4. Nico
I had not been off the ice this long since a hamstring strain two years ago.
Same amount of time away from skating but an entirely different kind of recovery.
The hamstring had been straightforward. Rest, physio, gradual return, back to full strength within a week of resuming training.
My body had known what to do because the problem had been purely physical.
This time, the problem was everything else.
The first hour back had been about finding my edges again, relearning the ice the way you relearn a language after time away—the vocabulary still there, the fluency slightly dulled.
With the hamstring, I’d come back hungry.
Impatient. Counting the minutes until I could push harder.
This time I was tentative in a way I barely recognized.
Overthinking every crossover. Second guessing the timing on my landings.
Carrying tension in my shoulders that had nothing to do with muscle memory and everything to do with the fact that the last time I’d pushed myself too hard, I’d ended up on a bathroom floor.
My body remembered the ice. My mind wasn’t sure it trusted it anymore.
And then there was Adrian skating around the far end of the rink like he owned it, which was not helping my concentration.
He had moved from warm up laps to actual practice and somewhere in between he had found Sabrina.
I recognized her from across the ice before I could see her face—her red hair catching the light when she moved.
One of the best female skaters Canada had produced in a decade, heading into her second Olympics, and my friend. Mine. I’d known her since junior high.
Adrian was saying something to her and I couldn’t hear it from here.
Whatever it was made her laugh—hand coming up to cover her mouth, shoulders shaking with it.
She shoved him on the arm the way she did when something was genuinely funny, not just polite funny, and he grinned at her like they’d known each other for years instead of what couldn’t have been more than two weeks.
Of course he had already found someone to charm. He seemed to save all of his aggravating traits exclusively for me.
I had always assumed Adrian was gay. The pink hair, the jewellery, the competition outfits that screamed for attention.
The way he moved through the world like he was daring someone to have a problem with it.
None of that was evidence of anything. It was just part of the Adrian lore I’d created in my head.
But he was very clearly flirting with Sabrina. Leaning in. That lazy, crooked smile. The easy gestures and casual touches—her arm, her shoulder, her lower back. Two weeks at this rink and already working his way through the roster.
Not that I cared who Adrian flirted with. It was just unprofessional. Renaud wouldn’t approve. That was all.
I heard Sabrina laugh again and I was going to grind my molars into dust at this rate.
If Théo were here, he would have been unbothered by Adrian’s presence.
That was his thing—nothing external got under his skin because the only person Théo competed against was himself.
He held himself to impossible standards and the rest of the field was irrelevant.
He would have glanced over, shrugged, and said something like good for her in that flat way he had that could mean anything or nothing.
Adrian’s not a threat, he would have said. He’s just obnoxious.
And I would have said totally and you’re right and it doesn’t matter. And I would have almost believed my own bullshit.
But Théo wasn’t here. Théo was in Chicago, getting better without me, and I was standing at the boards watching my friend laugh at my rival’s jokes and feeling something petty and childish curdle in my stomach.
Sabrina was just being polite anyway. Professional. You didn’t spend years as Théo’s best friend and one of my closest confidantes and emerge with warm feelings toward Adrian Zhao. It didn’t mean anything.
I put my head down and finished my session.
◆◆◆
I was running on fumes by the time I finished my ice time but I went to my uncle's office before hitting the showers anyway. Some things were more urgent than clean hair.
The door had a narrow vertical window in it and through the glass I could see him at his desk, head bent over his notepad. I knocked. He glanced up and waved me in without getting up.
It was a room I had been sitting in since I was a kid.
I knew every shelf, every trophy, every framed article and photograph.
The Canadian flag signed by the 1994 Canadian Olympic figure skating team that took up most of the wall behind his desk.
The single gold medal in its frame, positioned so that it was always in your eyeline when you sat across from him—not a boast, he would say, a reminder.
Of what was possible. Of what all the hard work was leading to.
It had always felt, to me, a little bit like a crucifix in a confession box—something you knelt before and promised to be better.
I sat down without being invited to. I waited for him to finish and he spent another minute scratching something into his notepad before closing it.
“Nicolas.” He folded his hands on the desk. “How was your first day back?”
Not how are you. Not how are you feeling.
Not I'm glad you're alive. How was your first day back.
As if I'd returned from a vacation and not a hospital bed.
As if the word overdose didn't exist in his vocabulary—and maybe it didn't. Maybe he'd filed it under the same category as every other inconvenient human failing that threatened to derail the Olympic timeline.
Things that happened. Things you moved past. Things you certainly didn't name out loud in this office, under the gold medal, where weakness was the only unforgivable sin.
“I'm still a little unsteady but that's to be expect—”
“We'll need to add some extra off-ice conditioning.” He was already frowning, already calculating. “If you've lost significant ground in your base fitness we should address it before we look at the jump content.”
“I didn't come here to talk about that.”
“The Olympic selection—”
“Uncle.” I held his gaze. “I came here to talk to you about Zhao.”
He flicked his hand, a small dismissive gesture I had seen him make a thousand times—toward journalists, toward federation officials, toward anything he had already decided didn't warrant his full attention. “What about him?”
The casualness of it made something tighten in my chest. “Why is he here? Why isn't he in Ottawa or Calgary? There are other coaches at this level.”
“Because I am the best.” He said it the way he said most things—not as arrogance, just as fact. The sky is blue. Water is wet. Jean-Pierre Renaud is the best figure skating coach in this country.
“This is supposed to be my Games.” I fought to keep my voice even. “I'm your national champion.”
He looked at me for a moment. Something shifted almost imperceptibly in his expression.
“Was supposed to be,” he said and flipped his notepad back open. “Things have changed. You let your situation with Théo derail your trajectory at a critical time. And then—” he paused, the silence loaded with things we hadn’t discussed. “You've had a difficult autumn.”
