Chapter 16 Théo
I had been avoiding Derek Sullivan since the day he gave me a ride to the rink.
Not in an obvious way. I was just—busy. Ice time in the mornings, off-ice conditioning in the afternoons, avoiding all my problems in between. A very full schedule that happened, coincidentally, to involve minimal Derek Sullivan contact.
Healthy coping. Totally fine. Nothing to examine here.
Every time he asked me a question with those earnest eyes—how’s training, how are you settling in, did you sleep okay—like the answers actually mattered to him.
The way he listened, really listened, his full attention on you like you were the only person in the room worth hearing.
It was fucking unnerving. I didn’t know what to do with that kind of attention.
I didn’t trust it, or I didn’t trust myself with it, which amounted to the same problem.
And then there was the text exchange.
I had re-read it three times. Four. I had caught myself smiling at my phone like an idiot and then immediately wanted to throw the phone into Lake Michigan.
It was banter. Just banter. The kind of thing you did with friends. Derek was friendly with everyone—that was his whole thing. He probably had equally charming text exchanges with half the team.
He invited you to watch GOT together, my brain supplied unhelpfully.
As friends. Platonically.
You don’t have friends.
I was going to lobotomize myself with a skate blade.
And even if this were something—which it wasn’t—he was straight. Formerly engaged to a woman that he was in a committed relationship with for a decade. You didn’t do that and then suddenly develop an interest in prickly figure skaters with commitment issues.
Whatever my brain was trying to do with the memory of him shirtless in his kitchen, it needed to stop.
Get a grip, Mathéo.
So.
Avoidance.
It was working great.
When Avery wasn’t talking my ear off—the power play setup, Morrison’s feedback on his positioning, whether he should try growing out his hair or if that was a terrible idea—he was gently prodding me about other things.
Had I called Coach Miller yet? Had I talked to Mom?
Had I consumed anything today besides coffee?
I was grateful for the reprieve of another road trip. Also, Derek’s apartment gym was significantly nicer than the one in Avery’s building and his shower had the kind of water pressure that made me reconsider my entire living situation.
Practical reasons. That was all.
I was definitely not thinking about the bergamot shower gel or whose skin it usually touched.
◆◆◆
I took Aspen for a walk as soon as I arrived, dropping my bags by the door and letting him out of his crate. He launched himself at me with his usual full body enthusiasm, like I had personally rescued him from abandonment rather than just shown up on schedule.
I had forgotten a hat again. The September heat was unrelenting and I’d left mine—somewhere, I didn’t know where, possibly still in Avery’s Jeep from the last time we had gotten dinner together. I grabbed the Frost hat from the hook by the door without thinking about it and pulled it on.
We walked past Walsh & Wilde, the giant windows catching the afternoon light.
Aspen stopped to investigate a particularly interesting section of sidewalk and I pulled out my phone and snapped a photo—Aspen mid-sniff, the W&W logo visible behind him, the street busy with people who had better things to do than walk dogs in 30 degree heat.
I sent it to Derek.
The response came back faster than I expected.
Derek: Nice hat.
I looked at the photo again. Zoomed in. You could see my reflection in the window—barely, just an outline, but enough to clock the teal and black on my head.
Looks better on me, don’t you think?
I sent it before I could talk myself out of it.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Derek: It does. I’ll get you one of your own.
Derek: I get all sweaty walking Aspen in the summer.
It does. Something in my chest did a fluttery thing.
Probably heatstroke. I looked down at Aspen, who had finished his investigation and was now waiting patiently for me to get my shit together.
He’s straight, I reminded myself. In a relationship with a woman for ten years. You are reading into nothing.
Nah, I just forgot mine today. Thanks though. Good luck with your game.
Short. Casual. The kind of thing you’d text anyone.
Derek: Thanks again for helping with Aspen. Makes me feel more at ease knowing he’s with a friend.
I stared at that for longer than was reasonable.
A friend. Did he mean I was his friend or was I Aspen’s friend? The sentence could parse either way. Probably both. Why did it even bother me?
Because you want it to mean something, supplied the unhelpful part of my brain. Because you’re developing a pathetic crush on your brother’s straight teammate and you’re dissecting his texts like a teenager.
The walk signal changed. I didn’t move. It changed back to red. Aspen looked up at me with judgmental blue eyes.
“I know,” I told him. “Shut up.”
I shook my head and tucked my phone back into my pocket and started walking when the light changed once again. Aspen trotted beside me, unbothered by my crisis, which was probably the correct response.
◆◆◆
My weekly check-in with Sabrina was overdue and her last text had been a single question mark two days ago—which in Sabrina-speak meant I was in trouble and would be paying interest on this delayed conversation.
She picked up my FaceTime request after two rings. Her fiery red hair filled the screen first, pulled back in the messy bun she always wore between sessions, her green eyes already narrowed in that particular way that meant she had been rehearsing this conversation.
“Mathéo Jin Beaubien. What the fuck? Where have you been? I was about to hop on a fucking airplane.”
“No need to middle name me. I’ve just been busy. And you’re literally coming next week.”
She gave me a pointed look. “I warned you that if you didn’t reply to my texts, I would use my emergency credit card. The one my asshole father gave me for actual emergencies. You know how much I hate using his money.”
