I looked at my phone one last time.
Tomorrow, he would skate.
Tomorrow, maybe nothing would change.
Or maybe everything would.
Either way, the choice had to be Luka’s.
All I could do was love him enough to let him make it.
Luka
The rink sat almost entirelydark when I stepped through the gate, the vast Olympic arena stripped down to maintenance lights and echoes. Pale reflections stretched across fresh ice beneath the rafters, silver and cold and empty in a way this place never was during competition. Hours earlier it had thundered with applause, music, camera shutters, commentators talking over one another in half a dozen languages.
Now every scrape of my blades carried upward into silence.
I paused just inside the boards, breathing in the familiar sting of cold air while ventilation hummed overhead. No judges sat waiting beneath bright lights. No federation officials watched from the shadows pretending observation and surveillance were different things. No cameras searched my face for composure worthy of national television.
For a moment, nobody required anything from me at all.
I pushed into motion immediately, long strokes carrying me down the rink. One lap became two. My body slipped into patterns ingrained deeply enough to exist beneath conscious thought: outside edges, crossovers, turns threaded together with mechanical fluency born from repetition and fear and discipline so old I no longer knew where training ended and instinct began.
Cold air cut into my lungs as speed gathered beneath me.
Usually skating emptied my head.
Tonight it cleared space for thoughts I had spent years keeping locked behind routine and exhaustion and careful silence.
Volim te.
The words still shook loose inside me every time I replayed them.
I had trained myself to edit everything. Interviews. Expressions. Eye contact. Tone. Entire conversations trimmed carefully into acceptable shapes before they ever reached another person.
Then suddenly I was in Dean’s room, admitting I loved him before fear could drag the words back down my throat.
I drove harder into the next sequence, blades biting sharply into the ice. Three turns. Change of edge. Backward crossover. My legs burned pleasantly with exertion, but the pressure inside my chest refused to ease.
So I jumped.
The double Axel launched almost automatically, years of training taking over before thought caught up. Rotation. Landing. Exit edge clean and centered.
Of course it was. I had built an entire life around making difficult things appear effortless from a distance.
My breath clouded pale in the darkened arena.
Clean programs. Clean interviews. Clean public image.
Even my existence had been polished into something presentable long before I understood what parts of myself required hiding in the first place.
Memory surfaced abruptly.
I was ten years old beside the rink while my father straightened the collar of my training jacket before practice competition.
“You look nervous.”
“I am not nervous.”
