Page 8 of About to Fall

“Mmm.” He leaned further back, fully committed to going nowhere. “Is that what it's called?”

“What would you call it?”

“Conflict avoidance.” He said it like someone who had spent a lot of time in therapy or at least read a lot of self help books. “You've got this whole thing where you go very still and very polite when something bothers you. Very demure. Very controlled.” His tongue pushed out his cheek momentarily like he wasn’t going to say more but then he continued. “Must be exhausting.”

The accuracy of it made my hackles rise but I refused to let him see how much it bothered me. I turned back to my locker. “Not everyone goes through life with two middle fingers up. I don't know what you expect me to say.”

“You could tell him how you really feel. Tell Renaud to his face that this situation is shit. I would pay good money to see his little prince voice an opinion.”

“I have opinions.”

“Name one.”

“I think,” I said carefully, pulling my shower things together, “that you should put a shirt on.”

A beat of silence.

“Why, Nicky.” I could hear the grin in his voice. “Have you been checking me out this whole time?”

The flush climbed my neck before I could stop it. I slammed my locker shut. “Dream on.”

Then Adrian laughed—a real one, surprised out of him, low and warm, nothing like the smirk—and I felt it in my sternum.

“There he is,” he said. “A little feisty after all.”

I turned away just as he dropped his towel and reached for his clothes. I walked to the showers without responding, which was the professional thing to do, and absolutely not because I didn't trust whatever would have come out of my mouth next.

5. Adrian

The terrace door slid open behind me and I smelled him before I saw him. Sandalwood, cinnamon, and weed.

Cam had been generous enough to open up his apartment to me on zero notice. The move to Toronto had happened fast—Coach Allen’s retirement, the scramble for a replacement, the flight east with my most precious possessions crammed into two suitcases. I hadn’t had time to process any of it. One week I was training in Vancouver at the rink I’d skated at since I was twelve. The next I was in Cam’s apartment, training under a coach who communicated through strategic disappointment, sharing ice with skaters who clearly distrusted me.

Cam had been home a total of three days since I arrived—studio, travel, wherever it was that rockstars disappeared to. I’d been bumbling around the neighbourhood on my own, learning which coffee shops were tolerable and which intersections to avoid, spending most evenings vaping on this terrace and watching the sun go down. I should probably go out. Have fun. Get laid. Do something other than sit here replaying the expression on Nicky’s face when he’d realized I was training at his rink.

He dropped into the lounge chair beside mine without ceremony, pulling a blunt from somewhere inside his hoodie. Quiet except for the distant traffic below, the soft snick of his lighter, his slow exhale. I took a drag from my pen. We both watched the last of the sun bleed out over the skyline.

That was the nice thing about Cam. No performance required. We hadn’t grown up together, not really—he was seven years older, had spent most of his life in Toronto with his dad while I was in Vancouver with our mom. The mom who had left him. Left his dad.

For mine.

It was the kind of thing that should have made us awkward, or resentful, or at least careful around each other. Somehow it hadn’t.

Growing up, we saw each other twice a year. Once over Christmas, then a few weeks in the summer when we weren’t in Europe. When we hit our twenties, we started hanging out more frequently, meeting up in different cities, building a friendship.

He was the lead singer and guitarist for 3xit. They had just wrapped an international tour, come home to a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Album, and were building a sophomore album from scratch. The pressure of that—being right on the edge of the kind of success that changes everything, knowing the next thing you put out either confirms you or exposes you—had been written into the lines of his face since I arrived. He looked tired.

I understood that kind of pressure.

The sun sank below the skyline without disappearing entirely, that suspended moment where the light goes amber and the city softens at the edges.

“How was New York?” I asked.

“Same depressing shithole it always is. How was Toronto while I was gone?”

“Same depressing shithole it always is.”

He scoffed, flicking ash in my direction. “Vancouver elitists.”