Fireworks: A Holiday Bad Boy Romance (67 page)

“I was just having an off
day,” he says. “Don’t worry about it.”

“You know,” I tease, “for
someone who’s been skating as long as you have, it’s pretty hilarious to see
you crash out repeatedly on something so basic.”

“Who says it’s basic?” he
asks. “If it weren’t for that vert section of the park, I wouldn’t have access
to a vert ramp at all. Have you ever tried to roll in on a vert ramp? It’s
harder than it looks.”

“Oh my god,” I say,
covering my mouth. “You can’t drop in.”

“Shh!” he says, putting
his finger to his lips and hunching forward like we’re talking nuclear secrets.
“It’s not a big deal,” he says. “I’m working on it and I’m going to have it all
down in time for the competition.”

“You really can’t?” I
ask. “I was half-joking.”

He takes a few seconds to
weigh his options.

“Are you going to eat any
of that?” he asks finally, pointing to one of my plates. “What is that,
anyway?”

I sigh.

*
                   
*
                   
*

“This is humiliating,”
Ian says as we’re walking up to the park.

“Well, you’re the one
that brought your board,” I tell him.

“Yeah,” he says, “I was
going to come here and practice after we met up and everything. I just wasn’t
expecting to have an audience when I did.”

“There’s nobody here,” I
tell him.

It’s actually kind of
strange to see the park deserted this early. The sun is setting and nobody ever
bothered putting up lights around the park, but with the street lights in the
distance, there’s still just enough light to see by.

“You meant me,” I
chuckle, “didn’t you?”

“I’d rather nobody see me
dropping in until I can actually learn to come out of it,” he says.

As much fun as I’m having
with Ian on this, I can’t imagine how terrified he must be to be this close,
but doomed to fail. Even if he gets perfect scores in the street competition,
if he can’t drop in, that’s it. Game over.

“Why don’t you just try
dropping in once and I’ll see if I can tell where the problem is,” I tell him.

He’s looking at me like
I’m telling him to kill his cat.

“You know, just because
we’ve got our questions for the interviews and everything doesn’t mean that we
can just—” he starts, but I think he realizes about halfway through this is
just something he needs to do. Either that, or he’s figured out that no matter
what he says, I’m going to pester him until he goes through with it anyway.
“All right,” he says. “I’ll do it, but I’ve had enough people laughing at me
for not being able to do this, and I really don’t need any more negative
reinforcement.”

“You know, negative
reinforcement isn’t actually what you think it is,” I tell him. “When you add
something to a scenario, even punishment, it’s still considered positive
reinforcement because you’re adding. If you take something away from a person,
that’s called negative reinforcement, and it occurs to me that none of that is
really that important right now.” I look up at the spot where he’s supposed to
drop in, and I’m just glad I don’t have to do it.

Still, he’s on the cusp
of going pro. This is something he should really have in his toolbox if he
expects to do well as a pro skater.

“Do you want me to climb
up there and observe or do it down here?” I ask.

“It really doesn’t
matter, does it?” he asks and walks past me. For an instant, I think he’s upset
at me, but as he gets to the top and looks down, it’s clear what emotion he’s
feeling right now. It’s fear.

“All right,” I tell him.
“Let’s see what you’re doing and let’s see if we can’t figure out a way to do
it better.”

“Helpful,” he says.
“Ready?”

“I’m ready when you are,”
I tell him.

He takes one more look at
the slope and gets his board ready, the tail on the lip, and I’m hoping that my
years of watching skate competitions live and on television have prepared me to
be able to dissect what he’s doing and tell him how to fix it.

“All right,” he says and
he puts his other foot on the board.

What happens next doesn’t
really compute in my head. I see him leaning forward, I see him crouching like
I’ve seen other skaters and then, about halfway down, something I can’t even
see goes wrong and he comes off his board, managing to stay on his feet and
running out of it.

His face is already red
and I can feel his frustration from over here, but I honestly don’t even know
what happened.

“Any thoughts?” he asks.

“Do it again,” I tell
him. “I need to figure out what went wrong and it happened too fast the first
time.”

“What makes you think
it’s going to happen slower the second time?” he asks. “Camera phone and a slow
motion replay?”

“Now I know what to look
for,” I tell him. “We can start taking videos and breaking them down, but don’t
you think we’d just end up spending all our time on the film and none of it on
the actual work that’s going to change things. Don’t you want to get this right
for the competition?”

“Of course I do,” he
says. “I was just hoping to be able to do this on my own time and without
anyone to see just how bad I am at it.”

“Give it another run,” I
tell him. “I bet I’ll have a better idea after this next one.”

He’s shaking his head,
but he climbs back up to the top anyway.

This is one of the things
that really drew me to skating in the first place: The determination. I’m
convinced that it’s impossible to be a successful skater without that
particular personality trait.

“Ready?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I call back.

I’m watching more closely
this time. Whatever happened, it happened when he was about halfway down the
ramp.

His board’s in position
and he’s leaning forward, only this time, he loses his nerve just as the wheels
are coming down on the ramp and he freefalls the fourteen or fifteen feet to
the ground.

Oddly enough, his second
attempt does seem to take longer than his first, but I think that’s only
because he’s on his way toward a tremendously hard fall and there’s nothing I
can do about it.

It looks like he tries to
tuck and roll as he comes down on the hard ground, and he surprisingly is on
his feet less than a second later, but it looks like he’s gone straight from
frustrated to pissed as he tracks down his board, slams his foot on the tail,
catches it and starts stomping back toward the ramp.

