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  By David Connor

  Published by JMS Books LLC

  Visit jms-books.com for more information.

  Copyright 2019 David Connor

  ISBN 9781646560981

  Cover Design: London Burden

  Image(s) used under a Standard Royalty-Free License.

  All rights reserved.

  WARNING: This book is not transferable. It is for your own personal use. If it is sold, shared, or given away, it is an infringement of the copyright of this work and violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

  No portion of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, with the exception of brief excerpts used for the purposes of review.

  This book is for ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. It may contain sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which might be considered offensive by some readers. Please store your files where they cannot be accessed by minors.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published in the United States of America.

  * * * *

  Transitions

  By David Connor

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 1

  Summer 2016

  If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.

  Erika hadn’t said a word since “Hello.” A slim ray of hope had existed, at least at the beginning, that a romantic dinner date with Jimbo Wormel might be the start of her happily ever after. That likelihood was quickly dashed, along with the restaurant’s ambiance, by the clank of dishes being dropped into a plastic bucket and the busboy’s off-key singing.

  “You know, you look vaguely familiar,” Jimbo said. “Perhaps a resemblance to one of my ex-wives.” There was a glint in his mud-brown eyes, maybe from the flickering candle, but possibly as if he was kidding. “Have you ever been married?”

  Apparently Jimbo didn’t follow figure skating. Erika Tsuchino had been semi-famous—for at least fifteen minutes—back in 2014. A run at an Olympic medal, the death of her father and coach right before The Games, a short-lived marriage to her on ice partner and the pregnancy that followed; it had all been tabloid and TV news.

  “Well,” she began.

  “My heart bleeds gold. My sexy parts get hard with steel. I want you, babe. I want you, babe. Come to my room and let me, let me, let me, let me, ahhhh.” The teenage boy danced about as he sang—if one could call it that. After Jimbo flashed him a dirty look, he stared at Erika expectantly. The truth was quite tempting.

  Actually, yes. I married a gay guy, Erika wanted to say. Tom Alan—that’s his name, like two, but it’s just one. While my father was grooming us as champion pairs skaters from childhood, he was also, unbeknownst to me until I was practically standing at the altar, grooming us for an arranged marriage, which isn’t as uncommon in modern day Japan as you’d think. She’d tell him everything. Papa died before we could wed, but my mother insisted we respect his final wishes, even though everyone knew Tom Alan was hung up on a British guy named Milo. So, we did it, honeymoon and all. I slept with Tom Alan every night, for weeks and weeks and fell deeper and deeper in love, which I never told him, because he’d found his way back to the Brit. The marriage was annulled just about the time the baby came, but I’m still not over him two years later.

  She sighed, but said none of that. Tom Alan and Milo were living their fairy tale ending. As she stared at the spinach stuck between Jimbo’s teeth, as she recalled blind dates, computer dates, reconnecting with high school crushes on Facebook, and fix-ups her best friends from her sport swore would be the men of her dreams but weren’t, Erika wondered what had happened to hers.

  “I guess I’m in sort of a transitional state at the moment,” she said.

  “Let me, let me, let me, ahhhhhhhhhh.”

  “Is it just me,” Jimbo asked, “or is that fairy waiter annoying the shit out of everyone?”

  “Busboy.” Erika knew deep down that wasn’t the word she should have objected to. She thought a lot about words lately. As she and Tom Alan got back on the ice to try and recapture their place as one of the top pairs skaters in the world, they were performing their short program to Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sounds of Silence. A few sign language passages had been worked into the choreography, including “Words hurt,” “Words heal,” “Silence kills,” and “Speak up.” The piece was a tribute of hope for those struggling for human rights all over the world, including the LGBTQ community in Russia, where Erika and Tom Alan had skated at the last Olympics.

  “And really, Jimbo, the word fairy is totally—”

  The kid with the bucket sashayed right into their table, causing Jimbo to spill cabernet all down the front of his shirt. “Son of a b—”

  “Holy shit, yo! I’m so—Oh. My. God. You’re Erika Tsuchino.”

  Jimbo stood. “I’m not. I’m wet is what I am.”

  “Not you, dude. Her.” The busboy was at her side in a shot. His nametag read Kensuke. He was a strikingly handsome kid with sparkling black eyes and a scruff of sparse facial hair. “Can I get your autograph?”

  “Is there a problem here?” The gentleman who had seated Jimbo and Erika joined the fracas. “Sato! Get back to work!”

  “In a minute, yo! I’m talking to a celebrity.”

  “Now or you’re fired,” the kid’s boss snapped.

  “I’ll leave it up front,” Erika said. “Don’t get in trouble.”

  “Oh, he won’t can me. He’s all ‘Blah, blah, blah.’” Kensuke made a moving mouth with his hands. “‘I’m the boss of you. Blah, blah, blah.’ Yo, you were awesome in Sochi and at Worlds with Baranowski.” He pronounced it spot on. “Sick, man, sick!”

  “Thank you.” People were staring, so Erika took a pen from her purse, rather than argue anymore. “I don’t know what to sign.”

