The Favorites

by Layne Fargo

Everyone thinks Heath Rocha was my first love. He wasn’t. My first love was figure skating.

became a skater because I wanted to feel like that. Fierce. Confident. A warrior goddess covered in glitter. So sure of myself, I could make my dreams come true through sheer force of will.

Imagine being down so bad you’d master a whole Olympic sport to spend time with someone.

“Don’t worry about them,” Heath said. He could always read my moods like a weather report.

The thing is, when pushing your limits is all you know, when it seems normal to you…it’s hard to remember you even have limits. Until you run right into them.

“It sounds wonderful,” the interviewer says. “But it also seems like an awfully ambitious project for a young woman without any business experience. And with two children to raise.” “I seem to recall people expressing similar concerns when I decided to compete in Calgary, and that worked out just fine.” Sheila smiles. “Didn’t it?”

No days off. No breaks. No excuses. Some days, I thought I might not make it through. But every day, I felt happier than ever before in my life.

Until the Academy, I’d never spent much time thinking about my body aside from what it could do. When I was ten, another girl at North Shore told me I had thighs like tree trunks, and I genuinely didn’t get the insult. Trees were tall and strong and beautiful. Why wouldn’t I want to resemble one?

“Katarina.” I fell silent. Heath sat up and pulled me against him, so close I couldn’t tell his heartbeat from my own. “You’re my home,” he said.

Heath had a bottomless pit inside him too, but it had nothing to do with ambition. No matter how much love I gave him, it would never be enough. He wanted to be everything to me, the way I was everything to him. And I would always want more.

Audiences love a love story.

It had been three years, almost to the day, since he’d run from me in the freezing rain in Nagano, and he looked like a different person. His posture was straighter, shoulders back like a ballet dancer. His features were almost gaunt—all softness carved away, leaving a face that was angular to the point of severity. That lush forest of curls razed to the roots. A small white scar cut across his left cheekbone, emphasizing the flintiness of his stare. But he was still so beautiful to me. That might have been the worst part.

His love for me hadn’t been motivation enough to reach his full potential. His hatred, though? That made him capable of anything.

In the scorching heat of Los Angeles summer, it was pure torture—more than enough pain to keep my mind off the true source of my suffering.

That was what he wanted. For me to forget myself. For me to forget everything I’d worked for. So I pushed him away. I grappled with the gate, snapping a nail in my rush to get it open. Heath said my name. Like a prayer, like a promise. Like he used to say it. Like he still loved me after all. I gripped the gate so tight the metal rattled. No. I would not turn around. This was another act. A part of the show. And I refused to stay for an encore.

I looked like a mess. But I also looked like myself, for the first time in a long time—raw and wild instead of pretty and refined. I looked like the fearless girl who used to ramble all over the lakefront with Heath, skinned knees and windblown hair and dirt under my nails.

I’d been furious with him for so long. And yet, in that moment, I couldn’t remember why.

When I was strong and self-assured, people recoiled from me. They told me I was too competitive, too ambitious, too much. But when I was brought low, bruised and bleeding, a princess in need of rescue instead of a conquering queen, they loved me.

Katarina Shaw was on the verge of becoming a four-time national champ. But suddenly all anyone cared about was her becoming a wife.

When expectations are that high? Anything but the best feels like failure.

At first I’d been clumsy on my blades, my limbs pathetically uncoordinated from disuse. I fell on my ass over and over and over again, until my backside was one big blue-purple bruise. But there was no one there to see, no one to judge. For the first time in my life, I was skating only for myself.

now I knew from experience that failure wouldn’t kill me.

Love like a steady, warming campfire that keeps you alive in the cold. Love like a raging blaze that burns down everything in its path until nothing but ash remains.

“If there’s one thing you’re good at, Katarina Shaw, it’s toughing it out.”

Shaw and Rocha could be arrogant, inconsistent, insubordinate, outright reckless. But when they were on, they were on. And that night, they were flawless.

This should have been the happiest moment of our lives. We should have been smiling and waving and skating to the kiss and cry, not sprawled across the ice. I should have been holding Heath’s hand, not clutching him to my chest as he coughed and spattered blood across the gleaming gold trim of my borrowed costume. Not like this.

There was so much I hadn’t told him. I hadn’t told him how much I loved him, even when I hated him. I hadn’t told him that no matter how many changes I made to that old stone house where we grew up, where we fell apart, where we fell in love—I could never bring myself to touch the headboard where we’d carved our names. We couldn’t end like this.

“No.” I sat on the bed, my hip brushing his. “Let them do what they want. I don’t care.” “Sure,” Heath said. Then he realized I was serious. He stared as if he were seeing me for the very first time.

You’re my home, Heath had said to me once. Despite all the years we’d spent apart, all the time we’d wasted, he was my home too. He always had been.

So say what you want about me. Call me a bitch, a cheater, a loser, a whore. I may not have an Olympic gold medal, but I have something better: a life where I spend every day with my favorite people in the world, doing exactly what I love. If that’s not winning, I don’t know what is.