Page 80 of About to Fall

Morning light filtered through the curtains. I woke to an empty bed and the sound of Nicky moving quietly around the room, gathering his clothes from the night before.

“Hey,” I said, voice rough with sleep. “You’re leaving?”

“We have ice time in an hour.” He was dressed in my sweats still, his clothes bundled under his arm. “I need to shower and change.”

“You could shower here.”

“I need my stuff.” He paused at the door, looked back at me. He chewed on his bottom lip for a moment, looking uncertain. “Last night was…”

“Fucking amazing,” I supplied, since he was too shy to say it.

The tips of his ears went pink. “Yeah, it really was.”

“Will you come back tonight?”

“Only if you share those macarons with me.” He smiled and slipped out the door.

I lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling, cataloguing the ache in my muscles and the warmth still lingering in the sheets where he’d been.

I knew two things for certain.

I wanted more.

And I had no fucking clue what to do with that.

35. Nico

The Nova Arena was bigger than I remembered.

Or maybe I was just smaller now. More aware of the weight of every point from here on out. Every competition felt less like an opportunity and more like a test I might finally fail.

Official practice was at 8 a.m. I'd been awake since 5 a.m., lying in the dark, running through my programs in my head until the choreography blurred into anxiety and the anxiety blurred into dread.

I had snuck out of Adrian's room under the pretext that I needed to get ready for morning skate but what I really needed was time to fall apart in private.

It hit me in the shower. The tightness in my chest, the shallow breaths that wouldn't deepen no matter how hard I tried. My heart hammering erratically against my ribs. The edges of my vision going grey. I braced my hands against the tile and forced myself through the grounding exercise—five things you can feel, four things you can hear—until the band around my lungs loosened enough to breathe.

I stayed under the spray for a little longer than necessary. Then I got dressed in my training gear, swallowed my meds, and grabbed my skate bag.

The hallway felt too bright. The elevator too small. The lobby too loud with people who smiled and expected me to smile back. And I did smile back. God, I hated it.

An hour ago I'd been in Adrian's room, his arm heavy across my waist, his breathing slow against my neck, the world reduced to a warm, quiet bubble where nothing existed except the two of us. In that room, I hadn't had to perform. Hadn't had to hold my spine straight or arrange my face or constantly be on.

Now I was back in the real world and it fit like a costume I'd outgrown overnight.

Practice went fine. I landed my jumps. Hit my positions. Skated through my short program twice without major errors. But my body moved through it mechanically—muscle memory doing the work while the rest of me stayed somewhere on the fourth floor, under rumpled sheets, pressed against a warm body.

Renaud watched from the boards with that particular stillness he had—the one that meant he was cataloguing every flaw, every hesitation, every moment where I fell short of whatever standard existed inside his head.

“The Salchow timing is late,” he said when I came off the ice. “You’re rushing the three-turn, then trying to save it off the back inside edge.”

“I know.”

“Then do something about it before the competition.”

That was all. No encouragement. No acknowledgment that the rest of the program had been clean. Just the flaw, identified and filed away for future reference.

Across the rink, Adrian was finishing his own practice. He'd stripped off his jacket and was skating in just a fitted black sleeveless shirt, pink hair bright under the arena lights. His quad-triple combos were powerful and he landed them effortlessly.