Page 52 of Chasing Gold, Catching Her

As Tora had said once, with that careless smile of hers:

“We’re just having fun, right?”

“Just having fun.”

Have sex, laugh, live, pretend none of it means anything.

“Well, why are you standing around like idiots?” the Pike shouted from the boards. “Back to work, quickly. We’re running out of time and they’re going to throw us off the ice early today.”

She was already standing beside the barrier with her arms crossed tightly over her chest.

Alisa and Lev looked at each other, smiled faintly, then quickly closed their bottles and set them down beside the boards.

At that moment Tora and Loke were practicing throw jumps on the other side of the rink, and apparently the Pike had noticed.

“Fine,” she snapped. “Then we’re doing them too. Come on, come on, come on!”

Lev took Alisa’s hand, built up speed, and threw her into the jump. By the time she landed, the Pike was already shouting again.

“Higher! The throw is higher than that! The Th3S is unfinished!”

“Triple Salchow again,” Lev muttered under his breath to Alisa, squeezing her hand tightly.

“Ready?”

She nodded.

“Get out of the landing properly! Alisa, blyat’, what was that?”

The Pike’s voice echoed through the rink.

Alisa only let out a quiet breath. Apparently the coach was in a terrible mood today, but there was nothing to be done about it. They still had to keep training, keep polishing the elements until they were perfect, and after that there would still be the choreography to run.

* * *

Alisa and Lev skated their short program well. Today was only for training, for correcting mistakes and running through details one last time, and tomorrow would be the final with the free skate. They had been performing the same choreography all season, polishing it over and over again. Everything was perfect. Or at least they thought it was.

Early that morning, Alisa and Lev were sitting in the locker room with Ilya and Maria, lacing up their skates while the arena around them was still silent. Nobody was on the ice yet, and throughout the whole complex there was that strange, muffled quiet that only existed before dawn practices, when the building still seemed half asleep. The only sound came from the low conversations in the locker room and the sharp pull of laces through metal hooks.

“Did you see what that guy from the U.S. did yesterday?” Ilya said suddenly. “He landed so many quads, judges are already saying that’s he’s the only one who can do it. But they haven’t seen our program yet, haven’t they, Maria?”

He grinned and tilted his head toward Maria.

“No,” Maria replied with a smile. “And he’s definitely not the only one who can jump quads.”

Ilya winked at her, then stood up from the bench and held out his hand.

“But you’re in different categories,” Alisa said tiredly. “Why the hell do you even care?”

She let out a slow breath. Her whole body ached from the pressure of the last few days. Either they would earn the quota place, or they would lose it and have to go back to Russia having failed the team, and that thought sat somewhere deep inside her like a stone. There were so many good athletes back home, so many people who could have been sent here instead of them, and if they lost, it would feel like they had wasted that chance.

“Alisa,” Ilya said, looking at her as though she had said something absurd, “what kind of world are you living in? One with pink ponies?”

He laughed softly.

“We’re all competing with each other here. You never know where you’ll end up skating someday, alone or in pairs, in another country, with another coach, with another partner. Anything can happen.”

The words made Alisa tense immediately.