Or nights, many nights when I’d been tired and not in the mood, and he’d pushed me to bed anyway. Andthose dreadful minutes when he’d smirkedin front of his friends and joked that I was frigid, a dead fish in bed unless I was drunk. They’d roared. I’d swallowed the hurt with my beer and made a joke about needing to work on my technique.
Every time, a little more of me folded in on itself. Every time, I told myself it was normal. That being chosen was worth a few jokes. Worth a few lines. Worth waiting in them.
“Next,” someone says up ahead, and the sound snaps me back to the terrace.
I blink, and the club peels away. No colored lights, no sticky floor. Just the glare off the snow, the scrape of boots, the soft hiss of espresso machines inside. Fabio is three selfies away now, standing by the steps with that same easy media smile, moving through the motions with the efficiency of a man who’s done this a thousand times.
I look down at my phone, at my own hand wrapped around it.
I am literally in a line again. Waiting for another man at the center of a room to give me thirty seconds and a photo so I can feel like I exist.
The realization hits like cold air down the back of my neck. It doesn’t make me step out—my feet stay where they are, boots planted on the wooden boards—but something under my ribs goes rigid.
This isn’t about him, I think, throat tight. He’s just working.
It’s about me, and the shape my body still knows how to take: patient, hopeful, ready to laugh at myself before anyone else gets the chance.
The boys in front of me move up. It’s their turn now—quick smile, arm around shoulders, a flash, a thank you. Then they peel away, chattering, and suddenly there’s only one person ahead of me.
My palms are damp inside my gloves. My stomach is doing that horrible swoop it did the first night Peter pointed at me across a room.
I take a breath that doesn’t go very far, and step forward.
Up close, he looks almost exactly like he does on my screen and not at all like it, both at once. Same jawline I’ve seen from a TV crane, same nose still a little red from the cold, same hair flattened stupidly by a helmet. But his eyes are darker than I expected, tired lines etched at the corners that no sponsor photo ever shows.
“Hi,” I manage, in German that comes out a bit too formal.
He gives me the smile. The one. Not the wide podium grin, just the smaller, professional one—up at the corners, nowhere near his eyes.
“Hi,” he echoes, accent soft. “Photo?”
I nod, throat too tight to risk words. My hand moves on autopilot: unlock, forward camera, arm up. He steps in beside me,not quite touching, face angling toward the lens with practiced precision.
“Ready?” I hear myself say.
“Yeah,” he says.
I hit the button. The phone does a quick burst—three shots, no time to check. In the second before I lower it, I see our faces mashed together on the tiny screen: him in the foreground, me half a step back, my helmet hair doing me no favors.
“Thanks,” I say quickly, stepping back, already out of the way for whoever’s behind me. “Good luck in Adelboden.”
It slips out before I can stop it. His head tilts a fraction, eyes flicking to mine for the briefest moment. There’s a split-second of real attention, like a camera lens focusing.
Then someone calls his name, a coach or a teammate, and the moment snaps. He nods, back to the fan smile, already turning slightly toward the next person.
“Thank you,” he says, generic and polite, but I’m not sure if it’s for good luck or out of habit.
I retreat automatically, boots heavy, heart doing that erratic drummer thing again. My hands are shaking enough that I almost drop the phone, so I clamp it in both gloves and weave back through the tables to my spot in the sun.
My cappuccino is cold.
Of course it is. While I was standing in line, it sat there cooling, the foam collapsing into a sad skin on top. I sink into the chair and set the cup down harder than I need to. The porcelain gives a small, offended clink.
For a second, I just sit there, breathing, the noise of the terrace washing over me in indistinct waves. Laughter, clatter, the hissof the espresso machine, the scrape of his boots on the boards somewhere behind me as he moves on.
Then I force myself to look.
The photo is exactly what I knew it would be and somehow worse.
