Page 7 of About to Fall

“Physically.” He said it without looking up. “Mentally, you've been checked out for a while.”

The silence that followed was very loud.

It was like a slap—not because it was cruel, exactly, but because a single sentence had erased fifteen years. Every gold medal, every clean program, every early morning and late night and competition I'd won with his name beside mine on the score sheet—gone. Reduced to checked out. And the hypocrisy of it—of a man who couldn't bring himself to say overdose in a private conversation accusing me of being mentally absent.

I sat with it for a moment. In the old life—before Aurora, before the pills, before my mother’s face when she found me—I would have absorbed it and nodded and left his office and found somewhere private to fall apart. I was very practised at that.

“Mentally checked out,” I repeated. “And whose fault would that be?”

He looked up.

“Because the top two skaters in your program just completed back-to-back stints in rehab. At some point, that stops being a coincidence and starts being a pattern. Maybe you should be treating the disease instead of focusing on the symptoms.”

The pen hit the desk. Not thrown—placed. Deliberately. The controlled gesture of a man who was not accustomed to being spoken to like this, least of all by the nephew who had spent fifteen years saying yes, Coach.

I held his gaze for three full seconds, which was longer than I had ever managed in that room, and then I stood up and left before he could respond.

◆◆◆

By the time I got to the locker room, I had replayed the conversation four times. Each time it got worse—my uncle's words growing teeth. Mentally checked out. Was Adrian the replacement? Was I already gone in his mind? Was this the narrative he would spin to the press?

By the fifth replay I was inventing entire sentences he'd never spoken and spiralling into a future that didn't exist yet.

I forced myself to stop. Breathe. Dr. Priya's voice in my head: You're catastrophizing. Come back to what actually happened.

What actually happened was I'd talked back to my uncle for the first time in my life and walked out before he could respond.

That was something.

I pushed through the door with my jaw set and my skate bag over my shoulder and immediately stopped walking.

Adrian Zhao was already there.

He was sitting on the bench in nothing but a white towel, pale pink hair plastered flat against his scalp, water tracking down his throat and dripping onto the wood beneath him. He had his phone in one hand and was smirking at the screen—something private and pleased—while his tongue toyed absently with the lip ring on the right side of his mouth. The other ring caught the light when he tilted his head.

I made myself focus on entering the combination for my locker.

Ignoring him was harder than it should have been. There was just a lot of him on display and he'd arranged himself on that bench with the energy of someone who had never once in his life felt awkward. The tattoos wound down both arms in dense, deliberate patterns—I'd seen glimpses in competition photos, peeking through those sheer shirts he favoured, and maybe once or twice from scrolling his Instagram at 2 a.m. which I would deny under oath.

A line of script curved along his collarbone. A branch of cherry blossoms climbed the side of his neck, delicate pink petals scattering toward his jaw like they’d been caught in a wind. A circular brushstroke on his left forearm alongside a line of text. A flock of birds in flight across his arm. A dragon coiled around his right bicep, its scales rendered in fine linework. A serpent wound around his left hipbone, its tail disappearing beneath the towel. Temptation inked onto taut golden skin.

His forearms were veined and corded where he'd planted them behind him on the bench, leaning back like he was sunbathing somewhere pleasant rather than dripping on a locker room bench in Toronto in November.

I found my combination on the third try and the door opened with a clang.

I had my gym bag in hand and was formulating a plan to get through the next ten minutes without incident when he looked up from his phone. He made no move toward his clothes. Just tracked me with those dark eyes and let the silence sit there long enough to make a point.

“You talk to Renaud?”

“Coach Renaud,” I said. “Yes.”

He snorted—a short, amused sound that managed to convey a complete opinion. “You're such a pushover, Nicky.”

I turned to look at him despite myself. “How so?”

“You're just going to roll over and let me take over your spot?” He tilted his head, that irritating smirk making its return. “I didn't take you for the lying down type. I always imagined you'd be a bit feisty.”

“I'm not lying down.” I kept my voice even. “I'm being professional.”