been the inane postings of “Feeling grateful for my boyfriend today, who always brings me my favorite coffee” and the heart emoticons. But Mary Beth and Chris were professional athletes and so their Facebook pages and Instagram accounts were for promoting an important, successful, and mature image.

Mary Beth came across as pretty, talented, and driven. And looking at that persona as I sat hunched over on my bed, tablet on my lap, blanket pulled half over my head, made me feel even more worthless. Why would Chris be interested in me when he could have her? Everything that had happened between us in Vermont seemed fake, like it was a figment of my imagination. Or at the very least like it was only possible because Mary Beth had been away in Europe and Chris had been desperate. Maybe he’d picked me on purpose. Maybe I was just the kind of disposable interval girlfriend he needed until he and Mary Beth realized they couldn’t live without each other a minute longer. If he had dated another grand prix rider, when it ended he would have still had to see her every day. But with me, it could be over and he’d never have to see me again. It wasn’t like I had a role in the sport. So maybe he was coming to Boston to tell me that he didn’t see any future for us. Maybe he wanted to do it in person so he didn’t feel like an asshole for dumping me over the phone. He could clear his conscience and head to Florida ready to get back together with Mary Beth.

My roommate Van startled me out of my stalker-depressive behavior when she opened the door and pretty much fell onto her bed. It was eleven o’clock in the morning—she’d been out all night.

Without sitting up she said, “You’re doing it again, aren’t you?”

“Doing what?”

“Looking at her page. You’re sitting there, sucked into the vortex of jealousy over someone he’s not even dating. You are obsessing over a self-created non-drama. I can feel the vibe in the room and it’s toxic.”

Van and I got along well, even though we led completely different lifestyles and she probably thought mine pathetic. But she was never mean about it. She seemed to have a soft spot for me, like I was an injured creature she’d found out in the woods but didn’t quite know how to care for.

It seemed to me that there were two kinds of kids at Tufts—the kind that never left campus and formed their college life around frat parties and the dining hall and at the very most ventured into Davis Square for dinners out or frozen yogurt. Then there was the kind like Van, who spent as much of their time as possible off campus. Van attended what classes she had to and then rode the subway all over Boston, mostly to hang out in cool coffee shops and hear indie bands. Van wasn’t exactly a groupie because she didn’t follow just one group, but she did spend all her time seeing indie shows. The less discovered the band, the better. Secret shows were her Holy Grail and if she wasn’t in Boston she could be found hopping on the train, the Chinese Bus, or into the dilapidated incense-smelling car of a near stranger to Providence, Portland, or Manhattan to catch a show. She had dated a lead singer in a band but from what I could tell that had ended.

“You’re right. I’m obsessing,” I told Van. She was perhaps the only one I could tell the truth to. I had nothing at stake with her. It didn’t matter what she thought of me and I also knew she wouldn’t judge me. She didn’t care what people did, as long as it made them happy. But it didn’t take a genius to see that I wasn’t happy. I couldn’t even tell Dr. S exactly how bad things had gotten because I was worried she might do something extreme like insist on calling my parents.

Van sat up and surveyed me with bleary eyes. She’d probably only slept a few hours on a friend’s couch, if at all. She had a short haircut—probably chopped by another friend who professed to have experience with hair cutting. It was uneven in places and a part of it was dyed blue. It would have looked awful on someone else but it worked on Van.

“Okay, you’ve got to stop. Put down the iPad. We need to save you from yourself.”

I did what she said and placed the iPad next to me. “He’s coming, actually.”

“Chris? Here?”

“Well, not here, not like to our room. But he’s coming to Boston. He’s giving a clinic nearby—a clinic’s kind of like a master class or something like that. He got us a hotel room in Cambridge.”

“That’s so great,” Van said. “But—” She stopped herself.

“What?”

“You kind of look like shit.”

“What about you?” I said. “You probably haven’t slept in days.”

Van tossed back her head, shaking her angular pixie cut. “But it kind of works for me, you know? You, not so much. You need to clean up. Get your shit together before you see him.”

“You’re right.” Of course she was right. I had been able to pretend to Chris on the phone but I wouldn’t be able to do it in person if I didn’t pull myself together. And if I didn’t pull myself together for his visit, then he’d most certainly be running straight back to Mary Beth.

There was a small nail salon, Kim’s Nails, next to the hair place and I decided to have my nails done too. Picking out my color I couldn’t help but think of Zoe. For the first few weeks of the summer circuit, we’d been best friends and she’d taken me along with her to get her nails done. The wild child that she was, she’d picked Come-to-Bed-Red. Being the naïve, inexperienced virgin that I’d been, I’d picked a light pink color with some sickly sweet name that I couldn’t remember now. I felt a small stab of pain thinking about Zoe because by the end of the summer, she had betrayed Chris and me. I knew that it wasn’t all about me, or Chris. That she had heaps of problems, stemming from growing up on the circuit. An orphan rider, Chris had called her at one point. She drank way too much—she was probably an alcoholic. She was a sad case, but that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt me that I had lost one of the only close friends I’d ever had. It did.

Now, here I was, getting my nails done alone. The only friend I’d made at school was Van and that wasn’t really a true friendship. What few friends I’d had in high school, I’d pretty much lost touch with. We’d never been close anyway. I hearted their posts on Instagram and occasionally mustered a comment or two, but it was clear they were doing what we all were supposed to do at college—grow, bloom, achieve. While I was shrinking, freezing, floundering.

I picked a purple hue—it wasn’t Come-to-Bed-Red, but it wasn’t sickly sweet pink. Maybe the purple would help me channel someone else.

My last stop was a small boutique clothing store with an eco bent—Gentle Goods—where I bought a really cute sweater. Maybe spa and retail therapy actually worked because I felt better than I’d felt in weeks as I walked back to campus.