I stared at this bunch of unbelievable, loud, ridiculous people, and suddenly I couldn’t trust myself to speak. Not one of them had hesitated or asked whether keeping quiet was worth the trouble.
Team USA, apparently, had simply decided Luka was theirs too.
Noah cocked his head. “Also, for the record?”
I huffed out a breath. “What now?”
“You deserve somebody who looks at you the way Davorin does.”
The knot that had been sitting in my stomach since Nathan spoke finally loosened.
I glanced at my phone.
Two o’clock, and the Village had gone strangely quiet. Doors still opened and closed along the corridor outside my room, distant voices drifted in occasionally, and elevators hummed somewhere farther down the hall, but compared to the chaos of the arena, it felt muted.
Luka lay beside me on top of the blankets, one arm draped across my stomach while I stared at the ceiling with my fingers threaded through his hair. He’d arrived at my room after practice, looking exhausted in that tightly controlled Luka way, and I’d opened the door already knowing neither of us needed words right then.
We’d ended up on the bed, holding each other, doing nothing but breathe, resting in the tiny pocket of calm we’d somehow built inside the middle of the Olympics.
I could feel the steady rhythm of his breathing against my ribs, slow and even. Every so often his thumb moved against my side, tiny unconscious strokes that grounded me more effectively than any breathing exercise Mark had ever taught me.
Luka shifted, lifting his head enough to look at me. “You are thinking too loudly again.”
I managed a chuckle. “Sorry.”
“Americans seem to apologize for everything.”
I snorted. “That’s rich, coming from someone who apologizes every time he steals my pillows.”
“They migrate naturally.”
“Sure they do.”
His mouth twitched. Then his phone buzzed on the bedside tablebeside us, and the shift in him was immediate. It was as if a heavy blanket had dropped onto him, weighing him down.
And if a blanket could have a name, this one would be called Obligation & Structure.
Luka grabbed the phone, glanced at the screen, and let out a long, slow breath. The second he said Mila’s name, I knew the break was over.
He sat up, one hand lingering against my chest before slipping away. “They want us at the arena.”
“Yeah.”
Then Luka looked back at me, and the sight of him sitting on my bed, his hair messy from sleep, his expression softer than the world ever got to see, constricted my chest.
“I have to go,” he said in a quiet voice.
I pushed myself upright. “I’ll see you on the ice.” His eyes held mine, and I nodded. “You’re going to nail it tonight. And I’ll be rooting for you every second.”
Warmth flickered across his face. He reached out and brushed his fingers along my jaw, the touch feather-light.
“You will win tonight,” he said, his voice warm. “And your father will be watching.”
God.
My throat seized, and my heartbeat raced. For a second I couldn’t get a single word out. Luka never dressed those moments up. He didn’t reach for speeches or comforting clichés. He just handed you the truth, like he trusted you not to drop it.
I swallowed. “Yeah?” My voice cracked on the syllable.