  “Here.”

  Kensuke handed her a used napkin from the other table. Eww, but she signed it anyway. Best wishes. Jump higher. Erika Tsuchino.

  “OMG! Thank you so much.” Kensuke seemed on the verge of fainting. “Is Tom Alan here?”

  He even got that right. Some people dropped the Alan even after being told repeatedly the two names went together as one.

  “No. Sorry.”

  “If I give you my cell, can you have him call it?”

  “Oh…I…”

  “Who’s going to pay my dry cleaning?” Jimbo demanded.

  Was he seriously going to ask a kid making less than minimum wage to cover the cost of washing his stupid shirt? “I will,” Erika said.

  “Chillax, old man.”

  “Sato!” The manager was suddenly involved again. Kensuke’s charming smile and good looks probably got him out of a lot. This time, however, his boss wasn’t wooed. “Get out.”

  “In the middle of the dinner rush?” Kensuke took off his blue apron and maroon bow tie. “No prob, yo. My pleasure.” He dropped them both to the floor, and offered a parting shot. “Eat my ass, Hideki.”

  So ended another shot at finding Mr. Right. Erika and Jimbo didn’t even wait for their entrees. She was grateful she had taken her own car. As she got in, she
checked her phone.

  Billy: Gimme a buzz.

  A text from the other ex—the redheaded baby daddy—maybe looking for a booty call. Recalling the last one, Erika seriously considered it.

  Billy liked it when she rode him like a cowgirl, but there was something about feeling his weight on top of her that got her off. She’d leaned down to kiss him, and then managed to roll them both over so she was underneath, all without him pulling out. Their choreography was almost as flawless as what she and Tom Alan could do on the ice.

  You’re not supposed to be thinking about him now, Erika had told herself.

  With one of Billy’s hands on her breast and the other between her legs where he alternated between a gentle sway and quick, jolting thrusts, she’d given herself over to the heat down below that soon rose as a tingle over her entire body. When Billy shuddered, so did she. It was not unusual for them to climax together, despite the fact Erika could still count the number of times they had actually made love—or was it just sex? When Billy kissed her neck, when he left his mouth there and began to hum—Celine Dion, she thought, not the song from Titanic, but one of her other romantic ballads—she’d had to ask herself again.

  “This is sweet, babe,” he’d said.

  “Yes.”

  “Be nice if, ya know, we made it kind of a regular thing.”

  “Hmm.” Burrowed into Billy’s sweaty chest, Erika had agreed.

  “Except, I’m probably not really ready for that stuff, I guess…commitment and…whatever.”

  “Then why do you bring it up?”

  It wasn’t the first time he had. Erika had gotten out of his bed then. She’d stood at the side of it, naked, just looking down at him.

  “Here comes the pissed off woman stance,” Billy had said with a smirk. “Arms across boobs, like, ‘No way are you getting at these again now.’”

  “Nope. Let me tell you something about women.”

  “Let me tell you something about women.” Billy sat up, back against the headboard, the sheet falling away so Erika could see almost all of him. He was usually a man of few words, unless he had a reason to use a lot of them. He was particularly fond of post-sex monologues. Erika wished she hadn’t gotten up. The bed would have been a far more comfortable spot to take in what was about to come. “I love women,” he said. “I love women hard.” What he did with his eyes, where he put them, she felt as if she might climax again, just from his look. “You may not know this about me, because we got together and fell apart pretty fast and there wasn’t a lot of time for talking, but women are my main role models in life—my mother and sisters, Irina Mischen, all those years at the rink working with her, Coach LeDoux…I must have mentioned her.”

  Erika couldn’t really recall.

  “You know when I first got into hockey?”

  “When?”

  “The sixth grade. We played floor hockey in gym. I wanted to play it every day, but we moved on to stupid basketball. There was no such thing as a floor hockey team anyway, but we did have a field hockey team—a girl’s field hockey team. In seventh grade, when we were eligible to play sports, I tried out.”

  “No way.”

  “Yes way. I was a freakin’ pioneer, and Coach LeDoux, she put me on her team—went to the principal and the school board to do it. Stuck up for me when other schools complained about having a boy on the team, how it was unfair. She assured them I sucked.”

  Erika smiled.

  “Which I did, but damned if she didn’t fight for me, and by the end of the season, maybe I didn’t suck as much…because of her. Not long after that, we found the rink up here and I started playing youth hockey, but I’ll never forget the shot she gave me. She’s principal now—sadly in another district. We keep in touch. She’s all up in this upcoming election and I’m with her…and with her…because now I’m the father of a little girl and these things are even more important to me.” Billy looked at Etsuko, his daughter. “Nobody’s going to make my baby girl feel like less. Nobody’s going to disrespect her or take away any right she has. She won’t need me to fight for her, if she’s anything like her mother, but bet your ass I will anyway.” Billy slid back down the mattress and pulled up the covers. No way was she getting back at his body parts either. “You didn’t know some of that, did you?”

  Erika had to admit she didn’t. “No.”

