Page 20 of Don't Brake My Heart
My phone buzzed and I picked it up to see a message from Lori:Urgh, I should have known my idiot brother was behind this. She’d sent a picture, a still from the race footage. When I tapped on the picture, a spluttering gasp rose up in my throat. The incident – and Colin’s words – were beginning to make sense.
‘What the hell is this? Some kind of prank, right?’ I turned the phone around to show him.
With a groan, he hung his head, rubbing a hand over his hair.
The still clearly showed Colin standing at the side of the road as the bikes whipped past, holding up a cardboard sign that read:Go Leesa.
Chapter 8
Leesa
I still wasn’t sure how he’d made me agree to be friends. When I woke up from my still very jetlagged sleep, I wasn’t even sure what I’d agreed to. Maybe I’d given him the green light to prank me, which was a scary prospect. I certainly remembered he wanted me to prank him back, which would take some thought.
I’d managed some extra internet searches last night and discovered his middle name was Valerio, from the Latin, meaning ‘strong’ or ‘healthy’. I tried not to admit it suited him, or that there was an affinity between us, our families and names that spanned cultures. He’d put that idea in my head, along with his insistence that we were friends.
He’d probably meant a friend with benefits.
I could still remember him as a pimply 19-year-old graduating to the senior team for the first time. Now I had to record every aspect of his existence for a job, while ignoring the little details that werenotpart of it, like the way his hair caught the evening light and glowed reddish. It had a wave in it and needed cutting. He had a surgery scar on his right forearm and I guessed he bit his nails. And I was the only idiot interested in that.
I had two weeks of training camp to amass as much content as I could to drip-feed during the Tour, when I wouldn’t have as much access to him. Luckily, the man was disgustingly photogenic, even with a dirtbag moustache. My first few days passed in a blur of hotel breakfasts, training rides and an ice bath under the mountain sun, where Colin and his teammate Jarin Nelson had traded barbed banter about shrivelling private parts that made me want to apologise to my hard drive.
At least it helped temper the inappropriateinterestI’d suddenly developed. I was relieved I’d never noticed before. I couldn’t imagine how mortifying it would have been to moon over him in the breakfast room in front of my teammates.
Doortje would be clutching her stomach with laughter if she could see me now, spending my time watching him through my phone screen, watching him in real life and then going back to my room to watch him on my laptop as I processed and uploaded the content.
On the third day of my assignment, he was spending hours hooked up to various machines, half-naked, to measure his performance on a stationary bike. Lucky for the sponsor, their name was stamped right above his butt and was impossible to miss even when the only things he had on were skintight shorts and a heartrate monitor strapped around his chest.
The testing brought back visceral memories. I’d been pricked and prodded and pushed to my limits too, but not with the intensity that the entire team hovered around Colin. He was a test subject, a science experiment, where the results would ultimately show themselves at the end of the gruelling Tour de France. Except there were too many variables for the team to hope to control – not least their test subject himself, who was still decorated with patches of angry road rash and red scabs, to add to the criss-crossing puckered scars on his knees.
Annoying how scars on a man were intriguing, but mine were something to hide with pantyhose. I hated pantyhose.
‘What’s the hardest thing about cycling?’
I had been admiring his tight obliques, decorated with the dark compass tattoo and glistening with sweat, and had to rip my gaze from his torso when he asked me the sudden question.
‘What?’
His lips twitched in a smile. ‘The road!’ he ground out, chuckling when I finally realised he was making a joke. ‘When are you hitting the road with me, Kubicka?’ he asked, his voice gravelly with effort.
‘Hopefully never,’ I mumbled, keeping my eyes pointedly on my phone.
‘You scared?’
Terrified, for a host of reasons, none of which I was going to discuss with him, so I rolled my eyes instead.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll be gentle with you.’
I considered telling him off for flirting with me on camera, but I seemed to have swallowed my tongue. One of the soigneurs, the vital support staff who looked after us, interrupted anyway to take a sample for lactate testing, pricking his ear. Colin didn’t even flinch as he kept up a recovery pace on the bike, didn’t react to the drop of blood landing on his shoulder, before the soigneur wiped it away.
Lactate testing was pretty gross all round. It measured the point at which overuse of muscles started to turn the blood acidic, making fatigue inevitable – and it felt like hitting a brick wall. I had enough memories of that feeling to last a lifetime and the stakes were so much higher for Colin. If he blew up, so did the chances for the whole team.
I tried not to look at his results, terrified I’d accidentally blurt them out to no one in particular, after I’d signed the NDA, but what glimpses I caught were some incredible numbers. In my head, he was the team clown, often the second-choice lead rider, with some famous blow-ups as well as wins, but it seemed he’d earned the support of the team with hard work as well as raw talent.
Perhaps it was fair enough if he let off steam in his free time, given everything he put into the session. By the end, he had sweat pouring off him, his hair dark and curling. Finally, on the warm-down, he let go of the handlebars and sat up, accepting a water bottle from a soigneur. After taking a long drink, where suddenly my world seemed to shrink to the image of his square jaw and the bob of his Adam’s apple, he lifted the bottle and squeezed water onto himself, spraying his face and then his chest, and shaking off like a dog.
Watching him glow, all slippery muscle and stamina, fired up all of my senses. My brain, which usually never shut up, was happily occupied cataloguing every detail of him as I hid behind my work phone, taking footage.
He shot me a sidelong glance. ‘Did you get all that?’
