Page 48 of Chasing Gold, Catching Her

No… not a girlfriend.

They were not even together.

So what were they to each other?

Still rivals on the ice or something more now?

Chapter 10

March 2025, ISU World Figure Skating Championships, Boston, USA

Alisa had always dreamed of coming to the USA, ever since childhood, since those geography lessons in the third or fourth grade, when they studied the landmarks of America and Alisa saw, in faded textbook photographs, how beautiful the country seemed. Of course, those had only been pictures, and over so many years everything could have changed beyond recognition, but Alisa flew to America anyway, carrying with her the feeling she had preserved since childhood.

She was thrilled, not only because she had dreamed of visiting this country for years, but because this trip mattered more than anything else. From March 24 to March 30 they would compete for Olympic quotas for the 2026 Games.

Before that there had been four more national championships. Alisa and Lev had skated well at all of them, well enough to be selected to continue, and at every championship they competed against Tora and Loke.

And almost every time these Norwegians won.

Naturally, each defeat chipped away at Alisa in some small, painful way, but after every loss she ended up in Tora’s arms, being comforted by her or told with softness that the medals were not what actually mattered, that what mattered were the performances themselves and the certainty that they would still be chosen for the Olympic qualifiers.

And every night with Tora dissolved into emptiness by morning, because by daylight they had to behave as if nothing had happened, as if they knew each other no more deeply than rivals on the ice. It upset Alisa, but there was nothing to be done. Too much was at stake.

And those rare meetings, one night here and there during those few competitions, could hardly even be called friends with benefits? Rivals with benefits? They were only a release for both of them and nothing more, or at least that was what Alisa kept telling herself. Even though it hurt her, neither of them took another step closer to each other.

They rarely wrote to each other. In Russia the internet had begun to disappear little by little, to break apart, and every day it became harder to access the global network. Finding a VPN that still worked had turned into a real challenge.

So they communicated through SMS sometimes when messengers were not working, as if they had somehow slipped backward into the distant, prehistoric years of the 2000s…

And that frightened Alisa.

All of this politics exhausted her and filled her with a helpless kind of stress, because it kept intruding into her life every day, while she herself could do absolutely nothing about it.

She was only one person.

Apparently everything frightened her, or perhaps the tension before the Olympic qualifying competition had become too great for her to bear.

There was tension everywhere. Hopes had gathered around the athletes from all over the country, because it was important, desperately important, to win enough quotas for the Olympic Games.

After the previous World Championships, a lot of people had suddenly subscribed to Alisa’s Instagram.

At first she had thought that maybe people simply liked her skating.

But then the comments began to appear…

“Russians should not compete internationally at all.”

“Do not let them go anywhere.”

“They do not deserve to skate on the world stage.”

And much worse than that. There was always something worse. Those comments disappointed her more than she wanted to admit. In the end she almost stopped posting anything at all. Her social media became nearly empty.

And yet sometimes, late at night, she still watched Tora’s stories. Tora spoke there with that same bright enthusiasm, smiling into the camera, talking about ordinary figure skaters’ things, about training, about her life as a skater, about how they were preparing for the Olympic qualifiers and how many people supported them.

Under Tora’s posts there was no hatred. No one wrote that she should not skate. No one told them they did not belong. And for some reason that hurt Alisa too.

So even before Alisa boarded the plane, after several months of waiting for an American visa, they applied six months ago anyway as a reserved pair, but now they were among the main ones, and after impossibly exhausting training, she already felt utterly drained. The flight was going to be very long.