Page 44 of About to Fall

She hung up. I sat for another minute, waiting for the tightness in my chest to fully loosen. It did, eventually—not all at once, but in slow degrees, like a fist unclenching one finger at a time.

Then I picked up a pair of training pants, folded them into the suitcase, and kept going until it was done.

I packed the grey costume. It couldn't hurt.

23. Adrian

The press loved to pit the three of us against each other. Had been doing it for years. Beaubien, Fontaine, Zhao—Canada's Big Three. Every preview article, every broadcast graphic, every federation promo reduced us to a triangle. The prodigy, the golden prince, and the rebel. Simple. Clean. Nobody had to know what a Lutz was to pick a favourite.

I'd competed against both of them for years and it had never felt like more than the job. Show up, skate, check the numbers. But heading into Osaka felt different. One of the last major internationals before Nationals, which meant every score was a data point the selection committee would use to decide who went to Milan. The stakes had shifted from career to legacy and all three of us knew it.

And something was off with the other two.

I could feel it, even if I couldn’t name it.

Théo had gone on an unexplained hiatus, fucked off to Chicago, then resurfaced months later with a new coach and no explanation. Nicky had vanished for a month under the thinnest cover story I'd ever heard. Whatever they'd been dealing with—separately, together, I didn't know the full picture—it had left marks. And no amount of PR spin could hide them completely.

Which meant Osaka wasn't just a competition. It was a test. Could they hold it together when it mattered? Could I capitalize if they couldn't? And—the part I didn't want to examine too closely—did I even want to win if it came at the cost of watching Nicky fall apart on international ice?

Because the thing was, I'd seen behind the curtain now. Not the whole picture but enough. Nicky was a good person. He'd carried my drunk ass up a stairwell and taken care of me when I had done nothing but antagonize him. Most people would have called a rideshare and made it someone else's problem. Nicky had taken off my boots.

And over room service in Québec, for a brief moment, the prince act had slipped. Some days I'd rather be the pink haired rebel. He'd said it quietly, almost to himself. And then the way he'd talked about the endorsements and the kids who looked up to him—not with pride but with the exhaustion of someone carrying a weight that had been placed on his shoulders before he was old enough to understand what it would cost. The heir to Renaud’s legacy. Canada’s next gold medal. The boy whose life had been shaped around a future he never got to choose and who’d been expected to be grateful for it.

I recognized that. My cage was built from money and obligation, his from expectation and devotion but the feeling underneath was the same. The suffocation of being someone else's project. The quiet fury of never being asked what you wanted.

So yeah. Osaka was complicated. Because I wanted to beat him—my competitive drive wasn't negotiable—but I also wanted him to be okay. And I was starting to suspect those two things might not be compatible.

◆◆◆

I sat in the aisle seat with Sabrina by the window. She had the survival instincts of a seasoned competitor when it came to long haul travel—the moment the seatbelt sign turned off, she had slipped on a silk eye mask, wrapped a neck pillow around herself with the efficiency of a person constructing a cocoon, and was unconscious within five minutes. Her head was tilted against the window at a slight angle that didn’t seem to bother her in the least. I envied her.

Nicky and Renaud were sitting across the aisle.

Renaud was at the window, reading some thick hardcover—a biography of some long dead historical figure, from the look of the cover. The kind of book that serious men read on planes to signal that they were above the in-flight entertainment. He was fully absorbed, turning pages at a measured pace, oblivious to everything and everyone around him.

Nicky was jittery.

There was no other word for it.

He kept winding his headphone cord around one finger and unwinding it. Picking up his phone, unlocking it, locking it, setting it down. Opening the in-flight entertainment, scrolling through movies he clearly wasn’t seeing, then closing it again.

His knee bounced under the tray table—subtle, rhythmic, probably unconscious.

Even when I tried not to notice things about Nicky, my brain collected them anyway. Every little tell. Every shift in his breathing. Every time his mouth went tight at the corners.

Bad habit.

He was nervous but not in the normal pre-competition way. Not the useful kind that sharpened you. This was the other kind. The kind that sat under your skin and chewed.

I had a pretty good guess why.

The same person waiting in Osaka that the press was salivating over—Canada’s Big Three, reunited on international ice, someone alert the graphics department—was probably the reason Nicky was slowly strangling his headphones.

Théo fucking Beaubien.

The skating forums had been speculating about those two for years. Are they or aren't they? The body language analyses. The slow motion GIFs of podium hugs that lasted a beat too long. The anonymous posts from people who claimed to have seen them together at this hotel or that restaurant.

But I'd watched them long enough to know the difference between rumour and reality. The forums guessed. I watched the way they looked at each other when they thought no one else was paying attention. I'd always filed it under none of my business. But watching Nicky come apart beside me, I found myself wishing it were.