Page 17

Lori

He didn’t say it, the bastard – the wise, sensible bastard. He let me walk away without kissing him.

To make matters worse, he then showed his face at dinner – and breakfast the following day, as well as lunch and dinner.

And he looked cute while he did it. Derek Sabel followed him around like a disciple and they joked and shoved each other and behaved like puppies instead of grown men – and it was unbearably sweet.

He kept meeting my eye – and then looking away and shaking himself as though he was trying not to.

The utter bastard. I couldn’t hate him. I couldn’t tune him out. By Saturday morning I was annoyed as hell – well, ‘annoyed’ was one way to describe it.

I waited for him to text me on Friday night before the race, but – nothing.

The last thing I did before rolling over and forcing myself to go to sleep was send him a Star Trek gif with something about good luck, which was a low blow since he’d spent so long on Zpeed explaining to me that the fandoms were entirely separate and he was more into Chewbacca than Spock.

In addition to having no reply from Seb when I woke up, I looked in the mirror while brushing my teeth to see that one of my earrings had fallen out.

You might not have expected that I wore earrings during races.

I had never been a girly girl, or at all precious about my appearance – I couldn’t afford to be when I lived my life with helmet hair and sweated off all my make-up.

In the second hole in my earlobe I wore lightning strikes.

But I’d learned when I was 14 and one hole had closed up that I needed to keep something in.

Mum had bought me a pair of platinum hoops that were small enough to wear all the time and I never took them out.

And now I’d lost one on the morning of a race.

It didn’t matter. Sure, I always put my right shoe on before my left on race day. I had my favourite socks and a lucky bra from a small Australian label, which was so difficult to replace in Europe that I kept a pristine spare in case I damaged one.

These were crutches to keep my head in the game and wouldn’t actually affect my race. But the earring freaked me out. After searching through my sheets and under the bed and examining the pillow with no results, I had to accept it was gone and decide whether to take out the other earring.

Assuming that wearing a single earring might bother me on the road, I slipped it out and placed it warily in my toiletry bag.

I was nearly too late for the early pre-race breakfast and, when I rushed into the dining room, it was to find Seb there, a bunch of women fawning over him.

Stopping to stare in bewilderment, I realised he wasn’t signing autographs for simpering fans, but drawing little spiders on the wrists of my teammates.

At least he blushed fiercely when he saw me.

‘Lori! Come and get your redback from Sebi!’ Leesa called out.

Sebi? ‘Um, no thanks. I’ve seen enough redbacks.’ I stomped to the coffee machine and tried to ignore them. Jealousy before a race might just be worse for my state of mind than losing an earring.

He approached me with an apologetic wince after the other women had left to get ready for our 9:30 start, but I shook my head, silently putting him off.

‘See you on the podium,’ he said, backing off with a nod and giving me a casual salute.

As he left the dining room without looking back, I stupidly wondered whether he meant I’d be on the podium or he would.

Viewed from the helicopter thumping overhead, the peloton would have looked like a mythical snake, emerging from the dust to weave its way across the clay hills, contorting itself through curves – a giant organism of many parts, not all of them organic.

Racing inside the bunch felt more like being in a spaceship, hurtling ahead with perpetual motion, breathing recycled air, listening to the clicks and whirs of the machinery and hoping no one would make a false move and upset the delicate balance.

My front wheel was almost touching Doortje’s rear one.

My longtime nemesis Laura Colombini was pumping the pedals next to me, her jersey in the colours of the Italian flag reminding me that she was a national champion this year and I was not.

I was probably imagining it, but she seemed to glance at me more often than necessary.

She was psyching me out, but knowing that didn’t stop me falling into the trap. I started to wonder if I had something on my face, when I should have been thinking about my position, planning a possible attack.

‘ Approaching the climb in 500 m. Five in the breakaway, but they’re losing steam already.

Wait for your moment and go, Lori – even solo if you have to ,’ I heard through the team radio.

Alf Londis, the women’s directeur sportif, was watching the coverage from the team car.

We’d learned through bitter experience that Dad needed to stay off the radio when I was racing.

I couldn’t manage his emotions as well as my own.

Laura glanced at me again and this time I responded with a punchy look of my own. ‘What?’ As soon as the word was out of my mouth, I realised I shouldn’t have said anything.

‘ 200 m ,’ Alf updated me.

‘You didn’t see him, did you?’ she said quietly, sounding alarm bells in my skull.

Keep your mouth shut, Loredana Molly Gallagher . My self-discipline was obviously shot. ‘Who?’

‘ 100 m! ’

I suspected what she was talking about a second before she confirmed it, but not early enough to stop my stomach from plummeting to my toes. ‘Gaetano,’ she said. ‘He said you look different these days. Between you and me, it was probably just his ego talking. You know what I mean.’

She lifted a hand long enough to make a wilting gesture with one finger that made me want to laugh, while my insides twisted tight.

‘ Lori! Go! What are you waiting for? Go! ’

Ahhh, shit, score one: Laura Colombini. She shot ahead of me, stealing the gap that Doortje and Bonnie had worked so hard to set up for me.

Shouting an expletive that was sure to have been caught on the motorcycle-mounted camera beside us, I took off after Laura, cursing myself for letting my team down – letting everyone down.