“I've worked myself to the bone my entire career.” The evenness in my voice was fraying at the edges.
I could feel it and I couldn't stop it. “I've given you everything. I almost—” I stopped.
Breathed. The betrayal and righteous indignation was right there, just below the surface and I was a month into learning how to feel it without drowning in it.
“I've earned my spot. I've only been away six weeks.”
“Physically.” He said it without looking up. “Mentally, you've been checked out for a while.”
The silence that followed was very loud.
It was like a slap—not because it was cruel, exactly, but because a single sentence had erased fifteen years.
Every gold medal, every clean program, every early morning and late night and competition I'd won with his name beside mine on the score sheet—gone.
Reduced to checked out. And the hypocrisy of it—of a man who couldn't bring himself to say overdose in a private conversation accusing me of being mentally absent.
I sat with it for a moment. In the old life—before Aurora, before the pills, before my mother’s face when she found me—I would have absorbed it and nodded and left his office and found somewhere private to fall apart. I was very practised at that.
“Mentally checked out,” I repeated. “And whose fault would that be?”
He looked up.
“Because the top two skaters in your program just completed back-to-back stints in rehab. At some point, that stops being a coincidence and starts being a pattern. Maybe you should be treating the disease instead of focusing on the symptoms.”
The pen hit the desk. Not thrown—placed. Deliberately. The controlled gesture of a man who was not accustomed to being spoken to like this, least of all by the nephew who had spent fifteen years saying yes, Coach.
I held his gaze for three full seconds, which was longer than I had ever managed in that room, and then I stood up and left before he could respond.
◆◆◆
By the time I got to the locker room, I had replayed the conversation four times. Each time it got worse—my uncle's words growing teeth. Mentally checked out. Was Adrian the replacement? Was I already gone in his mind? Was this the narrative he would spin to the press?
By the fifth replay I was inventing entire sentences he'd never spoken and spiralling into a future that didn't exist yet.
I forced myself to stop. Breathe. Dr. Priya's voice in my head: You're catastrophizing. Come back to what actually happened.
What actually happened was I'd talked back to my uncle for the first time in my life and walked out before he could respond.
That was something.
I pushed through the door with my jaw set and my skate bag over my shoulder and immediately stopped walking.
Adrian Zhao was already there.
He was sitting on the bench in nothing but a white towel, pale pink hair plastered flat against his scalp, water tracking down his throat and dripping onto the wood beneath him.
He had his phone in one hand and was smirking at the screen—something private and pleased—while his tongue toyed absently with the lip ring on the right side of his mouth.
The other ring caught the light when he tilted his head.
I made myself focus on entering the combination for my locker.
Ignoring him was harder than it should have been.
There was just a lot of him on display and he'd arranged himself on that bench with the energy of someone who had never once in his life felt awkward.
The tattoos wound down both arms in dense, deliberate patterns—I'd seen glimpses in competition photos, peeking through those sheer shirts he favoured, and maybe once or twice from scrolling his Instagram at 2 a.m. which I would deny under oath.
A line of script curved along his collarbone.
A branch of cherry blossoms climbed the side of his neck, delicate pink petals scattering toward his jaw like they’d been caught in a wind.
A circular brushstroke on his left forearm alongside a line of text.
A flock of birds in flight across his arm.
A dragon coiled around his right bicep, its scales rendered in fine linework.
A serpent wound around his left hipbone, its tail disappearing beneath the towel. Temptation inked onto taut golden skin.
His forearms were veined and corded where he'd planted them behind him on the bench, leaning back like he was sunbathing somewhere pleasant rather than dripping on a locker room bench in Toronto in November.
I found my combination on the third try and the door opened with a clang.
I had my gym bag in hand and was formulating a plan to get through the next ten minutes without incident when he looked up from his phone. He made no move toward his clothes. Just tracked me with those dark eyes and let the silence sit there long enough to make a point.
“You talk to Renaud?”
“Coach Renaud,” I said. “Yes.”
He snorted—a short, amused sound that managed to convey a complete opinion. “You're such a pushover, Nicky.”
I turned to look at him despite myself. “How so?”
“You're just going to roll over and let me take over your spot?” He tilted his head, that irritating smirk making its return. “I didn't take you for the lying down type. I always imagined you'd be a bit feisty.”
“I'm not lying down.” I kept my voice even. “I'm being professional.”
“Mmm.” He leaned further back, fully committed to going nowhere. “Is that what it's called?”
“What would you call it?”
“Conflict avoidance.” He said it like someone who had spent a lot of time in therapy or at least read a lot of self help books.
“You've got this whole thing where you go very still and very polite when something bothers you. Very demure. Very controlled.” His tongue pushed out his cheek momentarily like he wasn’t going to say more but then he continued. “Must be exhausting.”
The accuracy of it made my hackles rise but I refused to let him see how much it bothered me. I turned back to my locker. “Not everyone goes through life with two middle fingers up. I don't know what you expect me to say.”
“You could tell him how you really feel. Tell Renaud to his face that this situation is shit. I would pay good money to see his little prince voice an opinion.”
“I have opinions.”
“Name one.”
“I think,” I said carefully, pulling my shower things together, “that you should put a shirt on.”
A beat of silence.
“Why, Nicky.” I could hear the grin in his voice. “Have you been checking me out this whole time?”
The flush climbed my neck before I could stop it. I slammed my locker shut. “Dream on.”
Then Adrian laughed—a real one, surprised out of him, low and warm, nothing like the smirk—and I felt it in my sternum.
“There he is,” he said. “A little feisty after all.”
I turned away just as he dropped his towel and reached for his clothes. I walked to the showers without responding, which was the professional thing to do, and absolutely not because I didn't trust whatever would have come out of my mouth next.