Eyes Wide Shut

Disclaimer: I do not own Make It or Break It.

Summary: She had kidded herself into believing it was all innocent, but sometimes it's just easier not seeing. Third-person Payson/Sasha

Eyes Wide Shut

Kim Keeler wasn't blind, although sometimes she wished she were. She saw it the first moment he walked into the gym, taking stock of each of the elites and pausing for just a moment longer when he got to Payson – her daughter.

She had read it clear as day on his face, even though it only flashed for an instant and she was seeing it all from a behind the glass. Attraction – that's what she saw in his stormy blue eyes, mixed in with the adoration and awe. Completely unprovoked and intolerable attraction.

As she got to know Sasha better – as she began to see him as a friend and even the son she never had – she learnt to pretend that she hadn't seen it in the same way that Sasha learnt to pretend he hadn't felt it. He never acknowledged the attraction and so she never called him on it rather than risking the delicate fabric of their friendship. She wondered sometimes if he even realized what was building between him and his young gymnast or if he had simply buried those feelings completely, determined never to act on them or even imagine what the world might be like if he could.

Some things were harder to stay blind to than others. The warm smile he sometimes wore that could only be engendered by one person. The inordinate concern he showed leading up to the Nationals, fretting over even the slightest show of pain or discomfort. The distraught look of fear and pain on his usually stoic features when she fell from her best apparatus. It wasn't the expression of a coach concerned over the fate of his athlete – it was that of a man who looked like he was about to lose the most precious thing in his existence. Payson was quite possibly the love of his life.

The realization had produced mixed feelings in Kim at the time. On the one hand, Sasha was a man whom she respected and adored in her own motherly way, and if things had been different, he'd probably be exactly the kind of man she would want her daughter to be with. On the other hand, he was Payson's coach – he was in a position of trust and authority – and had more than ten years of experience over her young and naïve, sixteen-year-old daughter.

In retrospect, her response to that equivocation was not one of her proudest moments, but it seemed necessary at the time. It was unduly manipulative and even bordered on cruel, but she told herself it was for his own good, and Payson's by extension. Those feelings couldn't stay buried forever, and the result could be devastating for both parties. It was surely for the best that she intervened before things got too serious.

So she pushed him – with a great deal of subtlety and finesse – towards Summer Van Horne in the hopes that she would prove more than a mere distraction. She was hedging all of her bets upon transference, those suppressed feelings being directed at an appropriate alternate that was kind of like the real thing in the most superficial ways. It was a useless endeavour – his heart could only be fooled into feeling for the alternate for so long before it longed for the real thing once again.

And while she focused all of her efforts upon Sasha, she had been wilfully blind to Payson in all of this, failing to see the small changes in her daughter until it was already too late. It had never been simply a one-sided attraction – that had always been the thing that concerned her most. She just hadn't expected Payson to be the one to make the first move.

She imagined it was guilt that made her go after him and try to coax him back to The Rock. Or maybe she hadn't tried at all. Perhaps it had all just been for show, because if she had really wanted him back, she could have made it impossible for him to refuse.

She should have known in the end it would be Payson that brought him back. In the same way he surely knew that he couldn't have stayed away forever. He had left his heart in Boulder, Colorado, and even a fool could see it wasn't with Summer Van Horne.

They would always be drawn to one another no matter how hard either of them tried to run from it.

And maybe she was blind, because she should been able to see that from the start. There are some things we can't change and then there are those that we shouldn't. It was like trying to stop the tide.

It was fate.

And she had been a fool for not seeing it sooner.

~FIN~

I wrote this a while ago when I was trying to get into Kim Keeler's head for Just a Number, but I've been keeping it until the new season started because there is a little bit of a spoiler in there. After seeing the first episode, Kim really didn't try all that hard to get Sasha back so thankfully this still fit. They had a whole conversation without once mentioning Payson (or Lauren for that matter). He already stayed once for Payson and I think the words "Payson needs you" (or even "the girls need you") would have been more than enough to make Sasha stay.

It's all drabble nonsense really, but I like the idea of a subtly manipulative mother and Kim was pushing a little too hard on the Summer/Sasha business, so maybe that's why. Let me know what you think.