‘ There’s been a crash in the breakaway. Go for it, Lori! Now’s your chance! ’

Thinking for a moment that perhaps my luck had changed, I pushed hard up the gravel hill, tyres protesting as loudly as my lungs.

The landscape disappeared. The only things I could feel were gravity, breath and the bunch-and-release of the muscles in my legs.

My vision narrowed to Laura up ahead and two other cyclists who were blurry adversaries.

But I caught up. I was right on Laura’s wheel, basking in her slipstream as we pushed it up the rest of the climb and over the other side.

I finally registered that my back ached.

Everything ached and I couldn’t tell if it was the remaining damage from the crash and surgery or if it was the usual pain, the stuff we all pushed through.

‘Are we sticking together for a while?’ Laura called behind her.

‘If you shut up about Gaetano,’ I shot back, which made her laugh.

I caught myself wondering if we could be friends, if we ever had time or energy.

The best cyclists knew how to cooperate and earn the respect of the peloton – and strategically drop them at the right moment.

I’d always been better at the latter than the former.

‘You shouldn’t be so sensitive about him. You weren’t married.’

‘I said you should shut up about him.’ It was unfortunately clear who had been the loser in that relationship.

‘Okay, but you take a turn in the lead. There’s a headwind.’

Giving her a wary look as I overtook, I pictured the route in my mind, wondering where she would try to drop me, trying to remember everything I knew about her style and strengths, reminding myself I was good at this stuff.

Giving my naked earlobe a quick tug, I wondered whether losing that earring had been a sign of good luck and not bad.

But it was not a good moment to take my hand off the drop bars. Was that—? It couldn’t be. I must have been seeing things. In the middle of the— Ohhhh, fuck!

Seb

I had never been happier to see the finish line in my life – and there had been plenty of times when I’d limped to the end, a physical and emotional wreck after a gruelling race.

As I threw my bike forward the last metre with a grunt that would shame a tennis player, I thought I might just have made it – and beaten that great fool.

Decelerating after the finish line, I steered wildly in the direction of the orange Harper-Stacked bus, stumbling short of the support team and teetering to the ground.

My blood bubbled and my vision blurred as I stuck my head between my knees and just breathed.

Disembodied hands clapped me on the back and I heard Colin’s voice as though through a tunnel.

Then I threw up right on the cobblestones of the beautiful Piazza in Siena, with cameras broadcasting my vomit to all corners of the internet. Somewhere inside I was deeply embarrassed, but I had more on my mind.

‘Did I…’ I couldn’t finish my question until I’d heaved in a few more breaths. There were tears on my face. Wow, I was real crash-hot that day. ‘Did I beat him?’

‘You did, son!’ There was no mistaking Tony Gallagher’s voice – or the violent clap on the back that brought another glob of vomit up my throat.

With a whimper of relief that it hadn’t all been for nothing, I spat as discreetly as I could, hoping Lori was far, far away.

‘I don’t know where you got it from, but that was a real fight today!

Where have you been hiding those legs?’ Tony asked while I prayed that he refrained from any more backslapping.

Despite the lapsed status of my religion, someone heard me and Tony left me to shudder and sway and grimace at the sour taste in my mouth all by myself.

I’d started out distracted, wishing I could ask over the team radio how the women’s race was progressing. I’d seen Lori make a good start, protected by her teammates and cruising comfortably to save energy for the end.

Then I’d recognised Gaetano Maggioli in the peloton and been even more distracted with thoughts of how he’d broken up with Lori in hospital , the heartless bastard.

It was silly – completely immature – but the race had become personal.

I’d launched Colin into an attack on the breakaway group 10 km from the end and then I’d fought Gaetano with everything I had left – which hadn’t been much – for the dubious honour of sixth place.

With that thought, another wash of nausea rose up and I retched again, bringing up nothing. Swiping a dribble of spit off my lower lip, I painstakingly lifted my heavy head – and found Lori standing by the bus, her gaze trained on me.

Ah, shit .

Looking away, I flagged down one of the swannies, waving my hand to make sure he didn’t wander away again after handing me a ketone drink.

‘The women,’ I began, guzzling half of the drink because fluids were life itself to me in that moment. ‘How did our women go?’

His frown made my chest heavy. ‘Lori was in the breakaway with 30 K to go, and you’ll never believe what happened.’

Another wave of nausea. ‘What happened?’

‘A horse ran onto the road! A fecking horse! She came off the bike and when she got back on, the thing ran after her. I’ve never seen anything like it. Once they got the animal off the road, she only managed tenth.’

Tenth would still have been a dream result for me last year, but I understood that for Lori it was heart-breaking.

She was talking to Colin, her expression twitchy, and I wished I could give her a hug – if I hadn’t stunk of sweat and sticky glucose gels and vomit and wasn’t expected in the drug testing tent to take my turn peeing in a cup.

I was a real catch. She must have been relieved we’d agreed sex would be a one-time thing.

Which was why I was so shocked back in my room a few hours later when I opened the door after my shower to find Lori there, chewing on her bottom lip.

Stepping inside, she closed the door behind her and said, ‘I hope you’ve recovered.

You were right. I need my luck back, so drop the towel. We’re doing this again.’

The race wiped from my brain, I’d never got turned on so quickly in my life. But with those motives, I couldn’t go through with this – could I?