She paused. Her eyes narrowed.
“I bet he misses the sex too.”
I rolled my eyes, but the rotation lacked its usual velocity. Because she wasn’t wrong.
Garrison and I had been—the charitable term wascomplicated. The accurate term wasa disaster with a recurring subscription. On again, off again. Together, apart, together, apart—a cycle that any relationship counselor worth their license would have identified as a crimson flag the size of a hockey rink. The kind of pattern that looked like passion from the outside and felt like whiplash from within.
But blame us?Honestly? The adrenaline that surged through competitive figure skating was a drug the pharmaceutical industry couldn’t patent. The rush of a clean program—the endorphin cascade that flooded your system after four and a half minutes of sustained peak performance—left your body vibrating at a frequency that demanded release. And figure skating, with its built-in choreography of passion and desire, the lifts that pressed your bodies together, the throws that required absolute physical trust, the death spirals where your partner’s grip was the only thing between you and the unforgiving surface below—the sport was an extended, publicly funded exercise in foreplay disguised as athletic competition.
Going backstage after a program andnotfucking required a level of restraint that bordered on monastic. Particularly when you didn’t have a pack to channel thatenergy toward—no bonded Alphas waiting in the wings to help metabolize the hormonal surge, no safe, established dynamic to absorb the excess. Just you and your skating partner and the crackling, inconvenient electricity of two bodies that had just spent four minutes pretending to be in love for an audience of thousands.
Can you blame us? Probably. Should you? Absolutely. Did it make sense at the time? Every single time.
But one thing I was positive about: Garrison missed this arrangement far more than I did. Because after me, he hadn’t been able to score. Not partners, not hookups, not even the pity-fueled, post-competition encounters that most athletes could secure with minimal effort and a clean jersey. The man had gone from reliable access to absolute drought, and the irony—thedelicious, vindicating irony—was that it had forced him to confront a truth he’d spent our entire partnership avoiding: he wasn’t remarkable. He’d gotten lucky with me. And luck, unlike talent, didn’t come back for a second season.
Never again.
“Anyways.” Candy’s tone softened, the protective fire banking to embers. She reached for a water bottle, took a sip, and regarded me with the gentler version of her gaze—the one that held concern rather than combustion. “You might as well pray to the figure skating gods at this point. Light a candle. Sacrifice a sequin. Do whatever ritual your superstitious ass needs to do, and let’shopeyou can find a viable partner for the auditions.”
She paused, letting the weight of the wordhopefill the space between us. Neither of us commented on how thin it sounded.
“They’re tomorrow morning,” she reminded me, hervoice carrying the firm, no-nonsense cadence she used when she shifted from best friend to unofficial life coach—a transition she performed approximately seventeen times per day. “You need to sleep. Actual, horizontal, REM-cycle sleep. Not the thing where you lie in bed and stare at the ceiling for four hours and then tell me you rested.”
I capped the protein shake and set it on her nightstand.
“I’ll be up at four,” I said. “If I can get to the rink by four-thirty, that gives me two hours of last-minute routine drilling before the evaluation panel convenes at seven. Enough time to run the full program twice, polish the combination spin entries, and warm up the triple Lutz landing that’s been inconsistent on my right knee.”
A beat. I swallowed.
“And hopefully Angelo will show the fuck up.”
Candy gave me The Look.
It was a specific expression—one she’d developed over a decade of friendship and refined into a weapon of surgical emotional precision. One eyebrow raised. Lips pressed into a flat line that was neither a smile nor a frown but a judgment. Eyes communicating, in high-definition clarity, the sentence:Girl, you know and I know and the Lord above knows that man is not coming.
“Iknow,” I said before she could vocalize it. “I know. Iknow. But I have to operate under the assumption that he will, because the alternative is accepting that I’m walking into an Olympic qualifying evaluation without a pairs partner, and if I let myself sit with that reality for longer than thirty seconds, I will have a panic attack on your floor.”
Candy studied me. Held my gaze for a long, searching moment, her hazel eyes reading mine with the fluency ofsomeone who’d spent ten years learning the language of my silences.
“I’ll pray for your sexy ass,” she said finally.
A fraction of the tension in my shoulders released. Not all of it. Never all of it. But enough.
She grinned—slowly, deliberately, with the specific mischief that preceded statements I was guaranteed to regret hearing.
“Which, speaking of—this is the ass that Luka has an obsession with, right?”
I groaned. Dropped my face into my hands. Considered, briefly, the viability of dissolving into the mattress and reconstituting in a dimension where my best friend didn’t have a photographic memory for every embarrassing confession I’d ever made under the influence of tequila.
“Don’tremindme.” My voice was muffled by my palms. “The puppy-dog expression he was wearing when I walked away from him in the rink—you would have feltsorryfor his ass, Candy. The man looked like a golden retriever watching his owner drive away. And the fact that I walkedbackwardsoff the ice so he couldn’t get a parting glimpse?” I shook my head, still buried in my hands. “You would have thought I’d confiscated his favorite toy.”
Candy’s laugh rang through the small room—bright, warm, rich with the kind of genuine delight that was impossible to fake and infectious to resist. Her scent spiked with it—a burst of strawberry sweetness that overpowered the lingering cinnamon spice and filled the air with the olfactory equivalent of sunshine.
“Girl.” She wiped her eyes, still grinning. “The one thing you are absolutelyundefeatedat is making your men walk likedogs. Theycraveyou. They catch one whiff, get one look, spend five minutes in your orbit, and suddenly they’re trailing behind you with their tongues out and their tails wagging, ready to beg for whatever scraps of attention you’re willing to drop.” She shook her head, admiration and amusement tangled in her expression. “It’s a gift. A terrifying, magnificent gift.”
I pulled my face from my hands, stood from the bed, and slung my bag over my shoulder. The strap settled into the groove it had worn into the muscle of my left trapezius—a permanent indentation from years of carrying equipment, a physical souvenir of a life spent in transit between rinks.
“Goodnight,” I said, heading for the door. “And don’t stay in the splits forever. Your hip flexors are going to file a restraining order.”