“Hold on,” I tell him.

“What?” he asks.

“You’re hurt,” I answer.

He looks down. His pants
are torn just above the knee and there’s a pretty decent cut from which he’s
bleeding pretty steady.

“Fuck,” he says. “Well
that sucks.”

“Are you all right?” I
ask.

“I’m fine,” he says. “I
don’t even know what happened that time.”

He starts walking again
like he’s going to go for another run, but he’s leaving a trail of blood and I
can only see the situation growing worse if we don’t take care of it.

“No,” I tell him. “We
need to get that wound cleaned up and make sure you’re not going to need
stitches. You don’t want it to get infected, do you?”

He groans.

“This was such a bad
idea,” he says. “I don’t know how I let you talk me into this.”

“Hey, just be glad I’m
here to talk you out of going back up there or who knows what kind of gash
you’d end up with,” I tell him.

It takes a minute, but I
finally convince him to postpone the drop-in practice or whatever we’re calling
it and get where we can get a better look at the laceration. The only caveat is
that he insists we go to his house, as he says it’s closer.

We start walking, and I
don’t know if the wound really isn’t hurting him or if he’s trying to put on a
brave face, because he’s not limping or favoring the leg in any way, though I
can see the two sections of skin puckering and parting like lips when I catch a
good angle through the new tear in his pants.

We’re walking a few
blocks and the lower-middle class surroundings start turning into upper middle
class surroundings as the houses grow larger, the cars grow nicer and the
number of people outside doing their own yard work plummets.

“I didn’t know you were a
rich kid,” I tell him.

“I’m not,” he says. “My
dad’s a lawyer. Me, I don’t have shit for money, at least not yet.”

We take a right and walk
a little longer before we come up to what must be Ian’s house. Even for a
lawyer, it looks like his dad is doing particularly well for himself.

“Nice house,” I tell him.

“Yeah, it’s all right,”
he says. “We’re going to have to go in through the back if we don’t want to
track blood over all the carpet. There’s a bathroom just off the sliding back
door and it’s all tile through there.”

“Okay,” I answer and
follow him around the house. There are a couple of lights on, but there doesn’t
seem to be any signs of noise or movement.

We go in through the back
door and I follow Ian to the bathroom he was talking about.

“Come in,” he says, one
hand on the door, the other motioning for me to enter.

I walk in and he closes
the door behind us.

“What first aid stuff do
you have around…” I start, but am unable to finish.

Rather than simply
lifting the pant leg or opening it where it’s already torn, Ian went for the
much less expected option of simply dropping his pants altogether.

“What’s wrong?” he asks
and tries to angle his upper leg under the sink faucet, but doesn’t quite bend
that way.

“Do you have rubbing
alcohol or hydrogen peroxide?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s
just up in that cabinet. There should be bandages and antibiotic cream in
there, too. Would you mind grabbing it while I try to get myself cleaned off
here?”

Most of his bleeding
stopped a while ago, but he
is
a hell
of a mess.

I nod and try not to gaze
too long at the bulge of his anatomy pressing against the fabric of his boxers.

After rummaging through
the cabinet for a minute, I manage to get everything I need: hydrogen peroxide,
bandages, antibiotic cream, cotton balls, cotton swabs and a pair of latex
gloves. When I turn back around, Ian’s managed, somehow, to get his upper leg
under the sink faucet and is carefully rinsing off the area around the wound.

I set everything on
what’s left of the open counter space.

“You know,” he says, “I
think I can probably get this on my own.”

As unappealing as tending
a wound generally is, I protest, “Oh, quit being such a baby.”

“I’m not,” he says. “I’m
telling you that I can take care of it. That’s kind of the opposite thing…”

He trails off, because
not only am I ignoring him, I’m also holding a cotton ball over the mouth of
the hydrogen peroxide bottle and tipping it just enough to get the cotton wet.

I hand him the cotton
ball and tell him, “If you think you got this by yourself, go for it.”

As soon as the cool
wetness of the hydrogen peroxide touches his fingers, Ian shudders.

“All right,” he says.
“Thanks. I’ll be out in a minute.”

I walk out of the
bathroom and take a seat on the nearest piece of furniture, what looks like an
antique chair or a reproduction of an antique chair. Either way, I’m really
uncomfortable even touching the thing, much less sitting in it, so I quickly
get back up and knock on the door.

“You about done in
there?” I ask.

“Would you mind coming
back in here for a minute?” he asks.

I open the door and find
him sitting on the counter, the cotton ball about six inches above the wound
and just far enough off to the side that, when it drips, it doesn’t drip onto
his wound.

I sigh. “You’re such a
baby,” I tell him, and before he even asks, I put on the gloves, take the
cotton ball from his hand and start cleaning the area around the wound.

“I hate to be a bother,”
he says, “but would you mind getting the cut itself? I hate that peroxide
stuff.”

“You’d think, being a
skater, you’d be used to it,” I tell him, drying my hands and grabbing the
bottle.

“I think I had to have it
so many times that it built into a phobia,” he says. “I can get through it and
everything, but if I’m going to do it, myself, we’re probably going to be here
for a while.”

I take a look at the cut.
Now that the area around it is clean, the thing doesn’t look so bad.

Ian’s eyes are on the lid
of the bottle as I’m unscrewing it and then on the space where the lid was once
I’ve removed it.

“Don’t you need one of
those cotton balls?” he asks.