  Only nineteen when she’d gotten pregnant just after the Games, Erika also had to acknowledge the fact she still wasn’t sure how young was too young when it came to…whatever.

  “Do we even really know each other at all?” Billy had asked. “Like, everything…all the way?”

  Erika thought they did—the important stuff, anyway—unless Billy knew about the secret she was keeping. Could he read her that easily, she wondered as she looked down at her phone again?

  Billy: Just heard about your dinner disaster.

  So much for sex. And how the heck did he know about the date from hell before it even ended? In no mood for conversation, Erika decided Billy would have to wait.

  * * * *

  The idyllic vision waiting for her at home made her wonder why she’d ever even left.

  “How’d it go?” Tom Alan was down on the floor, his knees to his chest, no shoes or socks or shirt, just a pair of blue jeans. Muscles rippled and the smallest paunch of gut contracted and jiggled every time he giggled with Etsuko. The name meant “joy” and it surely fit. As she stared up at him from atop his bent legs, she reached for the MTA coin on a lanyard nestled in the hair in the concave of his chest. The idea for the symbolic jewelry had come to Tom Alan’s romantic partner in a train car. It was given their first Christmas with a promise they would never be farther than a train ride apart for more than a few days. “Was this one your soul mate?” he asked.

  “The busboy was more intriguing.” Erika joined them on the floor after kicking off her shoes. “Jimbo and I ran out of things to talk about before the bread came.” She tickled the sole of Tom Alan’s foot with her toe as two black and copper cats scrambled up into her lap. “He was a real jerk, actually.”

  “What will this little girl want to be?” Tom Alan asked out of nowhere, not the slightest bit interested in the response to his question.

  “The fifth female president in a row.”

  “Aim high.”

  “Or…just happy,” Erika said. “That’s all any of us want. Happy and not alone.”

  “Aww.”

  “She been fussy?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “She will be if you hold her all the time.”

  “I don’t get to babysit much lately,” Tom Alan said.

  “Whose fault is that?”

  Though they had taken off two full competitive seasons following the 2014 Olympics and World Championships, Tom Alan continued to hop continents to provide competitive skating commentary on Japanese television and perform in ice shows—mostly solo. Borne of figure skating royalty, Nobuo and Kyoko Tsuchino, Tom Alan and Erika were a celebrity super couple over there. Half the country had swooned when they’d wed, and though most of their fans had eventually forgiven Tom Alan when the marriage fell apart, some still berated him online.

  “I’ll be home a while now.”

  “Where’s the Brit?”

  “He went to bed early.” Tom Alan and Milo had their own apartment, but stayed at the family home often, the one Erika’s mother had purchased in Westchester County New York in the summer of 2014. Nestled in the middle of five secluded acres, it was not only closer to the practice rink where Erika and Tom Alan trained, but also to the train station where Milo was always arriving from or heading to NYU, where he was studying to become a forensic psychologist. “We had a spat.”

  “Ku areba raku ari.”

  “I guess,” Tom Alan said.

  It had been one of Erika’s father’s favorite expressions—”There are hardships, and there are delights.” His translation, his meaning, was more along the lines of “When life seems too good, expect som
ething bad.”

  “I got a commercial in Japan for breakfast cereal and he doesn’t want me to take it. He says I have enough jobs, and if I really need to take on anymore, they should be here in the States.”

  “So much for staying home a while.”

  “It’s an extra few days when we’re already over there for NHK. I figure I should strike when and where the iron’s hot, right? As long as we plan ahead…I made sure I had nothing going on from now until fall. I’m all his until he has to go for two weeks in September.”

  “Just…his?” Tom Alan didn’t even glance over, so Erika tickled his foot some more. That got him to look at her.

  “Everyone’s,” he said.

  “That’s better. So I suppose tonight you and Milo will be having make-up sex instead of just regular sex?”

  Milo bragged about their nightly ritual every morning. “I’m not wasting a moment with this honking yank’s honking dank when we’re in the same time zone.” Milo was crude, funny, juvenile, and adorable. “We’ll leave the door ajar, in case you’d like to watch.” Erika loved him almost as much as she loved Tom Alan—”Since, you know, you’re not getting any—” even when he was a bitch. The duo hadn’t skipped a night in the five days they’d been staying at the house. The HVAC system had recently been overhauled. Though Erika had never taken Milo up on his offer to peek in, now she could hear them through the heat vent in her room.

  “Shh.” Tom Alan covered the little one’s ears. “And yeah.” He raised both brows suggestively. “There are only six weeks of summer left. Ko-in ya no gotoshi.” Tom Alan’s Japanese wasn’t as good as Erika’s. She’d been raised with it from day one, whereas he’d been quite a bit older when Nobuo Tsuchino had taken him in as a skater and a son. Either way, she had to agree. Time did fly.

  “I’m a little jealous.” Erika admitted her feelings with a smile. “I want what you have.”

  Tom Alan laughed when Etsuko giggled, both of them caught up in their own little world.

  “She adores you.”

  “The feeling is mutual. I couldn’t love her more if she was mine.”