Page 42 of About to Fall

He didn't look at me. But his next element came out a fraction too sharp, too aggressive—the telltale sign that I'd landed exactly where I intended.

And sometimes—on the rare occasion when a quad didn't land clean or a step sequence fell apart or Renaud said something that made his jaw tighten—I watched the mask slip. Just for a second. Just enough to see the person underneath. The one who was constantly holding his tongue.

That was the Nicky I was after.

Not Prince Nicky with his perfect hair and his immaculate quads and his practised smile. The other one. The one who'd told me to put a shirt on with fire in his eyes. The one who was standing on the same ice as me right now, pretending he wasn't aware of every single thing I did from the moment I stepped onto it.

I threw a quad Lutz—high, loud, landed with enough force to send ice shavings across half the rink—and didn't look to see if he flinched.

I didn't need to. I could feel it from here.

22. Nico

I had managed to mostly avoid Adrian since Québec.

We overlapped ice time a few times a week but it was easy enough to steer clear on a full sized rink. I made sure to work on my off-ice conditioning when I knew he wouldn't be there. And I had resorted to eating lunch in my car like some sort of fugitive, scrolling through my phone with a protein bar and pretending this was a normal thing well adjusted people did.

Dr. Priya and I had spent two sessions on the Adrian situation and I was no closer to resolving it. She'd helped me see that what I felt wasn't really anger—or wasn't only anger—and that his freedom triggered something in me that was worth examining. Great. Very insightful. Didn't stop my stomach from dropping every time I heard his laugh carry across the rink.

The last thing I needed was to get tangled up with another skater. But every time I thought about Québec—about the dark hotel room and the sound of his breathing and the way my body had responded before my brain could intervene—my chest did something involuntary and inconvenient. Avoidance seemed like the healthiest option available to me.

Now we would be forced to room together in Osaka and it filled me with equal parts dread and anticipation, which was its own problem.

My phone rang while I was staring at my open suitcase sitting on top of my unmade bed, mentally making a packing list and getting nowhere. I was grateful for the distraction. I turned away from the mocking emptiness of the suitcase and slid down the side of the bed, settling against the frame as I hit the green check.

Kat’s face filled the screen—dark hair scraped back in her perpetual bun, sharp cheekbones, one eyebrow already raised before I could even say hello.

“You haven’t packed,” she said.

“I’m trying to but you rudely interrupted me.”

“I can see the empty suitcase behind your head.”

“There are pants in it.”

“One pair of pants is not packing.” She propped the phone against something and started pulling bobby pins from her hair with the efficient violence ballerinas applied to their own heads after rehearsal. “How long have you been trying to pack?”

“Twenty minutes. I’m decompressing.”

“You don’t want to go to Osaka?” The question was light but I could hear the edge underneath. Kat had made her feelings clear about me jumping back into competition barely six weeks out of treatment—too fast, too soon, you're not a machine, Nico—and my insistence on returning hadn't changed her mind so much as exhausted her arguments.

I exhaled. “Of course, I do.”

Kat and I had been friends since we were five. Two tiny, overly serious kids at a ballet school on Yonge Street. For a while, we were on the same path. Then, when I was twelve, my uncle gave me an ultimatum: the barre or the ice. If I was going to be serious about either, I needed to choose.

I chose the ice.

Kat went on to become the youngest principal dancer in TMB history. I became Canada's golden prince. Somehow, through all of it, we stayed best friends.

“It's about Théo then?”

I chewed on my bottom lip, the familiar tightness creeping into my chest—the low hum of anxiety settling behind my sternum like a second heartbeat.

“It’s normal not to want to see your ex,” she said.

“I'm dreading it. The last time—” I stopped. Breathed. The tightness pulsed. “The last time I saw him was at the hospital. I was a mess and he came despite everything. Do I smile at the boards and pretend we're just two guys who used to train together? Am I supposed to act like we’re just competitors now? Why does it have to be so complicated?”

“Uncomplicated doesn't exist between you and Théo. It never did.”