Page 26 of About to Fall

I lay on the couch in the dark for a long time after that. Toronto was quiet outside the windows. Somewhere in this city, Nicky was probably asleep in his immaculate apartment with his tortoiseshell glasses on the nightstand, no idea I was lying here replaying I like looking at you like a song I couldn't get out of my head.

12. Nico

Adrian was giving me a wide berth.

Not that I'd expected him to thank me. But he wouldn't even acknowledge me in the hallway. Not even the brief nod strangers gave each other in passing. I had taken care of him when he was wasted and he was repaying my kindness by pretending I didn't exist.

I should have been relieved. His presence was exhausting. The lazy smirks. The way he called me Nicky. His general main character energy.

I was not relieved. I was furious.

When our ice time overlapped, he stayed on his side of the rink. So I stayed on mine. Except staying on mine apparently meant tracking him across the ice like I had nothing better to do. And the infuriating thing was that watching Adrian skate was genuinely difficult to look away from.

We were opposites out there. I'd built my entire career on grace—clean lines, precise edges, the kind of fluid artistry that made people forget how much raw effort went into looking effortless. Everything I did was controlled, refined, measured to the millimetre.

Adrian was power. Explosive, aggressive, almost reckless. He attacked the ice instead of gliding across it. His crossovers ate up the rink in long, hungry strokes, and when he launched into a jump there was this fraction of a second where he just hung there, suspended, like he'd decided the laws of physics didn't apply to him. He landed with a force that sent ice spraying, and instead of looking sloppy it looked like a statement.

It was arrogant. It was magnetic. It was the kind of skating that made my jaw clench because it had no business being as compelling as it was.

He didn't approach me at the boards when I stopped for water. Didn't make eye contact when Coach Renaud was giving us both notes. The usual Adrian Zhao experience had been switched off, and instead of enjoying the peace, I found myself cataloguing the way he moved like an idiot.

This dragged on all week. I hadn't thought Adrian had this level of restraint in him. And then I saw him in the lounge with Sabrina.

She was perched on the arm of the couch, coffee in hand, laughing at something he'd said. He was sprawled beside her the way he always was—loose, easy, taking up space. Talking with his hands. Making her laugh.

He hadn't looked at me in five days. Hadn't spoken a single word to me. But he could sit there with Sabrina like everything was normal. Warm and open and completely at ease—as long as it wasn't me.

Something hot and ugly twisted in my chest.

I didn't stop walking. Didn't let my expression change. But I felt it—the anger, the confusion, the irrational hurt I had absolutely no right to feel. He owed me nothing. We were nothing. He'd been drunk and I'd helped him and that was the end of it. Whatever he'd said on my couch—those slurred, soft words I'd been replaying on a loop for a week like a pathetic fool—didn't mean anything. Drunk people said things they didn’t mean.

It wasn't personal.

So why did it feel personal that he was ignoring me?

And why couldn't I stop noticing him—the way he moved, the way he laughed, the way he'd woken something up in me with some slurred words that I couldn't seem to put back to sleep?

I went to work with the juniors because that's what I did. Four hours a week helping younger skaters with their Axel entries because my uncle had asked me for help two years ago. I had an Olympic qualifying season to navigate. A quad Salchow I was struggling with. Therapy once a week. A meal plan. A sleep schedule.

And I was spending four hours a week helping junior skaters because I didn't know how to stop being the person who said yes.

At least today it was a distraction from the storm brewing inside of me.

◆◆◆

I noticed him the second I walked into the weight room because he was impossible not to notice—his pale pink hair was pulled back from his face, the kind of careless half knot that should have looked ridiculous and instead looked like something a stylist had spent twenty minutes arranging.

Five days of avoidance and my body still clocked him automatically, like a reflex I couldn’t control.

I set up my resistance bands on the far side of the gym and tried not to look at him again.

This lasted approximately two minutes.

The problem—one of many problems, an expanding catalogue of problems that I was keeping in a mental file labelled things I will discuss with Dr. Priya never—was that Adrian did not train like a figure skater.

Figure skaters preferred lean muscle. The physics of rotation favoured a compact frame—narrow shoulders, long limbs, wiry muscle. I was built that way. Théo was built that way. Most elite male figure skaters were built that way.

Adrian was built differently.