Page 5

Seb

My agent would have been horrified to hear that I’d spent more time over the first three days of training camp thinking with the contents of my very tight shorts than concentrating on my fitness and my place in the new team.

He would have told me about the importance of getting sufficient rest – I was certain of that early in the morning of the fourth day, when I was rolling around in bed, worrying about waking my roommate Amir.

I placated my agent – without him even having to get out of my own head – by making for the hotel gym at six to do some extra core training on the mats, scooping up Matilda at the last minute, taking her with me and setting her on the chest press while I warmed up. Anything for the running joke.

When I put my Bluetooth headphones in and scrolled through my favourites playlist for the song I was looking for, a kernel of self-reflection made me face up to the real reason I’d got out of bed this morning: I’d heard the Gallaghers were still jetlagged, as well as utterly obsessed with being the best, and they often trained early.

I also had to own up to the fact that I was listening to Taylor Swift, hoping I might catch a short glimpse of Lori Gallagher – if I was lucky, in a situation that wasn’t embarrassing for once.

I had a terrible history of relationships ending before they’d really begun, but this was a new low: crushing on an entirely unattainable woman because she reminded me of another woman who’d already ghosted me.

Grumbling to myself as I stretched out on the mat and lifted my body into a hollow-hold, I realised I wasn’t even sure she knew my name, which was a blessing at this point.

When she found out, she might remember stage three of the Vuelta a Espana last year, when I’d flown off the road into spiky bushes and limped to the finish line, my shorts held together with medical tape.

Or maybe the time I was startled by a black cat at the side of the road during the Gent-Wevelgem and crashed.

It was a miracle her eccentric Australia-based team Harper-Stacked had offered me a one-year contract when my agent had given up hope. A miracle I was here at all to embarrass myself as she studied me with her intent gaze, the one that sent heat shooting to my toes.

I really had to stop thinking about her. In a second, my heart rate would flip out and I wouldn’t be able to hold the position long enough.

Too late. My abs buckled and my legs hit the floor. Taking a moment to catch my breath, I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling. So much for training hard. I couldn’t even keep up a hollow-hold for a minute.

It wasn’t only because I’d embarrassed myself in front of Lori that my thoughts seemed to settle on her and then hang like an overtaxed computer. I had great form in making an ass of myself in front of beautiful women who were out of my league.

No, it was the way my brain had mixed up Lori with Folklore – only because she’d seen Miss Congeniality recently!

That film had come out when Lori was just a baby (yes, I’d googled her unrepentantly yesterday afternoon and discovered she was all of 25 years old – 25!

How was the film that old?) It had to be a coincidence, along with the similarity between her name and ‘Folklore’.

My online training partner had chosen the handle because of Taylor Swift.

It wasn’t anything to do with Lori’s full first name, Loredana – given by her Italian triathlete mother.

I grabbed a dumbbell and began a set of lunges, trying to screw my head on straight and not think about my banter with Folklore – and definitely not the way Lori’s fingers had brushed mine through the spokes of Colin’s bike.

Under no circumstances could I start blending the two women in my feverish mind.

If she were Folklore, at least I could stop worrying that she was bleeding out in a ditch somewhere – not that bleeding victims with their lives draining away usually took the time to delete their Zpeed accounts.

No, she just hadn’t been into me and, while she could have been an adult and told me before bugging out, that was fair enough.

She didn’t want a dork who was afraid of winning, whose best friend on training camp was a sex doll called Matilda – any more than Lori Gallagher would want me.

I always gravitated towards unattainable relationships.

Another thing to add to the long list of reasons Lori Gallagher must think I was a loser: I was, in reality, a loser.

My entire career was built around being a loser.

I was a domestique – or équipier, the slightly less insulting term we used in French – the guy who paced the others, who helped the winners to save their strength for the final burst before caving and dropping back.

My palmarès, my (very short) list of wins, was the result of chance and not strategy.

I was a team guy and the Gallaghers were… not.

Had I really spent ten weeks training – way more than I usually did, I might add – with Lori Gallagher? She’d been funny and… nice to me. If I’d known it was her—

It couldn’t have been her. Christ, what was I thinking?

‘Morning, Frankie!’

I whirled so quickly I nearly clocked Colin Gallagher in the privates with the dumbbell. I’d never been called Frankie before, but I’d learned nicknames were a fact of life for Australians and, after the joke with Matilda, mine could definitely have been something worse.

‘Gallagher,’ I acknowledged, popping out my earbuds and summoning all my cool to cover the fact that I’d just been obsessing about his sister. He bypassed the chest press, giving Matilda a pat on the cheek, and settled at one of the leg-press machines.

My thoughts swerved back to the first day of camp, shooting down the mountain in Lori’s dust. When she’d attacked, she’d come alive, her plait swinging over her shoulder and her whole body rocking from side to side with the bike as she pedalled up out of the saddle.

I could have waxed lyrical about that hole in her shorts and the ideas it gave me – some of them simply involving gentle antiseptic and my fingers. She’d knocked me sideways.

I hoped she won – everything she ever attempted.

‘What’s your strategy?’ Colin asked between leg presses.

‘Oh, I’m sure she doesn’t—’ I cut myself off with a gulp.

Of course, Colin hadn’t meant my strategy for dealing with Lori and Folklore and my confused crush.

I covered my faux pas with a grunt of effort during the next lunge.

‘Erm, I haven’t met with the directeur sportif.

I don’t know which races we’re aiming for. ’

‘What about your coach?’

The doors swished open again and of course it was her, just in time to hear the sorry truth.

I forced my eyes off her, especially when I noticed she was wearing a crop top and her hair was in another high ponytail, brushing the back of her neck.

It helped that she ignored me – well, it didn’t help my ego.

Colin Gallagher prompted me with a look.

