Chapter 17
Elena
When we reached the restaurant—the same health-conscious place I'd taken him to before—Maxime stopped suddenly just outside the door, turning to face me with an earnest expression.
"I know the menu here is probably not what you're used to," I started. "Everything's low-oil, low-salt, very plain—"
"Elena." He cut me off gently, his hands coming up to frame my face. "As long as I'm eating with you, I could be having plain boiled chicken breast and I'd still think it was the best meal of my life."
The words were so sweet, so uncomplicated, that I felt something crack open in my chest. I laughed, breathless, and looked down at my feet.
"I'm not very good at this," I admitted quietly. "At being someone's girlfriend. I'll probably disappoint you."
"Hey." Maxime tilted my chin up gently. "You know what? From the moment we met on that beach—from the moment you looked at me like I was the most frustrating person on the planet—you've been keeping me on my toes. You're interested, but you hold back. You smile, but then you look away. And somehow that just makes me want to do everything I can to see you really smile, really laugh, really let your guard down."
His voice dropped lower. "This weekend at Disneyland, watching you on that carousel... I kept thinking that if I could just capture that moment, preserve it somehow like a doll in a music box, I'd have something perfect to hold onto forever."
My heart was racing, my cheeks burning. And somewhere in the back of my mind, a small voice whispered: This is what you should want. This is normal. This is allowed.
But even as I thought it, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was betraying something—or someone—by standing here, by letting Maxime look at me like I was precious, by trying to convince myself that this uncomplicated sweetness was enough.
In love's haze, I thought distantly, we all become temporarily blind, unable to see the truth of who the other person really is, unable to see what we truly want beneath the surface.
We went inside and ordered—quinoa salmon salad, grilled chicken breast with steamed vegetables, a small piece of whole wheat bread for me. Maxime had done his homework, I realized. He started talking about how he'd consulted with a sports nutritionist his mother knew, explaining the balance of protein for muscle maintenance, complex carbohydrates for energy.
"You actually asked a nutritionist?" I stared at him, genuinely touched.
"Of course." He grinned. "I want to understand your world. And speaking of sports, I love them too—especially surfing. I should take you to Biarritz sometime. The waves there are perfect for beginners, and with your balance, you'd pick it up so quickly."
We fell into easy conversation about sports, and for a few minutes I let myself relax, let myself imagine a future where this kind of companionship was enough.
Then my phone buzzed. Étienne's name flashed across the screen.
The message was brief, clinical: "Michel will be focusing on core strength training today. Reduce your lunch carbohydrates by one-third. Avoid legumes and high-fiber foods that might affect your training state. I've arranged for the recovery therapist to come to the house tonight."
I stared at the message, then at the quinoa salad the server had just placed in front of me—quinoa being exactly the kind of high-fiber food Étienne had just told me to avoid. A wave of suffocation washed over me, that familiar sensation of my life being managed down to the gram, down to the minute, down to every single choice I thought I was making for myself.
Maxime was watching me, I realized, his expression curious. I forced a smile and set my phone face-down on the table, but the damage was already done. The easy warmth between us had fractured.
The rest of the meal passed in a blur of forced conversation and carefully recalculated bites. Maxime tried to keep things light, but I could feel his attention sharpening, his questions becoming more pointed, as if he was finally starting to see the invisible strings that governed my existence.
By the time we finished eating, I was desperate to escape—not from Maxime exactly, but from the weight of trying to be normal when everything about my life was anything but.
---
The training facility in Monaco was bathed in afternoon light, the massive windows turning the Mediterranean beyond into impossible blue. I set down my gym bag—the one covered in stickers from competitions in Sofia, Moscow, Paris—and began the familiar ritual of transformation.
In the locker room, I changed into my training leotard, a deep navy number with a cutout design along the back. The fabric was high-tech, designed to move with me, to wick away sweat, to compress in all the right places.
I moved through my pre-training stretches with mechanical precision: neck rotations, ten circles in each direction; shoulder rolls, forward and back; waist rotations, my hands on my hips as I traced wide circles with my torso. Ten repetitions of each movement, until my body felt warm and ready.
Michel was already in the main training room when I emerged. He looked up from his tablet, his sharp eyes immediately assessing my posture, my gait.
"Elena," he said by way of greeting, moving to check the tape on my ankle, the wrap on my wrist. "How are you feeling today? Any pain?"
"I'm good," I said, which was true in the purely physical sense.
"Good." Michel nodded. "We're going to focus on that ribbon combination today. The one that gave you trouble at qualifiers."
My stomach dropped. Of course we were. The snake throw with the 720-degree turn and back catch—the combination that had haunted me for weeks, that still generated sarcastic comments on social media.
I pulled in one earbud, leaving the other ear free to hear Michel's corrections, and cued up my training playlist. The familiar music helped center me, helped push away thoughts of Maxime's confusion and Chloé's knowing looks and Étienne's precisely worded messages.
"Show me your warm-up sequence first," Michel instructed. "I want to see your flexibility baseline today."
I moved to the center of the mat and began: front splits, holding for thirty seconds while my muscles screamed; side splits, my legs extending into a perfect 180-degree line; back bridge, my spine arching until my hands touched the mat behind me. Then into a handstand, legs splitting wide in the air.
Michel circled me as I worked, his gaze clinical. "Good," he said finally. "Your foundation is solid. The Bulgarian training system gave you excellent basics."
I came down and reached for the ribbon—five meters of crimson fabric that could be beautiful or treacherous. I began the warm-up patterns, spirals and snakes and figure-eights, my body moving through the familiar choreography.
The extreme back-bend came next, my head tilting back until it nearly touched my ankles, while the ribbon continued to arc overhead in a perfect figure-eight. It was one of my signature moves, the kind of flexibility display that made audiences gasp.
"Very good," Michel said. "Now let's see the hoop. Three consecutive high throws with catches."
I set down the ribbon and picked up the hoop. The throws were clean, precise—up it went, spinning through the air while I executed the required body wave, then catching it on the descent. Three times in a row, each one landing exactly as it should.
"Excellent," Michel said. "Your basics are strong. Now let's get to the problem."
The problem. As if my inability to execute one specific combination could be reduced to such a simple term.