“I apologize,” I said, shifting on Derek’s couch. “Don’t go into debt to your father on my account. I’m fine.”
“God, I hate that fucking word.”
Aspen lifted his head from my lap and assessed whether this conversation required his attention. Apparently not. He put his chin back down.
“Would you prefer daddy?” I offered.
“You know which word I meant.”
“When did you become a goddamn linguist, Sabrina? I’m lovely. Grand. Fan-fucking-tastic.”
“You look pale.”
“What else is new?”
“Your dark circles are worse.”
I touched the skin under my eye reflexively and then dropped my hand when I realized what I was doing. “I’m hanging up.”
“Have you called Coach Miller?”
“You know I haven’t.”
She went quiet.
Sabrina’s silences were tactical. She learned them from Coach Renaud—weaponized patience, the kind that made you confess just to fill the silence.
But two could play at that game.
I stared at her through the screen. She stared back, unblinking.
I held on.
She blinked first.
“How long are you going to delay, Théo? You’ve been dreaming about the Olympics since you were nine. You landed your first quad at 16 and told me you were going to do it at the Games. Remember?”
“I also wanted to marry a prince and live in a castle. Some dreams are just fairytales, okay?”
“Not this one, darling.” Her voice softened, lost some of its edge. “You have it in you. You’ve always had it in you.”
“Had.” I looked away from the screen. Aspen’s fur was soft under my hand. “I don’t know anymore. Ever since—” I stopped. Started again. “Everything feels wrong. My body feels wrong. The jumps feel wrong. I don’t trust any of it.”
She didn’t interrupt. She didn’t try to fix it with an inspirational quote or a pep talk.
Because she knew.
She’d been there for all of it—the weigh-ins that stopped being about performance and started being about control, the Adderall that slid from focus tool to dependency so slowly I didn’t notice until I couldn’t function without it, the morning I called her from the bathroom floor and she dropped everything to come.
She’d trained beside me for over a decade. She knew my body almost as well as I did. She’d watched it change and sharpen and hollow out.
“That’s why you need to call Coach Miller, Théo,” she said, voice gentler now, but still firm. “He can help you get it back. Safely.”
“Maybe I don’t want to skate anymore.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Why not?”
“Avery said you’re still skating almost every day.”
“He’s texting you?” I sat up straighter. “That little traitor.”
“Why do you think I didn’t hop on the plane?” There was something almost smug in her expression now. “I have a source. A very chatty source who is worried about his baby brother and doesn’t understand why you won’t just call the perfectly nice coach who has worked with Olympic calibre skaters.”
“Avery doesn’t really understand how difficult this is for me. He just had to skate around holding a stick and doors flew open for him. I’ve had to struggle for every inch of ground.”
“No. But he knows you’re killing yourself in that rink every morning without a coach, without a plan, without any of the structure that would actually help you.
” She leaned closer to the camera. “And he knows you well enough to know that you wouldn’t be doing it if you didn’t still want it, Théo.
Even if you’re too stubborn or too scared to admit it. ”
I looked at her face on the screen. We had started skating together when we were nine years old, two kids in the same group lesson who had immediately recognized something in each other—not talent exactly, though we both had that, but drive.
The specific obsessive quality of children who had found the thing that they would organize their entire lives around without being asked.
Sabrina had gone to the Olympics at 18. Bronze. I’d watched from Toronto, cheering so loud I lost my voice, crying like an idiot from halfway across the world. I wasn’t jealous I wasn’t competing that year—I was proud. Fiercely, impossibly proud.
Women’s skating ran on a different clock. Different bodies, different peak years, different standards. Her making it that early didn’t mean I’d missed my window.
And she wasn’t done. The bronze had been incredible but it wasn’t the colour she wanted. She was fighting her way back, chasing gold with the same relentless intensity she’d had at nine years old.
She understood the weight of wanting something so badly it rewired you. The way it coloured everything. The way it could lift you up and hollow you out in the same breath.
She understood what it cost. And she wanted me to have my shot the same way I wanted her to have hers.
If anyone had the right to call me on my bullshit, it was her.
“I’m scared,” I confessed in a whisper. “I’m scared it won’t come back. I’m scared I broke something I can’t fix.”
“You don’t have to do this on your own, Théo.” Her voice was gentle now, the interrogation over. “Call Miller. Show up. Do the work. Let someone help you, you stubborn asshole.”
Aspen sighed heavily in my lap, apparently agreeing with her.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
“You’ll do more than think about it. I’m coming next week and I expect to meet this coach or I’m dragging you to him myself.”
“You’re very bossy.”
“You love me for it.”
I did. I really, genuinely did.
“How’s training?” I asked, redirecting.
She let me. She told me about her new program, about the quad salchow she was working into the free skate, about the music cut that wasn’t quite right yet. I listened and asked questions and felt the particular ache of missing something you used to do together, the shared language of it.
When we hung up, I sat with Aspen for a long time, staring at Coach Miller’s contact in my phone.
Then I opened my message thread with Derek instead. Read our previous text exchange for the fifth time.
I smiled at my phone and set it facedown and closed my eyes.
Tomorrow. I would think about it tomorrow.