‘I don’t have my own coach.’ I just muddled through following orders.

I remembered with a start that Lori and Colin’s coach was Tony Gallagher, their father, the Irish-Australian sprinter who’d dominated at the Olympics 30 years ago.

Those were the genes – and discipline – passed down to the power siblings of Australian cycling, while I had only learned the discipline to get up and milk the goats every day and I hadn’t seen my own father in nearly 25 years.

Too self-conscious to move into the crunches that were next in my floor workout, I went down into a set of mountain climbers, feeling like an idiot for running on the floor, wondering if Lori was watching.

When she dropped down next to me, I nearly reared back like a cat faced with a cucumber. She was so close I could map the constellation of freckles on her arm and I swear I stopped breathing.

‘Out of shape from the off-season, Belgian soap?’ she asked conversationally as she held her body effortlessly in an elbow plank.

Actually, I’m in the shape of my life from training with someone an awful lot like you. ‘I’m working on not peaking too early,’ I said instead, my mouth dry.

‘Is that what Matilda is for?’ she quipped through gritted teeth.

I nearly swallowed my tongue. Between laughing at her joke and the inability of my lungs to function when she was this close, the noise I made was more distressed donkey than articulate human.

‘No, I just,’ I began with a cough, ‘thought she’d be lonely.’

‘Has anyone ever told you, you have a weird sense of humour?’

Folklore had …

She pushed up into a high plank, her hair tumbling over her shoulder, her body taut and strong and so beautiful my eyes hurt. ‘Have you forgotten how to do mountain climbers?’ she asked, her tone irritated.

I knew that tone. I’d heard it so often through my headphones as she baited me and teased me and made me fight. Holy shit, could she be Folklore in more than just my imagination?

I scrambled to get going again, my head spinning and my eyes drawn down her body, as though looking could give me answers to the desperate questions swimming in my mind.

Lori moved seamlessly back onto her elbows and my gaze snagged on her lower back, to the jagged, puckered scar tissue, and I froze in alarm.

Folklore had occasionally been in pain while we trained, but she hadn’t talked in detail about her injury.

It hit me then that Lori had broken her back – I’d seen that crash on replay.

Rocketing down a mountain like a bullet, she must have hit a hidden seam, because one minute she’d been coolly burning the competition, and the next she’d sailed over her handlebars, her bike flipping and flying after her as she landed heavily on her helmet and skidded over the edge.

She was lucky she could walk – lucky to be alive. If something like that had happened to Folklore…

My arms crumpled and I hit the mat with an ‘oof’, my heart pounding. How much pain did she still have?

Glancing at me uneasily, Lori relaxed her body and sat up. ‘Do you want to do burpees? See who can do the most in three minutes?’

‘For fuck’s sake, Lori!’ Colin called out. ‘You always have to play with the boys.’

‘Sure,’ I answered her, ignoring Colin. ‘I know you’re in great shape— Erm…’ I sucked in a panicky breath through my nose as I felt Colin’s eyes burning the back of my neck. ‘I mean, you’re… competitive. It’s a compliment!’

Competitive like Folklore – impulsive like Folklore. ‘Okay,’ she said doubtfully. ‘Were you listening to music?’ she asked, gesturing to where I’d set my phone down. ‘Let’s use a song as the timer.’

I was such a mess of shock and excitement that my brain froze and I couldn’t work out whether I should hide the music I’d been listening to and just put on David Guetta or something.

The decision was taken out of my hands when I disconnected the Bluetooth and Taylor’s ‘Paper Rings’ rang out suddenly in the quiet room.

Fumbling with my phone, I tapped the screen to move onto the next song in the queue, but it wasn’t any better: ‘Hysteria’ by Muse – decidedly dystopian.

I couldn’t bring myself to meet her gaze, afraid to see if she’d put the two songs together and get FolkyDunes – my imaginary friendship that obviously hadn’t meant as much to Folklore as it had to me.

Even worse, she might not react at all and the similarities really were all in my head.

She said nothing until the moment felt like a rubber band pulled taut. Then it pinged back and she dropped to the floor as the dirty bass at the beginning of the song got going. ‘One!’ she barked at me as she completed her first burpee and I lurched into action.

I waited until she started to puff, the skin under her freckles glowing pink, before I slowed down.

I was struggling – burpees were right up there with cleaning the toilet or waiting for the bus, in my books – but not quite as much as I led her to believe.

She was intense – energetic and strong – but I had the completely unfair advantage of being male.

When the guitar solo at the end of the song finished with a crash of cymbals, I sat back on my haunches, heaving in deep breaths. She’d completed eight more than I had.

Colin clapped slowly from behind us. ‘Beaten by a girl, Frankie?’

‘Not just any girl,’ I muttered, hauling myself to my feet.

‘I… thanks for the contest.’ Holding a hand out to her, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to shake hers or help her up.

I would have told her what an honour it was to meet her in burpee battle if I hadn’t known it was coming on far too strong and I would have sounded like the idiot I was.

But she batted away my hand, eyes blazing. ‘You let me win!’ she accused icily.

‘It was a lot of burpees. I hate burpees,’ I insisted.

Shaking her head, she seethed, ‘There’s no point in winning unless I earned it. And why are you trying to be nice to me anyway?’ Her eyes narrowed.

Because if you are Folklore, talking to you online was the high light of my off-season. Because I know what your voice sounds like when you’re in pain, but still pushing yourself. I know that beneath the surface, you have feelings like everyone else.

I said nothing out loud. She didn’t want those words. I didn’t know if I could handle the truth, whichever way it went.

But in true Folklore style, she faced the issue head-on. Dropping her chin, she groaned, long and loud. ‘It’s from “Walloon”, isn’t it?’ she said under her breath. ‘The French-speaking people from Belgium. I should have realised.’