ROBBIE caught mid-fishtail by JAN, from HAIR AND MAKEUP, who teasingly chases after him waving a hairbrush as he runs from him laughing and grinning.
END MONTAGE
“…Finn andRobbie, after a disappointing performance on Monday, you are in this week’s bottom two. Please step to the side.”
It wasn’t like it was any kind of surprise. Robbie knew he fucked up this week’s performance. He did his best to keep his face impassive.
Across the room, Chad wore a mean smirk.
It was fine, Robbie told himself. Losing to that asshole didn’t have a moral connotation. He’d just fucked up a dance. It didn’t mean anything.
It still fucking burned.
“Joining you in the bottom two this week to fight for the right to remain on the show will be… Chad and Sophia.”
A tiny laugh escaped Robbie’s tightly pursed lips. Finn stepped on his foot.
Robbie tried not to read into it, but it felt like the first time Finn had touched him outside a professional capacity in two days. Obviously Robbie had fucked up the dance, so maybe Finn was pissed about that, but he hadn’t seemed too concerned, really. He was too kind to blame Robbie for not being able to concentrate given the shitshow that was his personal life. So maybe he was just trying to keep it professional so they could rally and outlast Chad the Asshole on this stupid show that Robbie had tried not to care about.
Or maybe he was just trying not to be a walking temptation for Robbie, which, good luck, he’d have to wear a bag over his head and a potato sack that went down to his toes, and probably Robbie would still smell him and get horny about it.
God. Now he wanted french friesandsex.
Michelle dismissed them to work on their programs, and Finn and Robbie collected their skates and hit the ice.
The waltz felt different from their earlier dances, and not only because of the steps, the rhythm. Swing, tango, foxtrot—those dances were all fun, or sexy, or flirty. Robbie had enjoyed them.
The waltz saidromance.
Or, the dance said romance. Most of Finn’s song selections, however, depressed the hell out of Robbie. Were waltzes supposed to make you want to jump off a building? Not in a fun energetic way but in a “this love will be the end of me one way or another” kind of way. No disrespect to Whitney Houston, if Robbie had to waltz Finn around the ice while she pleaded with a lover not to walk away, he would slit his wrists with a skate blade.
Not to be dramatic or anything.
So they finally settled on Jason Mraz’s “I Won’t Give Up,” which at least felt a little more hopeful. At this point Robbie hadmostly nailed the whole synchronized steps-with-graceful-arm-movements thing, and it was fun to start with that and then move into a close hold where he got to steer Finn around a little bit. It wasn’t the same kind of fun on the ice as it was in the bedroom, but right now this was what he could have, and he was going to take it and like it.
Besides, Stef had choreographed an absolutely incredible move for the moment the tension started to build, right at the second chorus, the part about the stars burning. It started with a spin hold, but then halfway through the first rotation, Finn bent backward over Robbie’s knee as they twirled, faster and faster, held together by one hand until Robbie pulled him upright and they whisked off in a different direction.
Then came the big moment—one-two-three steps with those weird one-legged spin things, pressed together all along the length of their bodies, and then a lift with Finn wrapped around Robbie for two full rotations before Robbie had to set him down again for the last verse.
To say Robbie was absolutely fucking moony-eyed by the end of every practice session would be severely underselling it. His arms and legs might ache and he might have a stitch in his side, but all he wanted was to do it again, to make Finn look at him like that again, cling to him like that again, hold him again.
Finn seemed unbothered by Robbie’s desire to keep running through the dance. In fact, he gamely agreed to start from the top “one more time” every time Robbie panted out the request between sips of water.
The upshot of Robbie’s insatiable hunger for all things Finn was that, by the following night, when it was time to skate their hearts out in a bid to stay on the show, they were ready. They were more than ready.
The first judge fanned herself and pronounced them “on fire tonight” and the second told them their chemistry was off the charts. The last, the hardass, said it was their best performance yet and said Finn was still clearly competition fit.
They were up first, which meant they had to watch Chad and Sophia while still sweaty and in costume. Chad and Sophia were still good, damn it. Finn was a tense line next to Robbie, clearly holding himself taut so as not to vibrate out of his skin with anxious jitters. But the Zen competition focus Robbie had honed during years in the NHL took over for him; he felt like he used to when he stood between the pipes, watching his teammates at the other end of the ice.
Waiting to be told who won the competition was more like watching from the bench after they pulled him from the net in a desperate bid to get one last goal to force overtime.
Then it was tension-building time. Michelle talked to Robbie and Chad again about their charities. This was followed by clips of them both during the competition—a fairly brief reel of both their high- and lowlights. Whoever got kicked off would get a more extensive montage. God, Robbie hoped it wasn’t him. If there was any justice, he wouldn’t lose to that homophobic asshat.
He’d needled Finn earlier that day for insider information, pointing out that Finn slept in the same house as one of the producers. But Finn had sighed and chewed his thumb and complained that Holly had too much integrity for that.
“I mean, I know she wouldn’t want to keep the homophobe, but she’s been overruled before.”
So both of them were on tenterhooks as they waited.
