Serge actually advertised a muscle cream over in Europe, but as jokes went, it was close enough to offend. He glared at me. “I do not advertise for hemorrhoids.”
“No? I thought I heard that. Oh, that’s right.” I snapped my fingers. “I heard that you were working hard on getting the herpes market cornered. My bad.” I leaned in. “I’d tell you that you might wanna warn Annamarie about that, but it looks like she’s currently sinking her hooks into my partner. Sorry.”
He got up from his seat. “You are still an unpleasant little girl, I see. I came over to give you some friendly advice, and you have been nothing but rude.”
I kept my smile pinned to my face. “Friendly advice, huh? What about?”
Serge gave me a thin-lipped smile. “Half the points come from scoring, little one. Half comes from the audience. If you want to win this? You need them both. But I see you don’t care about winning.”
I digested this warning-slash-advice. He couldn’t influence the audience, of course, so he had to be warning me about the judging panel. So they were crooked? Great. Figure skating had a long history of ‘slanted’ judging panels, so this shouldn’t have been a surprise to me, but I did feel a twinge of doubt.
I glanced over at my partner as Serge stalked away. Ty was laughing it up with Annamarie and her supermodel buddies, and I noticed Annamarie had a long, too-tan hand on his back, an almost possessive gesture. And he sure wasn’t fighting her off.
Figured.
“No,” Ty said. “Absolutely f**king not.”
I bit my lip, glancing around nervously at the stage hands rushing around. People were everywhere, even crawling around in the dressing rooms, and so were the cameramen. No place was off limits, and that included last minute costume, ahem, alterations.
Ty threw down his shirt and looked at me with disgust. “What did I tell her all week?”
“No sequins,” I said, biting the inside of my cheek and trying not to laugh.
“And what is this freaking…monstrosity covered with?” He gestured at the garish shirt that was now wadded into a ball.
I picked it up and studied it. It was a virtual match to my own, which meant it was incredibly hideous. It was a cowboy outfit…sort of. To go with our “Boot Scootin’” theme. Sort of. Except it was neon. I was neon pink and he was chartreuse. And both were covered in yellow fringe going up the arms (which was bad enough) and purple sequins (which was even worse). To make matters worse, I had bright white chaps and he had purple ones. Again, sequined and covered in fringe. His cowboy hat was bright green, and we had fake ‘boots’ that went over our skates and matched our chaps.
It was pretty much a costuming nightmare. No wonder they hadn’t wanted to show us until the last minute.
Ty shook his head at me. “I’ll wear the goddamn ugly hat. I’ll wear the f**king fringey-ass pants, since I have to, but I refuse to wear sequins. Absolutely and completely refuse. NO f**king way.”
I studied his clothing. It really was an odd choice for a guy as masculine as Ty. Maybe for a traditional figure skater with no sense of taste? But not Ty Randall, big, beefy, incredibly sexy MMA fighter. They didn’t even show off his tight ass.
I shook my head at myself. Where on earth had those thoughts come from?
“I’m sorry, Zara,” Ty said to me. He took my hands in his and gave me an earnest look. “I tried really f**king hard these last two weeks. I did. I understand how badly you want this. But a man’s got to draw a line somewhere, and this is my line. If they have to scratch us from the competition, I’ll take the scratch and work on another way to fix my PR.”
“It’s not that bad,” I told him, giving his hands a squeeze.
“I look like I belong in a g*y pride parade.”
Okay, he kind of did. I studied his costume and then sighed. We could either spend the next hour warming up for the show, or I could try to fix his costume. Looking into Ty’s angry gaze, it was clear what my choice was. I pulled up one of the folding chairs and got out my costume alteration kit. “Let me see what I can do.”
Forty-five minutes later, Ty no longer looked like a parade float. We’d scrapped the shirt entirely, as well as the hat, and he’d decided to go bare-chested at my suggestion. After all, he had a gorgeous chest. Seemed a shame not to put that to good use. I couldn’t do anything about his sequined boot-covers, so we ditched them. Instead, I focused on de-fringe-ing his pants and removing the strips of sequins that had been badly sewn down the seam of each leg. When I was done, he had garish neon pants, but now they just looked like they matched mine.
“Do you want a hot pink bandanna?” I asked as he pulled on his pants again. “It could complete the outfit.”
He scowled at me. “Do I look like I want a hot pink bandanna?”
I giggled. Guess not. “Does this mean we can still go on?”
“I guess so,” he said, and sighed heavily. “The guys are going to give me such shit for this.”
The music went up, and the show began. I could hear the audience cheering from the Crash Room—horribly named, I thought—in the back where teams sat and waited for their turn to go out on the ice. The judges were introduced, and then a montage of clips from the past two weeks began, showcasing moments from our introductions to trainings.
I could hear a swell of gasps come up from the audience and heard my own voice, loud and tinny, over the speakers, explaining how I’d tripped and fallen. Oh no. They were showing the video of my bruised and swollen face.
At my side, Ty clenched my hand and rubbed his chin, clearly nervous about how it would go over. But then they cut away to another team, and laughter filled the studio a moment later as Michael Michaels had a montage of clips of him falling on his ass repeatedly.
No big drama about my nose, then. Good. I relaxed, too, and touched the bridge of it. It had healed up nicely a week ago, and you couldn’t even tell that it had ever grown to the size of a potato.
The makeup artists had taken their time with me before the show, making sure that I looked like the others…which meant lots of make-up in bright colors. I wasn’t surprised. Skaters were used to heavy eye-makeup, blush, and lipstick so you didn’t look featureless and washed out on the ice. Of course, I was also used to my hair being pulled into an ultra-tight bun so it wouldn’t get in my face, and they’d insisted on braiding it into two cutesy tails over my ears. Ugh. It went with my horrible psychedelic cowgirl costume, I supposed.